Fool's Experiments (25 page)

"It's trapped!" Glenn shouted. "Get out
now."
As he spoke, Dodd, too, went into a seizure. Pittman's brain on the display glowed an unearthly crimson. "Out, out, get out!"

A writhing, claw-tipped
something
swept through the BOLD display's brain image. Then the brain representation went black as Pittman, his dead man's switch dropped, convulsively tore the helmet from his head. His right arm didn't move properly.

"Get them out! Get them
out!"
Pittman dived across a lab bench at Dodd. The agent's hand still clutched a dead man's switch. Pittman pried ineffectively with his left hand and right fist, breaking two of Dodd's fingers without freeing the switch. With a roar of frustration, Pittman pried the helmet off the agent's head.

This was combat, and Glenn stayed focused. All the helmets were linked by radio to one computer. Its power cord ran snakelike beneath the lab's central bench. He hooked a shoe tip under the cord near the plug and pulled. As the plug popped free, Glenn grabbed a comfortingly low-tech walkie-talkie from a lab bench. "Electricity off, now," he ordered the head of building security. "Whole goddamn building. Nothing goes back on until I personally walk this place room by room and know that every computer is turned off."

"Roger that."

The ceiling fixtures went dark, replaced within seconds by dim emergency lights. Glenn relaxed slightly. He had been promised that all the computers were off emergency circuits.

"Clear!" a doctor yelled. Dodd arched his back at the jolt from a defibrillator's two high-voltage paddles. The crash cart was battery powered, of course. "Clear!" The scene repeated with Brown and Beckwith. The medical bustle had quietly stopped around Tyler.

Pittman shuddered, but except for the twitching arm, he seemed functional. At least Ralph could talk and act: That was a good omen.

Glenn threaded a path through the crowded lab. He threw an arm around the quirky employee of whom he was suddenly inordinately proud. Never mind the eccentricities and baiting; loyalty to the mission was what mattered. "You did it, Ralph. You lured in the creature. We trapped it in the building, and then we killed it."

From the no longer frenetic pace around the agents, it was clear none of them had made it. With his free arm, Glenn gestured at the fallen. "They did not die in vain."

"You stupid, egotistical fool." Pittman shook off the sympathetic arm. "We didn't do jack shit. That thing is faster than you can possibly imagine. It had plenty of time, after you killed the gateway power, to reduce those brave, foolish men to mental hamburger. It was gone long before the end of the shutdown sequence.

"You might as well turn the friggin' lights back on."

The CIA doctor took no offense at Bev Greenwood's dismissal. He could always return with a sedative. It would be better if she first worked partway, no matter how little, through her grief.

As the doctor closed the door behind him, Doug and Cheryl looked at each other and at the weeping woman. They barely knew her. Neither knew what to say. First Cheryl, then Doug, sat beside her on the threadbare sofa of the borrowed office. Doug offered a hand to squeeze; Cheryl, a hankie. We're here, the gestures said. We just met, but we still feel some small measure of your pain. You are not alone.

Nothing they might have articulated would have been any better received.

The sobbing gradually slowed. The grip on Doug's hand eased. The woman even smiled ruefully at the sodden, cosmetic-smeared handkerchief in her hand. "I... I think I'd like to be alone for a while."

Doug followed Cheryl from the room, his left arm and shoulder twinging. Clearly he'd pulled a muscle supporting Bev on the way from the lab. Doug smiled encouragement he did not feel as he shut the teary-eyed woman into the inner office.

Cheryl had headed straight for a phone. He heard her asking softly if Carla could spend the night at her babysitting friend's house. "Not that kind of an evening, Barb," she answered an unheard, but obvious, question.

No, not that kind of an evening at all. Doug was about to suggest that he drop her off, sure that neither the CIA nor the forum planned any further activity tonight, when somewhere in the building screaming started.

Then all the lights went off.

Expressions around the conference table were grim. AJ's death had been bad enough, but everyone, to some degree, had rationalized it away. He had been exhausted, wracked with guilt, an academic unaccustomed to action.

What Ralph had just experienced permitted no such rationalization.

