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Suddenly, the telephone on the President's desk came back to life, ringing shrilly, shockingly, until Jack Benedict picked it up. After listening intently, Benedict held the phone away from his ear and stared with dazed blue eyes at the President.
'I've got General Samford on the line, Mr President, and he says the same thing's happening at the Pentagon.' Benedict let his gaze roam disbelievingly to the outside, where the great mother ship was still casting down its light, the smaller saucers were still hovering magically above the Ellipse and the south lawn, and the robotic insect creatures and cyborgs were surrounding the White House and, almost certainly, already entering it. 'According to the general, some of those . . . things . . . have already broken into the Pentagon and no one can stop them.'
'No one can stop them?' the President repeated like a man in a trance, turning Benedict's statement into a question.
'No. Right now some of them are making their way up the stairs of the building, zapping anyone who gets in their way.'
'Zapping . . . ?' The President was sounding more remote every second, doubtless fearful, among his many other concerns, for his wife and two children who were, right now, in the First Family's private living quarters on the second and third floors of the building.
'Right, Mr President. Those goddamned robots have laser weapons and they're either paralysing or killing outright the marines trying to stop their advance. Apparently, as they move through the building, they're somehow making the security and other electrical systems malfunction. The Pentagon switchboard has already malfunctioned once and it's behaving erratically again with various lines cutting out and the whole system threatening to collapse. Those robots, or the saucers they came out of
— maybe even that great mother ship still hovering above them — have also managed to kill the ignition systems of every vehicle in the immediate vicinity, including those in the White House garage and the military trucks in the Pentagon's motor pool, leaving us without any form of transport. With
those metallic legs, the robots can make their way up the stairs and that's exactly what they're doing right now. In fact, according to General Samford they've already reached the fourth-floor "B" ring of the Pentagon — our top-security ring — and have taken most of the people there captive. I think . . .'
Suddenly distracted, he put the phone to his ear again, heard only static, and said, 'Hello, there. Hello!
Hello! Damn it!' He slammed the phone down and turned to the other agents. 'The switchboard's down
— either ours or the Pentagon's or both. I think it's time to get the President and his family out of the building.'
'How?' the Vice President asked, his green gaze bright with fear and disbelief.
'Pardon?'
'How do we get them out — or ourselves, for that matter — if we've no transport and those robots are taking over the whole building?'
'Jesus Christ!' Benedict exclaimed, agitatedly squeezing his temples between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.
I want to see my wife and children,' the President said in a dead tone, still staring in a daze at the bizarre son et lumiere spectacle outside — that great pillar of light beaming down from the hovering mother ship; the thinner beams of light from the
smaller saucers hovering just above the south lawn and, beyond it, the Ellipse; the flaring compound eyes of even more robotic insects, now being followed by an ever-growing number of cyborgs — while listening to the increasing bedlam in the corridors of the White House — men bawling, women screaming, weapons being fired uselessly in long and short bursts, doors being smashed open, glass shattering, furniture breaking apart — as the robot insects and cyborgs already inside made their way relentlessly through the building. 'I don't care about anything else. I want to see my family.'
At that moment, however, the doors of the Oval Office were smashed open, torn shrieking off their hinges, thrown to the floor in clouds of dust, then ground into the carpet as an eight-foot-tall robot insect entered, its six legs and four arms moving rapidly, simultaneously, the floor shaking beneath it.
Its mouth-less head moved left and right, its compound eyes and sensors working, and then, when it saw the President and his men, it came to a halt.
The CIA agents had automatically drawn their pistols but none of them opened fire. They were either too shocked to do so or, as with Jack Benedict, had already gauged the hopelessness, the sheer finality, of their situation. They just stood around their stunned President and Vice President, looking up at that huge robot insect, and only lowered their collective gaze when half a dozen cyborgs, all with lifeless, chilling eyes, entered the room, holding stun guns in their hands. They formed a semicircle across the smashed doorway, taking aim with their weapons.
