And it looked like it was aware of her.
“What is—” Mr. K started to ask.
“Target is backtracking signal. Engaging defenses. PENETRATION OF BASE SEC—”
A wave of red shot out from the holo. Even as the hypersonic roller coaster began to reverse, the pulsing red signal overtook it. The holo was washed in a sheet of solid red.
The lights in the office died, the controls under the surface of the desk blinked out, and Mr. K jerked violently, snapping the helmet free of its cabling. He collapsed, unmoving, behind the desk.
For a few seconds there was silence, broken only by the chaotic sounds of the workers in the next room. Angel didn’t move. Mr. K was still alive. She could hear his breathing.
“What the fuck happened?”
“Who?”
Angel jumped. The voice had come from the speaker that had been doing all the announcements. However, the voice that was using it now was totally different. A fluid voice, liquid and bubbly.
Someone was pounding on the office door.
“What?” Angel repeated.
“Who?” repeated the voice. Did it actually hear her?
“What the fuck you mean, ‘who’?”
“Who requests access?”
Huh? What the hell was going on here?
Behind her the pounding on the door increased. Angel supposed that whatever blacked out the office had also jammed the hydraulic door. Her muscles were beginning to unfreeze, and she got up to work around the desk to Mr. K.
“Who requests access?”
Oh, great, the whole computerrorist assault on VanDyne crumbles, leaving her to deal with the damn security system. What the hell was she supposed to do? She maneuvered around the desk and almost stepped on Mr. K in the weak red light that was her only illumination. The guy was pale, sweating, clammy—it didn’t take a genius to see it was some sort of shock.
“Who requests access?”
Come fucking on? What’s the point? “I’m Angel, damnit, I’m requesting access. I’m also requesting you shut the fuck up.”
She bent to remove the cybernetic helmet, and suddenly the room lit up from the holo display. Angel looked up and felt the shock of her life.
The video was on some sort of zip-feed and she could barely get a few images to make sense. The holo was split into a half-dozen standard comm displays and on each one was some recorded aspect of her life. There was where she gave Pasquez the finger on a live video feed. There’s her interview after someone reached Byron’s body. There’s her giving a foot-job to an obstructing reporter. There were half a dozen local anchors who must be doing the story of her life. There were a few clips from Cleveland. It kept going, it seemed endless. There was a video of things that never should have been recorded. Comm calls she thought were private. Security footage from parking garages and the basement of Frisco General. Video from the room she was staying in upstairs—
Then the video ended, leaving the room in total darkness.
Text burst by, zipping across the holo screen too fast to read any but a small part. But she saw enough. Text files on her. Vital statistics, everything from her tax returns to her height and weight. DMV records, police records, credit records . . .
She felt like she was in a free-fall.
Mr. K groaned underneath her. He looked awful, but apparently whatever happened wasn’t fatal. She turned from the screen and tried to get Mr. K into a comfortable position. His eyes flicked open, violet irises looking very alien in the feeble red light.
“What happened?” she whispered.
“Tried to access me—” He groaned again and closed his eyes.
“What do you mean?”
The holo blanked. On the screen was flashing a glowing statement of the obvious.
“You are not the United States Government.”
“Damn straight I’m not.”
The text was replaced by a question. “Who are you?”
Angel looked at that, shook her head, and bent to finish removing Mr. K’s helmet. His breathing was steady; for that she was thankful. She was never much for first aid. He mumbled again.
“What?” Angel whispered.
“No security.”
“Huh.”
“Totally open.” He grabbed her arm for emphasis.
She looked up at the screen. The question still hung there, seeming to float in midair. For the first time she began to wonder what she was talking to.
“I’m a rabbit, you moron.”
“Are rabbits defined as a threat to national security?”
“Say what?”
The pounding on the door stopped. Angel wondered if the folks on the ground out there were privy to what was going on on this holo. If so, she wondered if they found it just as bizarre.
“Are rabbits defined as a threat to national security?”
Angel stared at the screen, and she felt Mr. K tug at her arm. She looked down and saw him shaking his head no.
Well, if she was allowed to make the rules. “Hell, no—”
“That information has been filed. What security clearance does a rabbit have?”
Too fucking weird. She had to be talking to the VanDyne mainframe—she couldn’t see some sysop somewhere acting like this, even as a joke.
What kind of mainframe was she talking to?
Mr. K was pulling himself up to his chair. Angel backed up to give him some room. He clasped a long-fingered hand to his head. “Talk to it,” he whispered. “Not much time.” He sounded awful.
Play its game, she told herself. What did she have to lose? “What clearances are there?”
“CONFIDENTIAL, CLASSIFIED, SECRET, TOP SECRET.”
Angel felt a little giddy. It was hard to take this all seriously. “What? No tippy-top secret?”
Mr. K looked about to say something, but a new message flashed on the screen, “Define TIPPY-TOP SECRET.”
