There was a disconcerting pause, seconds in length, that made his heart lurch in his chest. It’s nothing. Just the skip. Ignore it. You could hardly expect to make contact with a station halfway across the galaxy in the same time that you could send something across a planet. Nevertheless, that time was enough for his fearful imagination to go to work, and at last he ordered his wellseeker to release a few drops of sedative into his bloodstream, just to rein in his pounding heart. Try not to think about what’s out there. The pressure in his chest eased a tiny bit as the Aires gateway icon took form before him. It’s just a vast network, that connects to systems all over the galaxy. No different in theory than the one back home, on which you do your research.
But that wasn’t true, and he knew it. That one was a quiet and underused library, the other a madhouse of human activity. On Guera one might search for a given resource, find it, and withdraw; in the outerworlds one was likely to be jostled by a thousand competing programs, swept away by sheer mass of data searches, drowned in games and advertisements and semilegal entertainments, and in general disconcerted until research was all but impossible. Most people could use enhanced interface programs to wend their way through the madness, but that didn’t help when you had to study the code itself. Or when you preferred code, as he did.
He brushed aside two offers of a virtual menu for Aires points of interest, a display of popular station wares, and one particularly aggressive advertisement for a new viddie, that followed him around for several annoying minutes before he managed to trick it into going elsewhere. Such things were forbidden on Guera, whose innernet was strictly controlled. They were forbidden on every civilized planet, as far as he knew, as well as on the ships and habitats that circled them. Only here, in the outworlds, had dataspace been made such a free-for-all.
He had a headache from it already.
He found a relatively quiet connection to Northstar’s main processor, and slipped inside with the help of a codecracker stored in his headset. Once there, the datastream was somewhat quieter, calmer, and easier to navigate. Of course. No business could afford the kind of distraction that took place on the public wavelengths.
He took the time to get the lay of the land, dodging a few security programs that came sniffing his way. Nothing sophisticated, just your basic virus and intruder detectors. He knew what kinds of code to feed them so that they went away, satisfied he was nothing out of the ordinary. So far so good.
No wonder hackers thrived in the outerworlds. If this was the kind of security that was typical out here, he was surprised the problem wasn’t worse. He was used to Guild security, complex megaliths of defensive programming that were updated on a regular basis. These basic sniffers ... they were easy to dodge, and he could even have entrapped one and reprogrammed it to do his will, had that been his need. Oh, they’d keep the system clear of most viruses well enough, and nab a high percentage of intruders as well, particularly those who had no background in net security ... but that wouldn’t stop a real hacker. The kind of people who regularly attacked the Guild files could break into this system without pausing for breath.
Which was maybe why they went after the Guild files, he realized. Where was the challenge out here?
Strangely, as he headed toward Reservations, he began running across fragmented files. Oddly fragmented, as if pieces of them had been torn away somehow. He stopped to take a closer look at several, and downloaded copies for study at a later time, but it didn’t appear that the damage was in any predictable pattern. Very strange. The programs running in this section seemed injured, too, for they were running much slower than what Masada had seen elsewhere. He caught sight of one that was doing the equivalent of limping in circles, spewing out the same set of garbled data over and over. That was very strange. Had the copies of Lucifer which disappeared in this place somehow damaged Northstar’s programming? He’d never seen anything quite like this before.
It was then, for the first time, that he felt his own guidance programs picking up speed. Instinctively he adjusted them. He knew about this phenomenon, of course—the riptides of the outernet were infamous among programmers—and was prepared with a set of programs designed to stabilize his signal. Nevertheless he felt a cold rush of fear, as the full immensity of the creature that enveloped him hit home. His programs settled down a bit, but he found himself nearer to Reservations than he had intended. He tried to back out—
And his signal jammed. Menus opened like flowering buds before him, one after the other, welcoming him into the Reservations center. But he didn’t want to go there yet. He flashed up an anchor program and quickly reviewed his code. Nowhere had he given any order which should send him into Reservations. How bizarre. The anchor searched out a string of stable code and locked him onto it; forward motion ceased. The welcome menu for New Reservations flickered in his field of vision, frozen in the instant of its appearance.
What the hell was going on?
He took a long and careful look at the data around him. It should be mostly stable, strings of numbers that had to do with hotel accounting, coordinates for data routing, general bookkeeping. But oddly, some of that seemed to be edging toward the gateway to Reservations as well. There was no way to tell in the midst of all this just what was causing it, but he copied a few samples quickly, for study later. It was possible this was just some quirk of outernet behavior that the locals were used to, but he found it totally alien. He took a look around for data coming out of Reservations, to see if that was progressing as it should.
There wasn’t any.
None at all.
With a thrill he realized that he was not balanced at the edge of some normal anomaly, but something deliberately crafted, and probably not by Northstar. No doubt this was what had trapped his virus, as it was now entrapping every other program that wandered too close. A dead zone, into which data entered, from which it could not emerge.
He had used such zones in his own research, though they had been on university machines, far away from vital consumer systems. He was willing to bet whoever had done it on this machine didn’t belong here.
