She hesitated, then at last said, “No.” But it sounded like she wasn’t all that sure herself.
Corporate espionage. Jesus. Well, that would explain the level of security he’d run into on the Terran station. It also meant they were going to search for her and search for her and search for her again. Doubtless by now there were hundreds of programs scouring the outernet for any sign of her, and simple methods like cutting her hair or changing her name sure as hell weren’t going to stop them. The Terran corporations were notorious in the outworlds, both for their Earth-based power structure and their utter lack of concern for local law. He’d recently heard of one case where a corporation blew up its rival’s station, with people on it and everything. If that had happened in the outworlds there would have been swift retaliation, both from the Guild and from every station within shooting range. You didn’t tolerate stuff like that, not ever. But Earth seemed to take things like that in its stride. Scary.
So ... possibly the whole might of a Terran corporation was now focused on finding this girl. They’d have sniffers roaming all the stations, ID linked, and a host of other stuff. Dangerous, really dangerous, and not the kind of programs she’d be able to dodge on her own. He might well get himself killed for helping her. You shouldn’t get involved in that kind of thing, he told himself, not when the stuff in your own head could get you locked up for life.
But ...
Jesus, it would be a challenge. The kind of thing you probably couldn’t brag about for a while, but if someday you could ... yeah, that would be worth it. Bragging rights were a valuable commodity in his universe. Worth taking risks for.
And the girl. Hard to turn away a girl like that.
You’re getting soft in your old age, Phoenix.
He brushed that thought away like a dust spot on a monitor. Didn’t belong here. “Look, ah, I can help you. I’ve got some stuff on the outernet now, checking things out. We can take a look at that pretty soon, see what’s come onto the station.”
“I can pay—” she began. Then she flushed a bright red and looked down at her lap. “I’m sorry, that was habit, of course I can’t—”
“Well, not without money I steal for you, but that’s okay.” He managed a grin and got up and took the plate from her. “Frisia’s national debt was a little high anyway, nobody’ll notice a few extra numbers added to it. Don’t worry about it.”
There: that sparkle in her eye, that told him he had pleased her and amused her and a dozen other good things. It was hard to get that from women. Most of them didn’t much care what he could do with the circuits in his head ... or with his brain, for that matter.
Something flashed red in his field of vision. Incoming. He stood still for a minute, accepting the icon, studying it.
“What is it?” she asked.
“One of the sniffers found something. Big time.” He waved her to silence and shut his eyes, in order to see it better. Yeah, it was one of his, all right, and what it dragged behind it was longer than its own code. High security shit, right off the station cams. He found the chair by touch and sat down into it, heavily, ready to give the alien program his whole attention.
It was clean, and it was polished, and it reeked of the kind of programming you learned in school, or down the rungs of the corporate ladder. He recognized instantly what it was, of course; it was one of the things he’d expected to find, if someone big really was following her.
“Facial recognition program,” he told her, his eyes still shut. “Looking for ...” He scanned the codes, translating bits into features in his head, and finally said ... “You.”
“What does that mean?” She sounded nervous. Damn well should, too. This was no amateur maneuver.
“It means this little program is wandering around to all the security cams on the station and tapping into their feed. Then it’s scanning for the most obvious features of your appearance—height, sex, Variation—” He waited for her to protest the last being included, but she didn’t. Most Terrans in his experience would have. “Anyway, that done, it narrows down the field with other criteria, and so on and so forth, until eventually it matches the face recorded on the cam with its own files ... looking mostly for bone structure and such, things that can’t be changed easily.”
“And it would ... find me? Out of a whole station?”
“Only if you pass by the public cams. And even then it could take a good while. The program’s only fast enough to sample a percentage of what it sees, if there are a lot of Terran women around on a given day who’ll require attention. This isn’t the kind of thing that gives immediate results,” he warned. “Somebody’s willing to put in the time it’ll take to track you down. I think the pols actually run about eighty percent success on this kind of stuff, assuming their quarry isn’t holed up in a private space somewhere. Or ...” He couldn’t help but grin; it was purely showing off. “Assuming no one’s fucking with their programs.”
“You can do that?” She was leaning closer to him, he could feel it. “I mean ...”
“Fuck with their programs? Damn straight.” He was already redesigning the sniffer, snipping off bits of its code and replacing it with segments of his own creation. “When I’m done with this thing, it wouldn’t notice you if you walked up to the cam and smiled right into it.” For a moment he was silent, as he wrestled with a particularly difficult bit of code. “Then ... if it works right ... it’ll sail around the station finding nothing, appearing perfectly normal, so that its maker thinks it’s working all right, you just aren’t here.”
She said nothing more, but he knew she was watching him. Too bad it didn’t look more impressive, he thought. Like, something to do with his hands or his body, where each motion meant he had accomplished something. It would make programming a kind of dance that she wouldn’t understand, but at least she could watch it happening. This way he was just slumped in his work chair, and could have been asleep for all she knew.
Far from it.