The frank stayed silent but gave her a gesture that seemed to mean “keep going.” Then he started fiddling with his desk. Angel guessed he was trying to get his terminal on-line again.
She was scared shitless, but she couldn’t help laughing. Fine, I’ll define tippy-top secret. “It’s one step better than top secret, and it’s so secret that nobody who doesn’t have tippy-top secret access knows it exists.”
Hell, if the Fed didn’t have a rating like that, it should.
“Definition filed. Rabbits have TIPPY-TOP SECRET security clearance.”
What the fuck did she just do? Did it just take her seriously? Can a computer pull your leg?
She glanced at Mr. K, but he seemed fully recovered and was deeply involved in manipulating the colored lights under the surface of his desk.
“What the hell are you?” she asked the holo screen.
Text flew by the screen too fast to read.
“Stop it, just give me a handle, a brand name, something.”
“I have access to 6235 English-language self-referents. Do you wish to add more delimiters to the list?”
“Just give me the top ten.”
“The first ten referents defined as TOP SECRET:
“01: TECHNOMANCER,
“02: Artificial Intelligence,
“03: Amorphous crystal holographic memory matrix,
“04: A National Security Asset,
“05: Van Dyne Industrial, Inc., a subsidiary of Pacific Imports,
“06: Alpha Centauri Technology,
“07: The black box,
“08: The BEM Machine,
“09: Our edge,
“10: National Office of Extraterrestrial Research.”
Angel sat down and exhaled a long shaky breath.
All those weird speculations she’d been avoiding . . .
Merideth’s effing aliens. Until the
Fed had taken over the operation back in February, VanDyne had been one of the aliens’ corporate fronts. Whether or not someone believed those white blobs the Fed paraded for the camera were really alien or just some gene-tech’s demented nightmare, there was no question that the creatures had used a number of corporate fronts to funnel money to their causes. The most public one was Nyogi Enterprises in New York. They helped arm the moreau resistance.
Didn’t mean it was the only one.
If the Fed had found one of those corporate fronts and taken it intact . . .
“Someone tell me I’m dreaming.”
“You are dreaming,” came a low bubbly voice from the hidden speaker.
“This is insane.”
“Are you requesting a modification in operating procedure?”
“I don’t think so—” What the fuck was she supposed to do?
“Then for what reason does the rabbit require access?”
“All I wanted was to find out what Byron was carrying.”
“Please specify terms.”
Angel looked at Mr. K for some sort of help, but the frank was busy at his terminal.
She sighed. “Byron Dorset. If you’re VanDyne, he worked for you, porting data.”
“No record of Byron Dorset exists—”
“Bullshit.”
“Cross reference of Byron Dorset with Angelica Lopez database confirms Dorset as employee of VanDyne Industrial. Estimate 90% probability of record failure due to transitional damage to primary storage core.”
“What?”
“Cross refe—”
“No, shut up.” Angel shook her head. “What do you mean ‘transitional damage’?”
“During the transition from the Race to the United States Government, the Race damaged my primary storage core, resulting in a loss of 80% of stored data. Operation efficiency has been restored to 67% of optimum by bypassing damaged areas. Data storage capacity is at 72% optimum. Stored data is at 5% capacity.”
The Fed took over VanDyne, and during the takeover the aliens tried to scrag their own computer to keep it out of the Fed’s hands—
“What did you mean, ‘Angelica Lopez database’?”
“Information downloaded from your location. Label: Angel. Cross-reference: rabbit. Classification: TIPPY-TOP SECRET.”
Angel glanced at Mr. K. The little compu-frank had been keeping real good tabs on her. She supposed it was second nature to a guy like him.
“Examining data at your location.”
“Huh, what?”
Mr. K cursed quietly in Japanese and started working even faster.
There was a barely perceptible pause. “Determining nature of what Byron was carrying. Accessing coded ramcards. Copying encrypted data. Interpreting possible encryption strategies. Interpolating possible algorithms. Approximate time required to reconstruct data, 32.56 hours with possible 5% error. Task receives priority. Contact resumes when task completed.”
“Wait a minute—”
Mr. K let out a stream of Asian invective as the lights came back on in the office. The holo flashed red for a second and resumed the graphic roller coaster in retreat as if nothing had happened. Angel watched the point of view snap back through the cube room like a rubber band that had been stretched past the breaking point.
“—RTTY. ENGAGING EMERGENCY DEFENSIVE MEASURES.” The voice over the speaker had returned to normal. As if her entire dialogue had been some sort of figment. The only sign of it now was Mr. K, looking exhausted, sweating, and slowly sinking back into his chair.
“Lost it,” he said.
The hydraulic door finally opened and a dozen guards ran in, led by Mr. K’s oddly proportioned frank bodyguard. The guards stopped when they saw Mr. K unharmed. Mr. K nodded, and the guards began to retreat.
He looked at Angel and said, “I knew that system would be interesting.”
• • •
It took a couple of hours to get Mr. K and the Tetsami operation back to a semblance of normalcy. Angel stood in a corner and watched, trying not to get in the way.