On the one hand the thought was discouraging, for it meant that the disappearance of his virus might have been pure coincidence, unrelated to the purpose of this illicit construction. On the other hand he was curious now, and since the odds were at least two to one that the perpetrator was a hacker of some kind, he sent out a program that he knew would draw response from that type.
A short program, that he simply released. Sure enough, the tides of shifting data caught it up and moved it toward the Reservations gateway. Soon after it passed through it was swallowed by the dead zone, and Masada could no longer track it.
One second. Two.
Curiosity is the lifeblood of the hacker, he had once written, and curiosity is what you must use to manipulate them. What they will not do out of respect for authority, or even to safeguard their own well-being, they will do if you spark their hunger to know. New data, new techniques, exploration of the incomprehensible, these are the coins that can be used to buy them, the lures that can be used to trap them, the chains that can be used to bind them.
Three seconds.
He would have no way of knowing when his message would make contact. It contained only one word, which would overcome all other images for less than a second. Hello. Just that. The word was simple, but it implied a host of other messages. I’m out here. I’m watching you. I know what you’re doing. Want to know who I am?
If that was a hacker inside the dead zone, he was willing to bet he’d come take a look.
Four seconds. Five.
The anchor program indicated that parameters were shifting. The flow of data toward Reservations slowed, then ceased.
Six.
Something probed him, a tentative touch, subtle and quick. Not quick enough. The minute direct contact was made a real-time trace was possible, and he locked onto the signal and began to race toward its source. The time delay from the skip was
n’t enough to impede his chase, but it made the effort disorienting; thank God his quarry wasn’t on his home station either, so that they were on equal footing.
He followed the signal back through the node, into the skip, and onto another station. Code was strewn across his path like boulders across a road; he managed to work his way around the obstacles without pausing for breath. Another node, another skip, another hailstorm of obstacles. His quarry was trying to lose him with simple speed, and that just wasn’t going to work. He followed him into the main processor of a waystation—
And hundreds of paths splayed out before him. Thousands, in fact, each identical, each offering a gateway to somewhere else.
Damn.
This had been prepared long in advance, no doubt about that. This was the reason his quarry had taken the risk of probing him in the first place: because he knew that the way home was masked by so many forks in the road, no man could hope to follow him.
In the annals of hacking, Masada had just lost the chase. He could no longer follow the signal in real-time; by the time he explored half a dozen of these gateways the hacker would be offline and far from his connection point. No doubt he imagined himself safe already, and was congratulating himself on a neat escape.
Only it wasn’t that. Not yet.
With the same meticulous care that Masada had once used to regress Lucifer, he now set up programs that would analyze all those gateways. He was willing to bet that they were designed to impede the flow of data, slowing down any programs that might try to get through during pursuit. All but one, of course; that way would be wide open, the mousehole through which his quarry meant to slip. In time he would know which gateway that was, and his sniffers would search for the hacker’s trail on the other side. In time, by virtue of meticulous effort, not speed and ingenuity, those sniffers would work their way to the end of the trail, and discover what system the original signal had been launched from.
He couldn’t get the hacker’s name this way, nor any other specific information about him. But he could find out what station he worked from, and where on that station he went for outemet access. That was a start.
Setting his sniffers in motion, he retraced his own signal back to Aires Station, to the place where the dead zone had been. It was no longer there. A wealth of trapped data was stranded in Reservations, wounded programs limping home, new input rushing through the troubled area, searching for connection ... and there was his virus. Lucifer-X. It didn’t take him long to find it; the virus was motionless, and situated at what would have been the center of the dead zone. He called up its homing sequence just to make sure that this was the spore he had indeed lost, a simple act of confirmation. Or so he thought.
It wasn’t there.
Across the light-years of inspace and outspace, across the vast synapses of the human brain, he stared at the code he knew all too well. This wasn’t Lucifer-X, his own safe creation. This was another spore. The real thing. And from the way it was held still in the heart of what had been the dead zone, he was willing to bet this was what his quarry had been working with, hidden inside Northstar’s system.
Heart pounding, he gathered up the deadly spore in a network of code so tightly woven that not even it could slip through. He’d never been this close to the thing before without a protective interface between them. But he could hardly go away and leave it here. Any minute now Northstar’s security would be storming through the place, repairing crucial pathways, clearing out debris.
Slowly, carefully, cradling the killer to him, he backed out the way he had come. Through the sickening chaos of the outernet, which these people called home. Across the vistas of his own fear, cold sweat-drenched body sitting rigid behind its desk, headset and the hair beneath made clammy by the exudates of physical tension.
Carefully, as one might handle a bomb, he outloaded the spore that he had rescued and quickly sealed it up in a sterile chip. His wellseeker told him to go get food and drink, and to take a bath. Instead he picked up the chip and headed out to his special lab, where he might study it in safety.
Five hours later, he knew that the spore had been altered, and not by the Guild.
Six hours later, one of his sniffers returned to tell him where it had come from.
PARADISE.
