Empyre

by Josh Conviser

  The man lifted his chin. “How does that matter?”

  Sarah smiled weakly, eyes still averted. “It doesn't, I guess. Sorry.” She tried to get into the act. This man was her ticket out. “Just want to know what you need. Is there something special the wife won't . . . indulge in?”

  “No—it's not like that,” he replied, his voice hesitant. “Shit, maybe it is. I don't know. I don't do this—pick up . . . women. It's not me.”

  The man's fusillade hammered into Sarah. She couldn't bring herself to respond, so he machine-gunned on. “It's just, well, I have the wife, the kids, the mortgage that's kicking my ass, and then—on top of that, the world's, like, crashing down around me. No place is safe! Not anymore. I mean, terrorism—here? In Trenton? I just know we're headed for war. We gotta be, right? It's all such”—the man looked over to Sarah, who hadn't moved a muscle—“shit,” he finished, embarrassed by his tirade. “Listen, I'm sorry. You want to run for the hills, don't you? Maybe I should just let you off.”

  “Why don't you lie down—in the back there,” Sarah said.

  The man hesitated, unsure of himself.

  “It's okay,” she said. “I understand.”

  “I just want some peace.” he said. “To forget it all. . . .”

  For a moment, Sarah thought she'd lose it as her distaste for the man crumbled. Then cold ice returned. No going back now. The decision had been made and she would see this through.

  “Go on,” she said, motioning to the back.

  He nodded, set the Bento on auto, and scrambled into the rear. He reset the seating configuration so he could recline, then jerked free of his clothes in a quick, self-conscious fit. Sarah watched the first signs of the virus emerge on his chest and face. Through the euphoric expectation pulsing through him, he hadn't registered what was happening—yet. His skin grew taut and pale.

  “What?” he asked on seeing her hesitate. “You backing out? I have money.”

  Sarah got into the back and drew close, wrapping around him. The man gasped, fingers crawling over her, finding that she was topless. He looked down in confusion. He wanted to ask, then let it all go as she drew him closer—crushing into him, rocking him to the street hum.

  His breath grew husky, then labored. A fit of coughing tore through him, making the hair on Sarah's neck bristle. The pathogen took hold and worked through him.

  “What's happening to me?” he managed, drawing away. His eyes pocked red and began to bleed.

  Sarah just shook her head and hugged him closer.

  Then the convulsions began. She felt his muscles jump, hating herself, and the world that forced her to this. He jerked free of her grip, his head smashing into the Bento's molding, eyes wide in shock and pain.

  She watched to the very end, her body petrified under the horror's crush. There was a long quiet between them, the man suffocating under the clenched lock of his sternum. The fight in his eyes faded to blank. She watched him for what could have been seconds and what seemed like years—maybe a lifetime.

  It was the sewer smell, the faint wisp of it still on her skin, that kicked her to action. She ransacked the microbus, finding the washing machine in the back—a popular option on burb Bentos. Throw in Johnny's dirty jersey and out came a pressed shirt that would pass muster with the pickiest soccer mom.

  In it, Sarah found a selection of workout clothes. Must be the daughter's. She squirmed into the shirt. It was small, but the fabric quickly adjusted to her dimensions. She ditched her trashed jeans for a pair of yoga pants.

  Sarah slid back into the front seat, trying to ignore the corpse as she crawled over. She found the jackpoint and goggled into the flow's clean data streams. She accessed the Bento's drive control and mapped out a meandering route that would take her far from the city.

  Finally, she jumped to coverage of the barrio. The vid played and replayed through the blogs. In it, the barrio wavered, then ripped free of the port wall.

  She couldn't watch the rest.

  21

  BURNING MAN, BLACK ROCK DESERT, NEVADA

  Dave Madda was not well.

  Sure, he'd started life strong—pulled out of the gate running fast. Words like whiz kid, prodigy, and genius had followed him from an early age. Madda wasn't sure if he deserved such praise, or if it gradually came to define him. Either way, he believed the hype, and for years swam deep in his own bullshit.

