City of Golden Shadow (48 page)

"But that's what I mean! You're talking about someone hacking the Middle Country central records!"

Orlando made a noise of annoyance. "Fredericks! We already knew they could do that. Look at what happened to me down in that tomb. They just took the whole sequence out and then sewed it back up again. Like they were surgeons."

"But why?"

"Don't know." Orlando turned to examine his MBC window. Watching the constructor robots patiently excavating the red Martian soil was soothing, like watching cows in a field. He needed to slow his excited thoughts. "I just know I'm right"

Fredericks got up, a little more carefully this time, and walked to the center of the room. "But, Orlando, this is . . . it isn't Morpher or Dieter. This isn't just someone trying to get over on us. These people are, like . . . criminals. And why are they messing with things, taking all these risks-just to show you some city? It doesn't make sense."

"Not much."

Sifting, digging, then sifting some more, the constructor robots went on about their tasks. They were just on the other side of an imaginary window, and simultaneously millions of miles away. Orlando tried to remember the time lag of the transmission, but couldn't. Not that what they were doing at this exact moment probably looked any different from this delayed version he was looking at. And the mindless things would continue, working and working, dying off and being replaced from their own self-created factory. In another few years the project would end. A tiny blister of plastic would hug the Martian surface, a place where a few hundred humans could shelter against the harshness of an alien world.

"Orlando?" His friend's voice tugged him back to the equally alien world of his virtual house. Fredericks' broad-shouldered sim had crossed its arms as though to hold something inside its barrel-like chest "Gardino, old man? This scares me."

Orlando sat up, pillows bunched behind him, his blanket wrapped around his thin legs as tightly as a cold beggar's robe, and listened to Nothing.

He knew from books that houses had not always been like this. He suspected that most houses in other parts of the world, and even lots of them here in America, were not like this even now. He knew that in many places boards creaked, and upstairs neighbors thumped, and people talked on the other side of walls. He had visited a friend from the medical center once, a boy named Tim whose parents lived in a house on a street with nothing separating them from the rest of the city. Even during the day you could hear cars moaning past on the freeway half a mile distant.

On nights like this, when his father had stopped snoring for a bit, Orlando couldn't hear anything at all. His mother always slept like a dead person. The Gardiners had no pets except for a few dozen exotic fish, but fish were quiet animals and all the systems that supported life in their tank were noiselessly chemical. The building's human residents were cared for no less discreetly. Machinery in the house's walls adjusted temperatures, monitored air quality, random-tested the circuitry on lights and alarm systems, but all in silence. Outside, an army might be trooping past beyond the heavy walls and insulated windows of their house, but as long as no one stepped in front of a sensor beam, Orlando would never know.

There was something to be said for the kind of safety and security money could buy. Orlando's mother and father could go shopping, attend the theater, walk the dog-if they'd had one-all without leaving the vast security estate that was Crown Heights. His mother claimed they had only done it for Orlando's sake. A child like him should not be subjected to the dangers of city life, they had decided, but equally clearly should not be raised in some rural place, a long car- or helicopter-ride away from modern conveniences. But since most of his parents' friends also lived either in Crown Heights or in similar fortified mid-city security townships (they were called exclusive communities in the ads), and didn't have his parents' excuse for it, he wondered if she was telling him the truth. Sometimes he wondered if she even knew the truth herself.

The house was silent. Orlando was lonely and a little unsettled.

His fingers found the link cable by his bedside. He thought for a moment about going to the net, but he knew what would happen if his mother got up to pee or something while he was oblivious and saw him plugged in. She was on an anti-net campaign as it was, although what else she expected him to do she'd never made clear. If she caught him, he might lose the "privilege," as she termed it, for weeks. He didn't dare risk it just now. Not with all the things that were happening.

"Beezle?" There was no response. He had spoken too softly, apparently. He crawled to the foot of the bed and leaned over. "Beezle?" Voice activation was a bitch when you were worried about waking up your parents.