How ironic, that one of the most terrible conditions man can suffer should become linked to our conquest of the stars. How unfortunate, that in man’s struggle to take control of his own destiny, he nearly eradicated the very genetic pattern which promised to set him free. How awesome a validation of our culture it is, that only here on Guera was such potential noted, nurtured, and finally made to serve us as it should.
GUILDMASTER ARIANNE BERUN
“Guardians of Destiny”: Keynote address to the 421st Guildmasfer’s Conference, Guera Node, Tiananmen Station
PROSPERITY NODE PROSPERITY STATION
CALM WAS the outward world of Guildmaster Ian Kent. So calm. A world rendered in shades of gray upon gray, a tranquilized universe of ordered shapes and emotions. Peaceful gray halls with soft-edge shadows. Skylights of pearl and mist. Human flesh rendered in tones of clay and ash, with no hint of living blush, noxious sallow, or any other hue of life. And behind this bleached world, always, the gentle flow of chemicals into his bloodstream. He could hear it if he listened closely enough, sedatives seeping out into his veins with the measured precision of nuclear decay. Chemicals that diluted his despair until it was, like the rest of his world, muted and colorless.
The entrance to his home was impressive in its size, and doubtless it was pleasing in its design. He wouldn’t know. His staff hadn’t told him what colors they had used, and he would never ask. The words would mean nothing to him. Though the rods and cones of his eyes functioned perfectly, though the optic nerves transmitted signals without flaw, that portion of his brain which would interpret such concepts was gone. One moment was all it had taken. One moment of equipment malfunction, one second of feedback into his neural circuits, a flash of heat and unbearable light and then the slow awakening ... into hell.
You are lucky, they told him. Damage confined to optical processing, and only a small part of that. You are so lucky, so very lucky. You could have lost motor control, and been crippled. Or intellect. You could have lost that. You could have lived life as a vegetable, not even knowing who you were. This is better, they told him, much better. You’ll see.
Fools!
Be wary of dragons breathing red, his own notes warned him. Ainniq memories, recorded in happier days. Now he couldn’t even read the simple message without a tightening in his gut, a sharp pain in his heart ... and a twinge in his arm as the outpilot’s mechanism within squeezed forth another precious drop of tranquilizer. What was red? He could recite its definition, he could list its associations—heat, anger, lust, violence—but it was book-learning only; the words might be in a foreign language for all he understood them.
Color.
You could survive without color, in the outworlds. You could maneuver without it, you could identify dangers, you could make your way from one day to the other without being devoured by monsters. You could live gray, and work gray, and die at the end of a gray life, a natural death.
Not so in the ainniq.
“Sir?”
He looked up from the work he was doing to acknowledge his secretary’s appearance. Chezare Arbela was a man who had long since become accustomed to Kent’s tranquil nature and adapted to it. Accordingly he never looked hurried, even when he was, and never, ever seemed anxious. It was as if he had established some osmotic link to the Guildmaster which allowed Kent’s pharmacopoeia to flow directly into his bloodstream. Others found the relationship disturbing, and Kent knew they gossiped nervously about it when he wasn’t listening. He found it calming to have a man so in sync with his moods, even if the moods were artificially induced. Even his Syndrome found this man acceptable company, which was saying a lot; without the flood of chemicals to rein it in, his Syndrome tended to
regard every living creature as an enemy.
And yet, there was a pleasure in that. An honesty, in facing the darkness in your soul head-on, without mask or artifice. He used to say that piloting was his safety valve, for only then could he let the monster inside himself run free. The memory of those times was terrifying, but also exhilarating. To let this drugged tranquillity fade into the background, and slip off the yoke of conformity which brainware imposed upon his soul ... and there was a thrill in that. There was life in that, as vital and as dangerous as the primeval experience. Man as prey, fleeing hunters. Man as victor, emerging unscathed. The unbelievable rush of triumph as your outship broke through the surface of the ainniq, dragons snapping at your very heels....
What did he have now to take the place of that? Paperwork. Administrative duties. Occasionally diplomatic assignments, in deference to his drugged and adaptable nature. It wasn’t what his soul wanted. It wasn’t what it craved.
“What is it, Che?”
“The latest report on the League, sir.” The secretary put a chip down in front of him.
With a sigh he picked it up and loaded it into his headset. Data scrolled before his eyes, and he glanced over it once just to see that everything was in order. It was. A little less data than usual, perhaps, but nothing to trigger alarms. At least not on the surface.
“Nothing unusual?”
“No, sir.”
This was such a waste of effort. Having him scrutinize the Hausman League in the hopes that he would catch the Guild’s saboteur was just ... well, ridiculous. Granted, their station technically had Isolationist status and therefore fell into the Prima’s most suspect category, but how could one even imagine that they were involved with Lucifer? The League venerated all the children of Hausman and believed the outworlds should belong to them alone. Their Isolationist status reflected the fact that no Terran, Earthborn or otherwise, was allowed in their station space. The disruption of ainniq-based transportation would hurt the Variant races much more than it would hurt the Terrans, so why would they ever launch something like Lucifer? Yes, they were extremists, but not stupid extremists.