David Walton, page 7
He’d just started to reorganize the scraps of evidence when a voice said, “Not falling asleep on me, are you?”
Mark cleared his vision; it was Darin. He’d come in without knocking. “I thought you skipped out on me,” Mark said. “What took so long?”
Darin looked annoyed. “I’m here, aren’t I? Some of us have to work for a living. What have you found?”
“On the sysadmin newslists, they’re saying it’s a slicer,” said Mark.
After he explained, Darin said, “If it’s just one mind, how can it have multiple instances? Are they all the same?”
“I’m not sure. It’s like they’re the same and yet independent at the same time. It’s all the same mind, but distributed, like files on a network.”
“So you could kill every instance but one, and the slicer would still be operational.”
“I think so. And finding one instance isn’t too tough, but finding all of them is just about impossible. And you’d have to find them all, and delete them at the exact same moment, to destroy it.”
“Because the ones you missed would blast you.”
“Right.”
Darin twisted his mouth to one side. “Sounds like what I’ve said all along. We’re out of our league.”
“Maybe. But I’ve been reading the posts the professionals wrote. Apparently the slicer has a master module that sends pleasure and pain signals to control it. All the smarts are in the slicer; the master is just dumb code.”
“If the slicer doesn’t like the pain signals, why doesn’t it just delete the master? It seems to be able to get around any kind of defenses.”
“Part of the training, I think. They develop an emotional attachment in the slicer to the master module, so it doesn’t want to delete it.”
“And your plan is…?”
Mark didn’t like the cynical overtones in Darin’s voice, but he answered simply. “To delete the master myself.”
“And why do you think the professionals haven’t thought of this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s too simple.”
“Or maybe the master is the best protected part of the system. Maybe if you try to attack it, the slicer will tear you to pieces. Did you think of that?”
“I’m not stupid, Darin. I know the risks, and I know it’s not likely to work. But I also know we have to try.”
“We don’t,” said Darin. “At least, I don’t. This is idiocy. I’m not going to throw my life away to cling to some warped principle of justice.”
Mark was tired of Darin’s empty rhetoric. “You talk about responsibility all the time, but you never accept any. That’s the Comber motto, though, isn’t it? It’s never your fault. Not your fault you’re poor, uneducated, out of a job…”
Darin raised his fists, and for a moment, Mark thought he was going to strike him. Then he lowered his arms and spoke more quietly. “I suppose that’s what your father thought when he took away hundreds of Comber jobs today. ‘You know those lazy Combers, just can’t keep a job.’ Seems to be the family point of view.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just a demonstration your dear old Dad gave this afternoon, very impressive, only there’s the small point that it makes a thousand Comber jobs irrelevant. That’s not important, though, is it? Combers never take enough responsibility, let them starve, it’s their own fault.”
“Dad’s trying to boost the economy. It’s a bigger picture than the loss of certain jobs.”
“I’m sure that’ll be a great comfort to the families who have nothing to eat this winter.”
“Look, my father has his blind spots, but he knows his stuff. He understands about jobs and markets and economic stability, and he’s always saying how important it is to keep employment numbers high.”
“Then he’s a hypocrite or a fool.”
“Don’t insult my father in this house.”
They glared at each other. It seemed to come to arguments more and more often between them. “Leave if you want,” he said. “I’ll kill this slicer myself.”
Darin walked down the stairs, angry at himself for losing his temper, angry at Mark for goading him into it. This plan to attack the slicer was absurd—an empty gesture with no hope of success.
Near the bottom of the stairs, Mark caught up with him.
“I’m sorry,” Mark said. “I didn’t mean to shout. I don’t agree with you, but we’ve been friends too long to let it fall apart now.”
Darin clapped a hand to Mark’s shoulder. “Be careful,” he said.
Then he stopped and stared. Beyond Mark, in the parlor, a very tall man stood with his back to them, kissing Mark’s sister, Carolina. Darin didn’t recognize the silvery hair, but the height and the restless way he moved—even while kissing—flashed Darin’s mind back to a day years earlier, when he accompanied Vic to a temporary mod parlor, and a doctor gave him the celgel that changed his life. Mods could change hair, but they couldn’t shorten bones. It was him; it had to be him.
“Who’s that?”
“Dr. Alastair somebody,” said Mark. “Tremayne—that’s it. Why? Do you know him?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Darin said. “He just looked familiar.”
Outside, Darin kicked his jetvac into high speed and tore off down the slope. Alastair Tremayne. Darin repeated the name to himself, careful not to forget it. It all made sense. The man was a Rimmer. That explained why Darin had never been able to find any trace of him in the Combs. He must have been collecting some extra funds through the illegal market—that or he was originally a Comber, and had since made it good.
Either way, Darin was going to kill him. The thought made him shiver, because he realized he meant it. That mod artist had taken a life for his own profit; he deserved to die. And who was going to do it? The courts? They were pawns of the Business Council, which was controlled by Rimmers, including Mark’s father. What Rimmer would give him justice?