The thing on the network had effortlessly slain four experienced operatives. The novel cause of death—cyberpattems translated and transformed by NIT helmet, then written over formerly rich synaptic structures—was at once fascinating, nauseating, and unimportant.

As though enraged by the encounter, the creature had gone on another rampage. There were hundreds of disasters, of which the most visible was the spectacular crash of the Northwest regional power distribution system. Parts of four states and British Columbia would be without power for hours.

Ralph claimed the chair at the head of the conference table. Along both sides of the table, new agents studied him, seeking clues to whatever lay in wait. To avenge your buddies was an obligation of duty and honor. To dive into a nameless meat grinder was entirely different.

Across the table, Doug and Cheryl sat silently. Adams, wooden faced, sat next to Cheryl.

Ralph cleared his throat. The palsy in his arm had faded a bit, following treatment as though for a petit mal seizure. He took little comfort from the bland assurances of Agency physicians that he would probably recover normal function. Eventually. How the hell would they know? Any of them ever been brain-fucked by an electronic monster?

"The colonel"—Ralph nodded at his boss—"asked for a debrief. Don't expect to like it, although there is
one
valuable bit of data. I paid for it," and he flapped his injured arm, "so I hope it's helpful. There was some information crossover when it attacked. That thing is one of a kind as far as it knows. And no way will it ever replicate itself—it knows a clone will instantly be its deadliest enemy. AJ got that part right."

"Does this thing have any concept of geography?" Doug asked abruptly.

What an odd question, Ralph thought. "I don't have a clue." Or did he? "Not geography, exactly, I don't believe. Proximity, sort of. Why?"

"Explain about proximity," Doug persisted.

Ralph considered. "I sensed it knew the time spent moving between computers, that it preferred short hops to long ones." The creature
had
to understand routing tables, to get around the Internet. It wasn't terribly surprising that its understanding encompassed transmission delays.

"That preference is logical, given what we know of the thing's breeding." Doug's eyes narrowed in concentration. "Its ancestors for countless generations were the fastest through the mazes—otherwise they weren't chosen to reproduce. That's probably why it remained in densely networked North America long enough to get trapped, instead of jumping by satellite or undersea cable to, say, Asia or South America."

"Why?" Ralph tried again.

"Only thinking out loud, Ralph. You know me—I don't deal well with loose ends." Doug shrugged. "Sorry. I didn't mean to hijack the meeting. Go on."

After recapping the disastrous encounter, Ralph opened the session to discussion. The questions flew fast and furious, coming mostly from the presumptive second wave of attackers. He answered just as rapidly.

"With proper training, which the technicians will give you, yes, you acclimate quickly. In minutes, maybe less, you can start moving around the data plane. The folks who designed the helmets deserved better than they got." What they had gotten was brain-wiped, courtesy of viruses that were like baby bunnies compared to what Ralph had just barely escaped.

"I can't describe what the data plane 'looks' like. It may not have an appearance in any objective sense. Everything is so odd that your mind, abetted by your helmet, plays tricks on you. What truly scares me is how that subconscious editing must hide things, critical things, from view. We might have seen it faster if we'd been watching with unbiased 'eyes.' "

The agents hung on each word, more stoic the longer he spoke. Stoic? Fatalistic.

"Fast?" He laughed, and it wasn't a pleasant sound. "I can scarcely believe how fast that thing is. Still, you should know that
we,
people, are much quicker in there, too. More precisely, brain plus helmet is quicker. The neural net within the helmet is so adaptive, it automatically learns and takes over repetitive mental chores for you—and transistors run rings around our old-fashioned neurons. The problem is, you have to adapt to that speedup. You must retrain your reflexes. AJ's monster, on the other hand, evolved in there.

"I can no more describe its appearance than where it lives or how it strikes. I lack the words. Besides, as I said, your mind and helmet try to represent everything, no matter how foreign, as something familiar.

"For me, the creature was Cthulhu, that evil and unspeakable horror out of H. P. Lovecraft. If those stories hadn't made such an impression on me, maybe it would have looked different." Ralph closed his eyes, the memory somehow clearer to him by inner sight.