  Growing up, Madda had only wanted to be a hacker. Every bone in his body itched to sling through the flow, to be its master and direct its stream. In the backwater bars of San Francisco's Tenderloin, he learned the craft from anyone willing to teach him. He learned too well.

  No one cut code like he did. He had a knack for it. While larger patterns eluded him, Madda was all about the details—the basics. He could spot the single flaw in a billion lines of code. Still in his teens, he was running hard hacks on corporate targets. It was on such a run that his life changed.

  Madda was never one to let the letter of the law affect his wallet. He loved the fight too much. To get the work, you needed the tech. To get the tech, you needed the dough. To get the dough—you needed to take any damn job that came your way.

  A small software concern had contacted Madda. They had developed a new chip. It doubled processing power, replacing silicon with carbon nanotubes. The company was poised to make billions. Only one glitch. Word had spread that Josh Simpson out of University of Melbourne had developed a processor concept that would amp power by an order of magnitude.

  Madda had jumped at the gig. The run was a cakewalk. Academic fire-walls were inherently porous. Stemmed from some long-held belief that information should flow freely. Madda knew better.

  He used his standard interface—a simple physical endeavor that simmed the complex hack he had coded. In uncoded white space, Madda drew his saber. The firewall appeared as a host of faceless opponents.

  He lunged at the first, triggering his run. Each move within the simulation translated to raw code flying between Madda and the target computer. In the flow, perception was the key to any battle. To truly see the enemy was to know his flaws. This firewall had six layers. Thus, six opponents. None of the systems interacted; shit-poor coding as far as Madda was concerned. Thus, each opponent stood numb until the one before it fell. The battle was brief.

  In a matter of minutes, Madda was surfing over Simpson's data field. He was about to launch a virus that would subtly tweak the research, thrusting Simpson down a dead-end path and leaving Madda's client free to bring its product to market, when a twitch in the sim stopped him cold.

  Dave pushed into the coding.

  Couldn't be right, he thought.

  Smothered in the base structures, another virus sprouted and infected the data field. A subtle, beautiful web, spindling through the flow. He had seen no evidence of a previous incursion, but someone else was there—someone with very serious skills.

  Then Madda felt an eye on him—the eye. He backtracked very quietly, leaving no flow wake. The next day, Echelon knocked on his door and made him an offer he couldn't refuse.

  Using their far superior incursion software, Echelon had hit Simpson just minutes before Madda's run. They had done so for reasons too subtle for Madda to glean. Something about maintaining a steady flow of progress so as not to upset the status quo.

  They explained it to him. While it all sounded cool, Madda didn't really care about the reasoning behind Echelon. Sure, he had some vestige of morality, deep down in the black. But with the tech Echelon offered him, Madda was willing to bend. So, at age nineteen, he left San Francisco, disappeared from society's grid, and began his work for Echelon.

  For years, his work for the organization satisfied him. He punched through the cutting edge, awash in the flood of toys Echelon offered. But, ever so slowly, the novelty wore off. His lab in the abandoned subways of Los Angeles went from an altar to a tomb. His tomb.

  Ryan Laing had released him from that living death to help destroy Echelon. And then he was
truly free. With a world full of opportunity, Dave had decided on a life of hedonism.

  In the space of months, Madda pushed several products to market that made him Gates rich. It hadn't been much of a challenge—all were products he had developed under the Echelon aegis.

  The money had led to trappings. Indulgences. Women. Luxury. He dated actresses and models, reveling in his new playboy status. But the cravings could not be sated. No matter what he had, there was always something beyond his reach. Slowly, that unfulfilled need pulled him to a darker world.

  Obsessive compulsion pushed his friends away. Sycophants and suckups remained. He grew more and more reclusive: unable to trust anyone, wanting only to push into the flow, wishing he could go back to his life within Echelon's comfortable grasp. He sucked at freedom.

  Then the Burners found him. They offered another way. The offer wasn't pushed, just floated out there in a manner he found impossible to ignore. They caught him at the tail end of a three-day flow stretch. His mind ached, his body cried out for movement, but he couldn't bring himself to return to the flesh.