Sniffers like this were laden with security routines that you had to pry open carefully to slip your code inside. One wrong move and the thing would start sending warning signals back home. He’d already isolated it so that all such warnings would do was bounce around his home system, but it was still something to watch out for; you never knew when one might infect your machine and make its escape later. Surprisingly, this sniffer wasn’t all that hard to work with. Good security, but nothing original or particularly dangerous. For someone who had cut his teeth on state-of-the-art security processors, it was hardly a challenge.
At last he had it done. He checked it over once more, just to make sure everything looked right, and then opened up his system and set the wounded bird loose. It would flop around enough to make people think it was doing its job, but the truth was it wasn’t going to report anything to anyone. Unless you took a really good look at it, though, it would appear totally normal. Good work, he told himself. He called up his own sniffers again and checked them over, making sure that all was as it should be—
—only it wasn’t.
“Phoenix?”
It was on the end of one of his sniffers, a small enough program that he had hardly even noticed it. Neat, clean, efficient ... and linked to his own machine code.
Someone was trying to track him. They had found his program and followed it home. Shit.
“Are you okay?”
He sealed the thing up, wrapping it up in strings of security code so tight it couldn’t move without his say-so, and then wrapping it up again. “Fine,” he muttered. “Just fine.” Someone was trying to trace him, and they had almost managed it. He’d been so busy showing off for the girl that he’d almost missed it. Jesus. That wasn’t like him. He shook his head and then shut down his brainware, flashing it the icons that would put all his work on hold. He’d been careless, and that invited trouble. Hackers couldn’t afford carelessness. Especially hackers whose own heads were so crammed with blackware that the first time the pol took a good look insid
e their skulls, they’d get locked up for life.
Like him.
“Phoenix?”
She was scared now, he could hear it. “Just a programming glitch,” he assured her. It was clear from her expression that she knew it was something more. Damn it, he never was good at lying. “Look, there’s just some work I have to do ... but not from here. I’m going to have to go out for a while.”
She reached for him and then withdrew her hand, clearly sensing that she could neither convince him not to go, nor come up with a good reason for accompanying him. “Look,” he said, “you’re safe here. As long as you don’t go online nothing should be able to find you. And I won’t be gone long, I promise.” He hesitated, then took up a scrap piece of paper and scribbled down a com number. “Here’s Nuke’s number, okay? If I don’t come back right away and you get nervous, you can call him. But I will. Really.”
She looked unconvinced, but took the paper from him and folded it into her hand.
“It’s okay. Really.”
He knew she didn’t believe it. He didn’t believe it himself. But what else could he say?
He hurried out of the small apartment, flashing up maps of Paradise Station as he went.
You don’t hide a grain of sand by locking it away, you put it out on the beach and dare people to go looking for it. Someone had said that in an old Earth viddie which he’d seen as a kid, and the line had stuck with him. He wasn’t really clear on what sand was, of course, but a quick visit to a research site had given him enough information to make the context clear. He liked it.
He thought of that now as he took a tube to a distant mall, fighting his desire to fiddle with the programs stored in his headset. Later. Later. He couldn’t afford to go shooting off thoughts to the outernet while he was still this close to home.
At last he got to his chosen “beach,” a shopping mall on one of the interior rings. It wasn’t on a level where tourists congregated, which meant that the locals flocked there to escape the press of alien crowds. A good thousand or more people were there in the section he chose, walking and talking and eating and shopping ... or just hanging out, the favorite pastime of the young.
Of course there were the loops, and the virts, and infinite variations and combinations of the two. You saw those in any public place you went to, these days. He could see one woman sitting propped up against a storefront, her eyes glazed with contentment as some short bit of neural happiness-programming ran over and over through her head. There was a couple strolling hand in hand whose giggles and flushes were a good sign of some porn loop running through their heads. And of course there were the fantasy buffs with their state-of-the-art virt programs, translating everything into the context of their choice. One went flying past him on skates, swinging an imaginary sword at some imaginary enemy who just happened to occupy the body of a middle-aged Frisian. Another leered at every woman passing, as the program in his head substituted idealized naked features for clothing. Or maybe it put smiley faces on their butts; it was hard to tell what kids were into, these days. When Phoenix had been young—really young—the big thing had been Earth-virts, programs that substituted old Earth viddie settings for a more prosaic reality. He’d liked the science fiction settings best, bizarre alien landscapes with creatures so far removed from the human norm that not even the Hausman Effect could have explained them. You could buy a sandwich at a local vendor and turn the experience into some deliciously revolting piece of alien diplomacy, with live things squiggling beneath your tongue and some fish-finned snake-creature watching to see if you would dare spit it out. Of course, the other customers never quite understood why you made the face you did as you tasted the stuff ... or maybe they did. It wasn’t like virts were a secret thing, though they’d originally been designed for private entertainment. Adults were happy to use them that way, but kids were another thing. Was there ever a generation that didn’t enjoy shocking its elders in public? Was there ever a world where adults didn’t shake their heads in frustration, annoyed by the antics of the young, but unable to stop them?