A minute hum wafted out of the darkness. A small, dim light brightened, then seven more tiny red lights blinked on in circular sequence until he could see a small scarlet ring gleaming in the shadows near his closet door.

"Yes, boss?"

"Quieter. Like me."

Beezle matched his volume level. "Yes, boss?"

"Anything to tell me?"

"A few things. Some of them strange. I was going to wait until morning."

The conversation was still making Orlando nervous. His mother had been on a bulk scorch lately about not sleeping, and sometimes the woman had ears as sharp as a bat's, even in her sleep. He was sure it was some kind of mother thing, a latent genetic abnormality that only emerged after giving birth and lasted until you'd driven your children out of the house.

He briefly considered doing the whole thing silently onscreen, but at least if his mother woke up and heard him talking, he could pretend it had been in his sleep. If she caught him with a glowing screen, it would be harder to explain away. Besides, he was lonely, and having someone to talk to was still the best cure for that. "Bug. Come over here so we don't nave to talk so loud."

A couple of near-silent clicks indicated that Beezle was detaching his robot body from the power outlet, where it had been quietly sucking nourishment like a flea on a dog's back. The ring of red lights slid down the wall and then came across the carpet at about shoetop height. Orlando scrambled back to his pillows and got under the blankets again so he could enjoy the ticklishly amusing sensation of Beezle clambering up the bedclothes. He enjoyed it mostly because he was not so grownup as to have forgotten the slightly creepy way it had felt when he was a little boy.

Beezle approached the pillow, humming and clicking as faintly as a cricket wrapped in a yard of cotton. He crawled onto Orlando's shoulder and adjusted for stability, rubber-tipped feet scrabbling to get a satisfactory grip. Orlando wondered if someday Beezles, or things like Beezle, would be able to move as freely in RL as they did in the virtual world. He had already seen news stories about agents with robotic bodies going feral because of bad programming or aging software, escaping their owners to live like woodlice in the infrastructures of buildings. What would such things want out of life? Did they run away on purpose, or just lose the ability to follow their original programming and wander off into freedom? Did they retain vestiges of their original artificial personality?

Beezle had settled with his speaker beside Orlando's ear, and now spoke so quietly as to be barely audible. "Better?"

"That's fine. So tell me what you have."

"Which first?"

"The gryphon."

"Well, first off, we don't know for sure when it was purchased, but everything else lines up with your guess. It was first introduced into the node after the shutdown order."

"So Diller didn't buy it."

"Well, a call on the hospital databank says he's still there and still listed as comatose, so even if he bought it, he sure didn't install it."

"Where's it from?"

Beezle readjusted in response to Orlando's small change of position. His Brooklyn cabdriver accent continued to purr into his master's ear. "That's one of the strange things. It doesn't correspond exactly to anything. It's been customized from several different chunks of code-I think it did more than just perform its Middle Country duties, but it's too late now to go back and check those possibilities. Maybe if you go back in, boss."

"I doubt it. So you can't find out who bought it or who made it?"

"The chain of manufacture is messed up all to hell. I can't trace an unbroken line-companies have gone out of business, trademarks on some parts of it are held under what seem to be invented names-not in any indexes I can find anywhere." If an agent in a robot body could sigh, Beezle would have sighed. "It's been hell, I'm tellin' ya. But one thing keeps coming up."

"Which is?"

"TreeHouse."

At first Orlando thought he had misheard Beezle's whisper, "You mean . . . the place?"

"Most of the invented names are hacker tags, and a lot of them show up in TreeHouse-related material."

"Wow. Let me think."

Beezle sat patiently. Unlike his parents or Fredericks, you could tell Beezle to do something and he'd do it. He knew "Let me think" meant don't talk, and if Orlando didn't prompt him to speak again, the robot would crouch silently in place until he had to crawl back to his socket to recharge.