  Then it popped through his node. A straw man, massive, hundreds of meters tall. The edifice stood alone in a vast, dry-cracked desert. It burst into flames, red ripping through the night in rich bursts. It didn't burn down but remained alight, a phoenix locked in the act of becoming. After the image faded, Madda had hunted for its source. Wasn't hard to find.

  The process was slow. Consultants came to visit him. They took over his finances, easing him out of the hated interactions that drained him. They allowed him space. Then his health took a turn. Clarity ebbed and flowed. He existed in a mental limbo as his physical being withered.

  Few accepted his choice to go with the Burners. His friends and colleagues warned him, cautioned him—they said they just wanted him to be free. He shivered at the very word. Fuck freedom.

  That's when the consultants collected him. They took him home. To Burning Man.

  Burning Man had begun centuries ago in the desert outside Black Rock City, Nevada. And there it had grown. Now, it spread for hundreds of kilometers over the dry, caked plane. Those that entered the Burning Man didn't leave.

  Here, in the grip of his consultants, Madda found peace. He went internal, hollowing into his own solitude. He signed over all his assets. In return, he lived under their umbrella, utterly incommunicado. It suited him. He festered in neurotic solitude, unable and unwilling to separate flow from flesh, truth from lie.

  That was before that unfulfilled need rose up and found him. Before Sarah Peters pushed back into his life.

  Sarah had to disappear. If she couldn't control the game, she needed to pull free. Pushing out onto the throughway, heading west, the Bento hummed under her.

  On leaving Trenton, she had hacked the Bento free from its previous owner, who was now buried off a lonely road outside Melcroft, Pennsylvania. With all identifiers altered, the car wouldn't be pegged as stolen. It gave her time.

  Now, lost to the blur, she tried to make sense of what was going on around her. The terrorist acts. The pathogen. Only one answer. Whoever was behind this knew EMPYRE from the inside out. But what was the endgame of all this killing?

  Clearly, Ryan Laing was integral to the plan. Sarah had been made the scapegoat—forced to run a gauntlet that would surely finish her. All to flush Laing out. Her lips thinned. She thought about the man who had held her in his grip, suspended over the barrio. Should she have stayed with him in his self-enforced isolation? Maybe. Now she had forced him to come back to a world he hated. And she knew he wouldn't rest until he found her. So she needed to disappear—to ghost out. Then she could turn the tables and hunt her hunter. But to disappear, she had to disable the virus. Until then, a trail of death would follow her.

  Sarah pulled her gaze from the humming road. She jacked back in and tunneled into the flow. It had been a while, but she knew a man who could help. Whether he would was another matter. He had been a friend once, and a good one. At this point, she wasn't sure if there was anything left of him to salvage.

  Sarah punched the defenses arrayed around Dave Madda with the subtlety of a rhino charge. No time for a clean hack. She needed him—and quick.

  To her, Burning Man was just another cult that had suckered in one more believer. Watching Madda slip, Sarah had tried to purge him of their bullshit, but it was too late. By the time she pushed through the clique of consultants, Madda had disappeared.

  Weeks later, he had reemerged on the blogs, bleary-eyed, saying that he had given his life over to Burning Man. He had chosen to live behind the makeshift city's electronic barrier. What more could she do? That he'd been brainwashed, or worse, was obvious, but she had her own problems. She grew to hate Madda, as she hated Laing. Another person who had abandoned her.

  She couldn't seem to hold on to anyone. Ryan. Madda. Her family. They all ran from her. So why not remake herself? One cell at a time if she had to. Each time the knife jockeys cut, a piece of her fell away and she was glad of it. Maybe she would become someone who could be loved. Or someone strong enough not to care.

  Now, her need pushed her to action. On her own, on the run, she needed Madda. She couldn't run forever. With the pathogen in her, she would leave a trail that Ryan would certainly follow. And she couldn't allow that.

  So she crashed Madda's system. From the Bento, slinging west at speed limit, she charged Burning Man's firewall. Breaching the system and getting to the world's wealthiest recluse was no easy matter, especially with the Bento's hardware. She craved the challenge. It occupied her, and allowed her to forget.