At last he came to a place where consumer traffic was low, and a larger than usual number of virts seemed to have collected as a result. A handful of them seemed to be involved in some group fantasy down at the end of the corridor, which would eventually draw official attention; in theory such games were prohibited from the public walkways, though in fact they popped up any time the pol were absent. He bought himself a drink and walked slowly with it, sipping its frothy green contents as he sought out the pace of the local traffic. You could walk and work at the same time if you were good. He was good. All it took was a place where no one cared if he looked zoned out while he did so, and this was definitely such a place.
Slowing his step, brushing his hand against a nearby storefront to guide him, he gave his attention over to his brainware, and called up the program which had so disturbed him back at the apartment, to take a look at it. Slowly, carefully, he unwrapped it. It was a nasty little thing, a sniffer program keyed to the brand and model of his brainware. Not his headset, he noted; that would have been the normal search procedure, much easier information to access. Anyone with half an ounce of talent could trace a headset. But this sucker went for the brainware itself, the thing you couldn’t change by buying a new interface. And it had found his codes attached to his program, and dug in its little data claws, and ridden the thing all the way back to his head.
Not good.
Thus far it didn’t seem to be doing much damage, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t start soon. Basically it seemed to exist only to locate him, and then send a signal back to someone once it had found him ... which thus far he had kept it from doing. Now he needed to see if he could figure out where it had come from, and who the hell had his brainware specs in the first place....
He took a table outside a local eatery, suitably crowded, and leaned back in the narrow chair, drink box in hand. Here in this public place the sheer number of users would help mask him from the enemy, if anyone tried to trace his signal.
.... the enemy. Jesus. Listen to him. It sounded like he was back in one of those virts right now, substituting aliens for shopkeepers and exciting spy plots for the angst of teenage existence.
But the girl was real. The people who were after her were real. Maybe this time, for once, life had caught up with the virts.
He lidded his eyes halfway, enough to darken his field of vision but not enough to look like that’s why he did it. Just a lazy guy, out for a drink and a snooze. Meanwhile, inside his head, he began to unwind the nasty little sniffer, taking apart its code piece by piece, seeing what made it tick. It tried to send out a signal almost immediately, but that was okay; he had taken precautions, and its messages weren’t going anywhere. Carefully he picked at it, searching for the one line of code that would tell its signal where to go. That’s what he wanted to know. That’s what he had to know, if he was going to come out on top of this crazy little cat-and-mouse game.
Suddenly the code faded from his field of vision. He stiffened, expecting trouble—but it seemed he had triggered some kind of graphics program, embedded in the homing sequence. Glittering stars suddenly filled his field of vision, then gathered at the edges in a luminous border. Part of his brain was aware that this could be a trap of some kind, meant to distract him, but he was so damned curious that he couldn’t look away. Slowly an image took form in the center of the darkness: faint outline of a waystation, encircled by half a dozen vast rings. Paradise. What the hell was this anyway, some kind of ad? That would be just great, all this work and fear and some stupid travelogue program had invaded his brainware—
And then an eddress resolved in front of his eyes. Just that. White letters against a black background: simple, plain, easy to read. Then it was gone. The after-image shivered in his sight for a moment, and then it too faded. The station and stars quickly followed, leaving him with only darkness.
What the fuck ... ?
The sniffer had s
elf-destructed, code strings unraveling into meaningless data before he could stop it. Apparently it had done its job, delivering that little scene, and now it wasn’t going to give him a chance to analyze it further. Phoenix opened his eyes and blinked heavily, took a sip of his drink—now warm—and tried to make sense of what he had just seen. This guy had made up a sniffer program to find Phoenix, right? And it had found him, and tried to send out a message saying where he was. But all that was just window dressing for a three-second vid designed to play out inside his head? Which had been its purpose all along?
Shit. This was getting stranger and stranger.
He knew he shouldn’t go check out that eddress. Doing so was about as reckless as a guy could get. On the other hand, how could he resist? The programmer who had sent this was good, damn good, and he knew that Phoenix was good, too, and respected it. He’d figured the hacker could spot his program, neutralize it, and then take it apart to see what was tucked away inside. There was almost an inherent challenge in the process: if you aren’t good enough to find this note, you aren’t worth my time.
How could any moddie resist that?
He had to take better precautions, though. He shut down his hacking programs for a few minutes, letting ads run mindlessly through his upper visual field as he walked to the nearest tube. In better times he might have altered them, just for the fun of it, stripping models of their clothes or adding mustachios and sending them back to their maker. Now he was too preoccupied for such efforts.
This guy who had sent the sniffer ... was he a hacker himself? The very nature of the invitation said he was, but other facets of his behavior argued against it. For now, Phoenix was reserving judgment. But whoever he was, he sure as hell was worth a hacker’s attention.
He boarded an express tube bound for the upper levels. There were plenty of seats and he stretched out on three, body language making it quite clear that no one should ask him to move. He glanced up at the nodes in the ceiling, which would shunt his headset signal to the nearest outernet processor. At the speeds the tube would be traveling, that meant he’d be changing processors once every few minutes. If anyone was tracking him, they’d lose a lot of time adjusting, and time was everything in this game.