The men around the President let their weapons fall to the floor while slowly raising their hands above their heads. The President, who had no weapon to drop, simply raised his empty hands.
Even as the President of the United States was surrendering his once proud country, similar invasions were commencing elsewhere, all over the globe.
The world changed overnight.
Chapter One
■ wilson is back.
But who the hell is he? Gumshoe wondered, not for the first time, when he saw that cryptic message
pop up as an anonymous e-mail on his permanently activated full-colour computer screen. That statement, or variations thereof (where is wilson? who is wilson? r u lurking out there, wilson?) had appeared out of nowhere a few weeks back and now seemed to be haunting cyberspace as surfers all over the country picked it up and passed it on, either for fun or hoping for a serious response. It was an odd little message, inexplicable, intriguing, with nothing to suggest who 'wilson' was or why he had suddenly sprung to life in the ongoing World Wide Web, which so far had not been taken over by the cyborgs. The message disturbed Gumshoe because it was leaving him out in the cold, presenting him with something that had come from somewhere he hadn't been — somewhere in cyberspace — and he couldn't bear the thought that there was anything out there — a scrap of information, a person, a mere shadow — that he hadn't known about and couldn't track down.
Was 'wilson' an invention? Almost certainly, Gumshoe thought. Probably a name snapped out of the blue by a resentful flame ghoul who'd been worked over in a thrash somewhere on the Internet, maybe kevorked — terminated — from his or her chat
group and who had decided to haunt the system rather than confront the perns who'd done the damage.
Maybe he, or she, was just inserting this 'wilson' into the thread in the hope of causing consternation, frustration and the total disruption of 'real time' which was, essentially, any time not spent on, or in (as some would have it), the Net. This was, of course, possible, but it still seemed strange to Gumshoe that this 'wilson' statement had persisted on the Net for so long and was now turning into a series of questions that no one, not even himself, could answer. At the very least, if wilson was an invention, he was likely to be based on a real person, a mere shadow in the system, in that great well of untapped data; and it was this possibility that was starting to nag at Gumshoe, who hated being toyed with by invisibles with good, bad or downright crazy intentions.
No doubt about it, whoever that flame ghoul was, he, or she, was doing a damned good job.
He or she? You never knew when a pern was just a post code and a date on an e-mail. So fuck wilson.
He didn't really matter. What mattered was the pern. Was it male or female? That very question was what made sexual flirting on the Net so dangerous: short of inserting as an avatar into a 3-D
environment (always dangerous itself making you recognizable), you never knew if the lewd suggestions you were making through the keyboard were being made to a man or a woman. No wonder a lot of perns were scared of f2f (face to face) encounters or IRL (in real life) relationships. They could end up with anything.
'Fuck IRL,' Gumshoe said aloud, speaking to his monitor screen. 'I'd rather have cybersex. Besides, everyone says the real thing is disappointing and not nearly as good as the virtual other. No AIDS
either, old buddy.'
In fact, AIDS was dying out, except maybe in places like darkest Africa or, possibly, Calcutta where, God help them, the technology was still retrograde and could not advance any farther, now that the cyborgs were in control. AIDS was actually in decline elsewhere because even as the cyborgs were keeping
most sane and decent people off the streets worldwide, the World Wide Web was becoming more vital as a tool of communication: cybersex was replacing the real thing for an increasing number of those on-line — now more than half of the world's population. Naturally, though Gumshoe did still get occasional postings from darkest Africa, they were few and far between and, when they came, were often concerned with the fact that upgrading was practically impossible over there because the cyborgs, who otherwise weren't too interested in that vast territory, seemed determined to keep the situation static by allowing no technological imports. Yeah, and here in the US, as well as in Japan, Russia, China and the EU, the cyborgs, during what was now known as Year (#) I, had closed down the
factories and research outfits producing new computers and other cutting-edge technology while not bothering to take action against the already established markets. So everything in the realm of technology - computers, biochemistry, the aerospace industry, even medical and surgical science — had been frozen since #1, the year Gumshoe had been born, which meant that places like Africa had remained in the technological Dark Ages (their AIDS figures, against the trend elsewhere, increasing) while here in the good old US of A the black market in computer equipment, albeit it was all stuff from circa ad 2,000, had become a thriving trade largely ignored by the cyborgs while being used increasingly as a means of continuing some kind of communication between humans (hence AIDS
figures down). Kids like Gumshoe were therefore in great demand, despite, or possibly because of, the dominion of the cyborgs.