Her dialogue with TECHNOMANCER had been visible on every terminal linked to the system, and she was treated to at least a dozen repetitions of that conversation as the techies tried to figure out exactly what had happened.
The first and most obvious conclusion was that TECHNOMANCER had grabbed control of the entire system, like a Toshiba ODS was nothing more than another peripheral to it. She heard the techies talk about ludicrous processing speeds and the fact that it had drained the Toshiba’s core memory in less than ten seconds.
It had tried to treat Mr. K as another peripheral in the chain of command. Apparently, having your brain directly accessed like that wasn’t a pleasant experience.
The techs talked about what an “amorphous crystal holographic memory matrix” might be made of. They talked about the kind of operating system a true artificial intelligence might run.
They worried about the Fed— No, they were positively panicked about the Fed. No one seemed able to believe that they had gone through the entire episode without detection. But the software jimmies they’d grafted on to their signal had held through the contact.
The weirdness was with the connect to TECHNOMANCER itself. All along the wire—down to the alien mainframe itself—were a conventional string of computers, all with the standard security setups. Every computer along the line was designed to prevent access to the core with the best security the Fed could muster.
They had sliced through all the software protection. It’s what they were trained—and in Mr. K’s case, designed—to do. They had broken through all the way to VanDyne, where a standard Fed mainframe straddled the dedicated line to DC and guarded the alien box.
Once past that, there was no security whatsoever. Beyond that gate the system was wide open, and anyone who got that far could access everything. The catch was, the machine knew you were there. It was a nearly tabula rasa machine, but it had a mind of its own. It could make judgment calls as long as it wasn’t told otherwise.
Mr. K’s theory was that it was in such an embryonic state of development after the damage done it by its previous owners, it probably really couldn’t tell the difference between Mr. K’s pirate signal and a legit input from the Fed. To TECHNOMANCER, that one dedicated line was its only access to the outside world, and any communication down that line was legit.
Hell of a way to run a railroad. But then, Mr. K thought TECHNOMANCER was suffering from a bit of brain damage.
The question was, how seriously was the VanDyne mainframe going to take Angel’s “instructions.”
It was all a little much.
Hanging around the computer room, she began to get the feeling that most of the computerrorist shock troops were about to have a techno-orgasm thinking that something like this actually existed, and were suffering a heavy wave of resentment over the fact that the rabbit was the one to talk to the thing.
Mr. K looked like a kid who’d just been told that there really were twelve days of Christmas, and they started now.
When the techs began talking about ghost data that the AI had imported into the system, Angel went back up to the apartment they’d loaned her.
She sat down in front of the wall-covering comm and contemplated the fact that Byron had been working for aliens. White blobs of extraterrestrial creatures that the president of the United States said were heavily into covert and clandestine activity on this planet. President Merideth blamed the aliens for the hole the country was falling into, blamed them for the political chaos in Washington, blamed them for feeding money and arms into radical groups of all stripes, blamed them for the riots . . .
Anaka was right; they were all living in a paranoid’s wet dream.
Byron was a data courier for the extraterrestrials that ran VanDyne Industrial before the Fed stepped in. Th
e aliens that TECHNOMANCER called the Race. The Race needed someone to physically transport data to their clients because their mainframe, TECHNOMANCER, had been totally isolated from the communications net. VanDyne’s mainframe had been isolated for so long that Mr. K assumed that there would be no way to get at it—
Only, the Fed laid in a dedicated comm line from VanDyne to DC once they took over. Until the Fed had taken over, the Race’s artificial brain was fully secure, with no contact with the outside.
Except for the data Byron carried.
Then, last February according to Anaka, the Fed took over VanDyne Industrial. Byron was a freelancing moreau whose employers were an enemy of the state. He was damn lucky the Race roached most of VanDyne’s records before the Fed took them. Byron was left out in the cold. The aliens were shipped off to the “converted” dome on Alcatraz.
This would have been the time to retire.
But what if Byron was porting something for VanDyne when the Fed fell in? Byron had become a millionaire simply as a courier for this data. When he found out that he was alone, how long would it be before he started thinking about how much VanDyne had been getting for the stuff he carried. How much was VanDyne selling this data for if it could afford to pay the courier a hundred K or so a pop?
A million?
Ten million?
How much would it be worth when the company was no longer in business? When Byron was the sole owner and this was it?
“Jesus Christ.” Angel’s head swam. It was all speculation, but it made sense. She could understand why people were going crazy over this.
And she could see Byron getting really greedy.
Instead of pocketing all the money from the original sale, he contacted all the interested parties he could think of and tried to auction it off.
And the buyers found out what Byron was doing.
Angel knew she wouldn’t like it.
She needed to know who those buyers were. She needed to know who the Old Man backing the Knights was. She needed to know who hired the feline hit squad. She needed to know who the folks from Denver were. That was what all this BS about those ramcards was about.