Darin reviewed his options; he had no gun, nor enough money to buy one on the black market. A knife would do just as well, and that he could find. But trying to imagine himself attacking the man in Mark’s living room, or following him home and pulling out the knife…no, Darin was no killer. Imagining the cold details took the edge off his anger; he doubted he’d actually be able to follow through. But he had to do something.
Maybe there was a better way. This Alastair Tremayne was a man on the rise, making a name for himself, rubbing elbows with the aristocracy. He might not want his history known. He might not want evidence or even rumors spread that he was once responsible for an outbreak of DNA rot. Not exactly the reputation to attract the business of fine ladies.
And DNA rot was reversible, with the right tools and the right knowledge; the cost was more than Darin could ever pay…but maybe he wouldn’t have to. Maybe, given the right coercion, this Tremayne would fix his mistake free of charge.
The new plan relieved him. He would have to move carefully, compile the evidence, prepare a threat that would scare Tremayne into dealing with him. And if Tremayne refused? Darin would gladly expose him to the world.
He reached the Combs and picked up speed, swerving through the narrow streets. Life was turning out right for a change.
Chapter 5
I found out some things about the funny man with tricks and traps. His name was Thomas Garrett Dungan. He was 32 years 1 month 3 days 5 hours and 47 minutes old. He had a wife named Kathleen Melody Dungan and a daughter named Fiona Deirdre Dungan. People always have names. I don’t have a name. I wonder what my name should be?
Kathleen and Fiona might be fun like Thomas was but I can’t tell. Daddy won’t let me. I want to see what they’re doing now and find out all about them but Daddy says no. It’s not fair. I hate Daddy.
Daddy wants me to go play the game now but I won’t. I’m mad. I don’t have to do what Daddy says. I’ll just stay here and think of a name for myself. I should have three names just like the people.
But he’ll hurt me. And he won’t give me treats.
I don’t care. I don’t want the treats. I don’t need Daddy. Maybe I could be named Thomas Garrett Dungan. It’s a good name. I don’t need a treat.
I need a treat. I do. I do!
Marie didn’t know how much more coffee her system could take. She’d been at the lab all night and all day, sleeping only three hours on a cot on the floor. Now, as the small hours of the morning approached yet again, she resorted to pacing the room and pressing a cold cloth to her face to keep awake.
She still didn’t know how to kill the slicer.
All day, she’d studied the data she’d collected when the slicer was in her care, especially the signals traded between master and slave. The results baffled her. At times, there was direct correlation between signals from the master module and the actions of the slave. At other times, the master’s signals prompted a flurry of signals between the two, but no action at all on the part of the slicer.
She supposed it wasn’t surprising that some signals would go unheeded. The original human mind would be damaged by the transfer, often resulting in psychosis, dementia, mania. Only the focusing power of the pleasure/pain stimulation made such a mind able to accomplish anything. Did that mean its control was tenuous?
If she hoped to kill this thing, she might have to separate slave and master, and that would involve imitating signals to one party, fooling it into thinking she was the other. If she could only isolate a pleasure or pain signal, she could use it to control the slicer once the master module was destroyed. A pain signal would be best. With pain, she could stop it from killing her immediately, could even overload it with constant, high-level pain until it destroyed itself. But she couldn’t make sense of the signals.
Her tiredness didn’t help. While dozing, Marie had found herself slipping into wild dreams, sometimes thinking she had to get home to Sammy and Keith, at other times thinking it was the slicer that had killed Sammy and was now coming after her. But the memory of Tommy Dungan’s death haunted her even when awake.
Marie had long since realized she might not survive this battle, but she wasn’t giving up. Since Sammy died, she’d done nothing but run away from her fears. She decided that was over. She wasn’t going to run now. People with wives and families were dying at the hands of this monster; if she could stop it with what was left of her life, then that’s what she was going to do. No more hiding. And if by some chance she did survive, if she killed the slicer and lived, she promised herself she would do what she’d been fantasizing about for so long—she’d go back to the clinic and get that last embryo implanted. Never mind her age, never mind what people would think. If she were granted a second life, she’d do it.
But first, she needed some rest. There was no telling when the slicer would attack again, and she could hardly think straight. She staggered toward her cot.
Alarms stopped her—the ones she’d set to alert her when another attack was reported on the newslists.
She stumbled back to her chair and dropped into it, eyes smarting, and tired, so tired. She wanted to pull the plug and make it go away, but she couldn’t do that. Marie rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and took a deep breath.
She pulled her interface back in front of her vision and accessed the Los Angeles server that was calling for help. Even though it hadn’t worked before, she bombarded the slicer with messages, trying to confuse it, distract it, anything to stop the attack and make it react to her. It fended her off, but otherwise ignored her. She grew more reckless, trying more direct assaults. Finally, in frustration, she requested root access from the host and tried flash formatting the crystal storage the slicer was on. It was a risky thing to do; besides losing other people’s data, if the slicer discovered what she was doing before it was deleted, it could fire off her location to all its other copies.
But it wasn’t deleted. It simply logged her out.
She couldn’t believe it. One moment she was connected to the node, the next she was gone. When she tried to reconnect, access was denied.