'Yeah, right,' Gumshoe said, again speaking aloud, without shame, to his monitor, which still contained its cryptic message about the unknown wilson. 'I got a lot to thank you bastards for; it compensates me for other things.'
Hearing a low rumbling sound coming from outside, which distracted him from painful thoughts about those other things, Gumshoe leaned sideways in his chair, pulled the curtain back and glanced down at M-Street in Georgetown, Washington DC. The street was in darkness, though erratically illuminated by rusty street lamps, many with broken glass, and a SARGE was moving steadily along it, looking like some metallic Neanderthal beast, the beams from its movable headlights sweeping both sides of the seemingly empty road, its wheels crushing the uncollected garbage as it moved past the house. Originally developed jointly by the US Army and the Marine Corps, it was one of the many military vehicles taken over by the cyborgs, technically upgraded by them, and now used by them in their constant war against the more rebellious members of the human community. The SARGE was, in fact, a Surveillance and Reconnaissance Ground Equipment vehicle, a small and highly manoeuvrable scout telerobot in the form of a four-wheeled, all-terrain frame that housed thermal imaging and zoom surveillance cameras. It also possessed dead-reckoning navigation and triangulation, along with a video camera for positioning, and it could calculate in advance where it needed to go, then head straight there, letting nothing short of a bomb stop it. The SARGEs were, in fact, often stopped by the home-made bombs of the new 'urban guerrillas', mostly teenage hot-rodders and bikers, the aptly named 'Speed Freaks'. But Gumshoe didn't want to think about them right now, nor about the cyborgs, so he let the curtain fall back across the window, blotting out real time yet again.
Cyberspace was less threatening.
wilson is back.
So who the fuck was wilson and what was he doing here, sitting as e-mail on Gumshoe's monitor —
and not for the first time?
'Yeah, right,' Gumshoe said, talking contemptuously to his glowing monitor and humming hard disk. 'I get the message, you fucking nerd. Are you wilson? Is that it? Is that the truth of it? Let's check it out right now.'
He dragged his cursor across the message, hit DELETE, clicked on another window and then keyed in his own e-mail.
From:
so what.
who the fuck is wilson and why should I, or anyone else for
that matter, be interested in him.
come clean poster or go back to being a lurker.
i await your response.
He clicked on SEND, then sighed wearily, not really expecting an intelligent response (most responses so far had been asinine jokes or outbursts verging on flaming). He sighed again, opened a bottle of Bud (still in production and popular with the Speed Freak gangs as an alternative to drugs) and drank it while gazing in familiar disbelief at the state of his apartment.
The place was a typical on-liner's mess. Hardly more than a living room with a bathroom, a mere part of his parents' old brownstone in what had once been one of Georgetown's nob streets, it was dominated by what Gumshoe had lovingly named 'the Tower of Babble': his six PowerMac 9500s with their eight-gigabyte hard drives, 298 megs of RAM and PowerPC microprocessors. But the Tower of Babble, while being the dominant item in the room, was also surrounded by stacked-up Radius Pressview colour monitors, scanners, colour printers, digital cameras, remote controls, mouses, boxes of floppies and loose floppies, every other imaginable kind of software, and a veritable junkshop of discarded modems and worn-out hardware. These items were strewn across the room's only sofa, piled on top of the old TV set and covered the table, lying there with the unwashed cups and saucers and takeaway leftovers. They were also stacked up on the chairs and littered the floor. There were no books, magazines or normal CDs — only CD-ROMs — because everything that Gumshoe wanted or needed came through the Tower of Babble: music, movies, virtual-reality games, cybersex, crank religions, world news (albeit news carefully monitored by the cyborgs) and even education, which for Gumshoe mainly meant French lessons.