"Think of darkness not as the absence of light but as something palpable. Within the blackness, picture an obscenity of ever-changing, writhing limbs tipped with every manner of claw and fang and horn. Imagine standing helpless in the unblinking gaze of an utterly alien and all- penetrating sight.

"Can't do it?"

His eyes reopened without focusing. "God knows I'll spend the rest of my life trying to forget it."

The questions petered out.

It was clear to Doug that the coming mission was unlikely to kill AJ's monster, that it wasn't even a credible delaying action. In the awkward silence that ensued, CIA agents unenthusiastically studied the table and one another, each one contemplating throwing his life away for no better reason than
something must be done.

Still, as Ralph's narrative had unfolded, Doug found himself strangely excited. It was as though everything in his life had brought him to this singular crisis. The more disheartened the agents grew in their questioning, the surer Doug became. Every one of these men, he thought, is a trained killer. Any one of them could vanquish me in an instant. In
this
world. But what they cannot do, and
I
can, is stop this thing. Once and for all,
I
can stop it.
Me.

In the focus of the moment, Doug put completely from his mind the annoying tingle in his still-tender left shoulder. He cleared his throat for attention.

Everyone turned toward him, the agents doing so with undisguised relief.

"I'll accept that someone can learn to conceptualize the data plane in a few minutes." Unvoiced ire accompanied that acceptance. The neural-interface technology Doug had worked with required lengthy sessions of biofeedback training. CIA scientists had exploited
his
ideas to restart NIT research while everyone else—while
he
—awaited forum blessing of his protective techniques. All the while, Adams had been stringing him along, demanding higher and higher standards of proof before a public announcement of success. Stalling Doug and trying to divert him to altogether-unrelated projects. All the while, the CIA was free to spy using technology that the government publicly discredited.

Still... had the CIA not made these advances, the world would now be defenseless. Doug tamped down his anger. "That lets data-plane explorers look around, poke and prod, even move about. What I don't believe, Ralph—no offense to you—is that such limited exposure denotes expertise." Cheryl eyed Doug sharply. Did she suspect where he was going? He tried to not think of her. Of them.

He turned to an agent. "I can imagine hand-to-hand combat without having done it. Let's go beyond that and postulate that I've had a few days or even weeks of practice. How would I do up against you?"

Doug took the feral grin as a response. "Right. Roadkill." He let that sink in for a bit before continuing. "We need someone with extensive neural-interface experience."

"The damned viruses got ev—," Glenn Adams began. "No! Doug, you can't mean it," Cheryl cut in. "Your experience is with an arm. A neurally interfaced
arm.
You have no more experience in a helmet than Ralph had."

Or Ralph's four dead escorts. Five dead, counting AJ. Less practice than the CIA techs who all refused to go in. Doug reached for Cheryl's hand.

She jerked it away. "Don't do this. Don't be a hero. You'll wind up like AJ." Horror flooded her face. "Or Sheila Brunner."

Doug recalled
her
all too well: vacant eyes in an expressionless face, and a single compulsion endlessly looping through a ruined brain. His heart pounded.

He swallowed hard. "It's not the same." Was he telling himself or Cheryl?

"What I have, and no one else here, or anywhere, has, is years of practice with neural interfaces. I'm not just now learning to use them. Ask these guys," and Doug gestured at the watching agents, "if in the martial arts you think before each punch thrown or blow parried."

"Do you
really
want to do this, Doug?" Glenn asked.

Doug said, "No, I don't want to. I have to."

"Are you
sure?"
Glenn's eyes held something besides hope and respect, another emotion that Doug couldn't place. Then Glenn spoke again, and Doug placed it: guilt.

"I have a real problem sending in friends," Glenn said.

Yet Doug knew Glenn would do what he must and then live with the ghosts.

Doug looked around the table. The agents silently pleaded: If you have an edge, even the hint of one, help us. Adams did his best, which wasn't enough, to seem neutral. Ralph was drained, too weary even to express an opinion. No one spoke.