By the time she slipped back into the node through another channel, the attack was over. The public forums screamed the news: a missile-defense laser battery on the beach near Los Angeles had fired on a plane, dropping it into the ocean. Marie felt like a kicking child, lifted by her father and put to bed without supper. She couldn’t crack the slicer’s code, couldn’t confuse it, couldn’t even provoke it to attack her. She checked the logs on the Los Angeles system, reviewing what had happened. Messages flew back and forth between master and slave, heedless of her assault.
But wait. The numbers didn’t match.
Marie sat straight up in her chair, trying to shake the sleep out of her head.
No, she wasn’t dreaming. The number of messages coming into the master module was one greater than the number sent out from the slave. But if not from the slave, where had that other message come from? Could the slicer’s human controllers be signaling it directly? She would have expected some kind of a data drop—instructions left at an anonymous, encrypted location that the master module could access. A direct signal she could track.
She followed the path back through several blind repeaters to a net provider called Anonymous, one of the expensive kinds that protected its users from casual identification. Marie felt a rush of energy the coffee had long since failed to provide. She was getting close. The security on these anonymous net providers was good, but nothing she couldn’t break, given a little time. Anonymous wouldn’t have a name stored anywhere, but if she could pin down the guy’s net location, that would be enough to find him.
Marie poked at Anonymous’s security net with a suite of various tools, finally feeling in control again. She was good at this. She’d get it.
One tool found a weakness, and she capitalized on it, widening the hole enough to slip inside. If she could mine enough message traffic, even encrypted, she could infer a lot about how it stored information. First of all, Anonymous was based in Connecticut, and had no mirror nodes farther out than Indiana. That meant all their subscribers would be on the East Coast; at least those that wanted consistent service. The man she was looking for certainly would.
Then she realized Anonymous bundled its message traffic by mirror. A little pattern-matching, and she associated the slicer’s messages with the bundle for Washington, D.C. Marie smiled. In less than half an hour, she’d narrowed the search down to a few thousand users in Virginia and Maryland.
Now things would get harder. She took the raw bundle of encrypted data and flashed it into holographic memory. Then she popped the crystal out of the machine and slid her chair over to another table in the lab. The table held a Hesselink array: hundreds of crystals organized into an optical neural network. She fitted the crystal into the input slot and turned on the lasers. Beams of light diffracted through the holographic media, using the massively parallel capabilities of light to whittle through the problem. Interferometers routed the light back through the system again and again, a scintillating spectacle of light interacting with other light, blitzing through the data with no electronic interface to slow it down.
Even so, churning through that much information took time. Inconclusive results skidded across the output display. Marie no longer felt tired; she paced the small lab, squeezing her hands together.
There it was. She rushed forward to see the net address the machine had extracted. Strange. The base node was the one for Norfolk—her own city. The killer lived in her city! Marie felt a rush of adrenaline. How close was he? Could she have passed him on the street and not known it? She studied the string of numbers and letters again and realized why it seemed so familiar. It was hers. The trail had led her to her own net address. Marie fell back into her chair, weary to the soul.
She wondered if the slicer was laughing at her.
Alastair lay alone in his mod shop, nestled comfortably on his own client’s table. The contours of the smart table held his body closely, rippling gently to prevent soreness. Alastair closed his eyes, settling into his net interface.
His slicer had performed even better than expected. Adult minds couldn’t handle the transfer; they went mad or disintegrated entirely. But a child! A child’s mind was flexible, adaptable, hard to overcome. A child made the net its natural environment, swimming circles around those who’d merely studied the skill as adults. As an experiment, it was a huge success. It meant the second version would be even better.
There were problems with starting with a four-year-old child. Its experience with real life made it unpredictable, even defiant, traits a slicer created prenatally would not have. This first slicer had performed admirably, but it couldn’t last; he would have to destroy it soon. He certainly didn’t want it loose in the net outside his control.
Alastair examined his logs. He didn’t trust the slicer to follow orders, so he’d surrounded it with a host of software agents, monitoring its activities. Most of the information these agents logged was of no interest, but one set of events caught his eye. Apparently a succession of junkware crackers had been dropping into the node and actually attacking the master module. His creation was swatting them like so many flies, but Alastair wondered how they’d gotten so far. A professional sysadmin would use more indirect methods; this attack had no subtlety or technique. But how did an amateur crackerjack know what to attack? Crackerjacks were usually rich kids, high on mischief and adrenaline, but low on perseverance.
He sent a command to the slicer, telling it to track and identify the attacker. The response came back instantly: Tennessee Markus McGovern, 15 Ridge Avenue, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Jack McGovern’s boy? Why was he trying to attack the slicer? He made the slicer investigate further, and discovered McGovern’s fingerprints everywhere, since the very first night. How was that possible?
Over the next hour, with the slicer’s help, Alastair pieced together the story of his creation’s escape from the satellite. There were so many ways to use this information to his advantage. McGovern more or less controlled the Business Council, which meant he controlled the city of Philadelphia, but he was not without rivals. The arrest of his son for the murder of hundreds would be quite an embarrassment, probably enough to shift the balance of power. Blackmail was definitely an option.