Orlando needed a few moments of quiet. He didn't quite know what to say. If this trail he seemed to be following led toward TreeHouse, that was both exciting and extremely daunting. Exciting because TreeHouse, often called "the last free place on the net," was supposed to be an anarchistic hacker's paradise, an outlaw node that floated through the system like an illegal streetcorner craps game. Net gossip said that it was supported not by massive corporate structures like the other big nodes, but by an ever-changing network of its residents' own small systems. It was supposed to be like a gypsy camp-the whole thing could be taken down in minutes, stored as small and widely distributed individual chunks, then fitted back together again equally swiftly.

The daunting aspect was that nobody just went to TreeHouse. It was pretty much invitation only, and since it had no commercial purpose-and was in fact by its own governing principles opposed to being useful in any meaningful way-those who found it usually wanted only to enjoy and help preserve its exclusivity.

So you couldn't just go to TreeHouse like you could to some other node. Being told that the answers to his questions might be discovered there was like telling a medieval peasant that he could find something in Cathay or Samarkand. For a teenager with no connections, if it wasn't actually mythical, it was still so unreachable as to be in effect purely imaginary.

TreeHouse. Excitement moved inside him, but something else fought for room beside it, something he knew very well, although he had never before felt it about something on the net. Just like Fredericks, he was scared.

"Beezle," he said at last, "are you sure?"

"Boss, please." Beezle was old equipment, but he was an impressive piece of work. There was nothing artificial about his tone of scorn.

"Then get me everything you can on TreeHouse. No, not everything. At least at first you'd better just give me stuff with a reasonable believability weight-information with multiple sources. We can decide whether we want to start hunting through the really scanny stuff later."

"Even so, boss, it's gonna take a while."

"I'll take whatever you've got in the morning." He remembered that tomorrow was an appointment day."No, after lunch. I'll look at it, then decide."

"If you want a really thorough search by tomorrow, I'd better lose this body and get to it. Crawling around wastes an awful lot of bandwidth, ya know."

Orlando made a face. One problem with hanging onto your childhood agent was that they tended to lecture you. "Tell me something new. Go on, get out of here."

The rubber-clad metal polyps riffled in sequence as Beezle backed away from his ear. "Good night, boss."

" 'Night, Beezle."

The agent made its laborious way down the blankets to the floor. Like cats, Bugs found it easier to climb up than down. Orlando watched the faint gleam of red until it reached the wall outlet once more, socketed in, and turned off its display.

TreeHouse. It was so strange to think of that name in connection with something he, Orlando Gardiner, was going to do. It was like deciding you were really going to fly to Never-Never Land, or go down a rabbit hole to look for Alice's friends.

But it made sense, in a weird way. If people existed who could hack into a system as sophisticated as the Middle Country, excise an entire five minutes or whatever it had been, then leave no trace-not only of who had done it, but that anything had even been done!-they would be the kind of people who hung around in TreeHouse.

He sank down into the pillows, but he knew sleep would not come soon. There was so much to think about. Had he really found something unusual, something worth causing all this trouble over, something worth taking so many risks? Or was it only that the vision of the strange city made him think about things he'd stopped considering? Fredericks would tell him he was getting carried away. Certainly data bombing someone's node was not a normal kind of thing to do. His parents would be horrified.

A sudden thought made his neck go prickly. Orlando sat up; the idea was too uncomfortable to consider lying down.

He had figured that only someone with access to the Middle Country records would ever know he had been in Senbar-Flay's tower-he had even said so to Fredericks. But clearly whoever had snipped out the sequence in the tomb and managed to suppress a shutdown order for half a year could walk in and out of the Table of Judgment's master files at will, and do things to them that even their owners couldn't do.

If that was the case, then whoever had rigged the whole thing in the first place could find out about Thargor's visit any time he or she wanted to. And the mystery hacker could find out about Thargor's creator with even greater ease.

Sour bile rose to Orlando's mouth. With the kind of stupid self-confidence that would make any imaginary barbarian proud, he had as good as told this person of near-limitless skills and an obvious desire for secrecy that there was a fourteen-year-old kid looking for him. Surely the whole thing was just the work of some extremely talented, slightly childish prankster. But if the city and the records-fixing were indicative of something bigger, something far more illegal? He could only hope that his adversary had a really good sense of humor.