Gumshoe was determined to go to Paris, France, one day. Of course, the cyborgs had taken over that city as well (they'd taken over the whole globe) but apparently life in general was better over there and the Left Bank remained relatively untouched, either by the cyborgs or by passing time. The cyborgs were intelligent but they had no aesthetic sense and Gumshoe, who had studied Paris on every CD-ROM available, had been in love with the city since adolescence and was determined to go there eventually, when real time and circumstances permitted. Also, he thought the language was sublime, though he personally fucked it up when he spoke it, trying to follow instructions from the dark-eyed French babes on his CD-ROM programs — too often, alas, while mesmerized by their moist, glistening lips and masturbating until he practically came over them. Oh, yeah! Paris was great and so were the French babes, so he was determined to go there some day, despite the cyborgs and despite the fact that he'd never had a real babe, French or otherwise, in his life. Right now, however, he couldn't leave the US because the cyborgs had grounded all air transport — except their own, of course — thus kevorking world travel for the foreseeable future. Give it time, though. He'd get there.
Sighing, taking note of the mess around him, while automatically, nervously, lighting a cigarette, determined to add more smoke to his already cancerous room, he realized that he'd been collecting this garbage for years — from childhood, in fact — and that for him even the best was not good enough. No question, he would have updated the whole works if he could have. But nothing of note had been made after the cyborgs had taken over and the black market, though still functioning, was still glutted with stuff from the Old Age, which meant with anything from the year 2000 and before. Though ensuring that no new computers were made by humans, the cyborgs hadn't bothered to confiscate what had been out there already, thinking it not worth bothering about.
Mistake. Big fucking mistake. The cyborgs had obviously
reasoned that the Internet was only a game park, a primitive human fixation, a healthy distraction for a largely unemployed society, but they didn't know what was really going on out there. In fact, the whole fucking shooting match was out there — the hackers and the crackers, the flamers and the thrashers, the posters and the lurkers, the groupmind fundamentalists, chat-room ranters and cyber-terrorists, creating a new language with their acronyms and abbreviations and memes. Some of the perns were crazy, a lot
were certainly dumb, but a fair number were as sharp as razors and determined to live their own lives, no matter how bizarre, despite (or to spite) the cyborgs. Yeah, they were all out there in cyberspace, communicating with each other, travelling the electronic highway, howling down the bandwidths, given a kind of freedom and venting their frustrations in that vast, disembodied world. Gumshoe loved it because he was part of it, had been practically born in it - and, in truth, because he was the best cracker in the business and did lots more besides.
Gumshoe. Nethead investigator. On-line in the New Age.
Randy 'Gumshoe' Fullbright, born in the year 2,000 and twenty years old next week, had picked that pern name, his signature for the Net, because he was a cyberworld researcher (an honest man) and a genius cracker (a criminal) but liked to think of himself as the kind of detective you could still see in downloaded old Hollywood movies. Humphrey Bogart for a start — Bogart in a gaberdine, flinty-eyed and deadpan — the private investigator, the gumshoe, to beat 'em all. Downloaded with Lauren Bacall, a sultry, wisecracking blonde, once his IRL wife, who could, even in black-and-white movies
'technically enhanced' with computerized colouring, also make Gumshoe come with a groan of pleasure in his well-worn desk chair. Naturally, though one of Gumshoe's many illicit lines of work was the breaking into of mainframes all over the world, he did it without actually having to leave his gloomy bachelor pad, so he met no sultry blondes and rarely got to walk those mean streets. (When he had to hit the streets, which he did with great