  Sarah prided herself on running clean hacks. She left no trace, slipping through the flow like a ghost. But not now. She didn't have the time or the hardware to run silent. Instead, she submerged her hack in a mountain of code.

  Looming over Burning Man's flow representation, she set the avalanche free, allowing the virus she had created to build steam and power, rolling faster, harder. By the time it hit the first firewall, it was unstoppable. Defenses couldn't restrain this much coding. The virus surged through the target's infrastructure, leaving chaos in its wake.

  Sarah smashed into it with vindictive glee. If those she needed wanted to barricade themselves from her, she would destroy their carefully created defenses. The avalanche rolled through Burning Man's network. This kind of hack was rarely attempted as it tagged the culprit and destroyed the system data it blew through. It was a suicide run.

  From the ruins of Burning Man's system, hunter-killers tunneled out, tracking her. She ignored them, punching farther, locating Dave Madda's flow point. In a last burst of raw destruction she pushed through. Voice-lock blinked, then held strong. She spoke into her mic.

  “Madda.”

  A withered voice bounced back to her. “Sarah? No. Oh, no. You can't be here. They'll be angry.” Madda's voice halted and surged like that of a tired child.

  “Dave, I crashed the system. They'll be very angry.”

  Petulance rose in the voice. “Why would you do that? Leave me alone! They said you'd come. They said you'd all try . . .” He trailed off, then renewed with a frenetic vigor. “Everyone needs to leave me alone!”

  “Jesus Christ, Dave. I would have let you rot in that coffin, but I need you. And you will help me.”

  “Everyone needs me.” The voice ran shrill and tinny. “I give up.”

  “Not today. Today, I can't run solo. So I'm forcing the issue.”

  “You can't . . .”

  Sarah lost the link as the Burners' hunt-kill 'ware smashed through the walls she'd erected. She didn't have much time.

  “Listen, Madda,” she said. “I'm coming to you. Do you know what that means?”

  A muffled noise.

  “No?” She triggered the second slide. Another data torrent ripped through the target system. But this one was directed at Dave only.

  She hoped it wouldn't kill him.

  The rush of vid-captured events blasted over Madda. He struggled to hold
amid the whirlwind of swirling input. He saw Sarah's run through Dubai, the mayhem at Langley. Then Trenton hit him—a steamroller of information patched together from a thousand blogs and news clips. The sheer mass of it threatened to push him catatonic. He didn't want it. Didn't want any of it. He wanted only to play his games. The world could get along without him. And that included Sarah Peters.

  “Monster . . .” It was all he could say.

  “No. Dave, it's me. You know me.”

  “You've killed thousands. I want no part of it!”

  “No! Yes. Those people died, Madda. But—it has to end. I need you to fix me.”

  “Me?”

  The edge in her voice dropped away. “I don't trust anyone else.”

  “Sarah, no.” Madda just couldn't. “Not now. Too tired. Way too tired.”

  “Dave, I know. But I have to finish this thing. And you don't get a choice.”

  “I'll—”

  “Listen to me, Dave. I'm coming to you. Do you know what that means? The pathogen in me will decimate everything in its wake. Maybe you'll survive within Burning Man's shield. Maybe it will bust through. Either way—every pilgrim at your gates will die.”

  “You are a monster.”

  “I guess I am.” The voice trailed into silence. Something in it, in the desperation, the truth, the raw need, kicked at Madda. From that deep well, his feelings for Sarah, his need for her, took hold of him once again.

  “I'll be ready,” he said.

  22

  Ryan Laing dreamed. He wandered through transient fantasies, unable to latch on to reality and not really wanting to. Fever sapped him, rising in hot sweats and ebbing to chills that shook him to the core.

  His wandering mind settled on a single scene, familiar but unwelcome. He clung to knobbed granite, climbing high over the California desert. The sharp tang of warm rock infused him. He slammed a fist into a vertical fissure, savoring the rock's bite. His feet splayed out wide, climbing slippers grasping protrusions in the sheer face.