the Noise Within (2010) (12 page)

Fortunately, his own apartment was blissfully free of any problems, which saved him from one temptation in that direction, but a corner of his mind snagged on a familiar name: Cindra Broughton, a willowy young blonde with an apartment on the floor below who had warmed his bed on a regular basis for a while. They had parted on good terms and remained casual friends. Evidently she was having problems with the security system, her front door not always releasing and opening at the first time of asking. He bumped the issue up towards the top of the list from its former position near the bottom, for old times' sake.

To Philip, this reality was not something he experienced in any physical sense. There was no avatar or other analogy of self, nothing to centre awareness on and claim 'this is me.' It was more the case that anything he wanted to reach which stood within the computer's compass of being he could summon instantly before him, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he directed his awareness to them. It was as if he were already touching everywhere and everything, and merely focused attention on any given point. Since the computer governed all aspects of the building, what lay open to him were its residents, their apartments and
their
computers, which invariably communicated with the building systems for all manner of requirements on a daily basis. He could have taken it beyond the building but resisted the temptation, conscious of this system's limitations and wary of over-extending himself. Besides, there was plenty here to keep him occupied.

Of particular interest at the moment was a resident by the name of Pelloy McGovern, who had the type of security system built into his PC which a government department would have been proud of. Some people might have seen this as a warning to stay clear. To Philip, it was a challenge.

During recent visits he had familiarised himself with McGovern's defences. The first time he risked actually breaching them had been nerve-wracking as hell, though he knew it was all a question of perception. No matter how formidable these protective programs might be, they still permitted communication with the wider world, allowing information to flow to and fro across them and only coming into play when something was perceived as a threat or unfamiliar. All Philip had to do was ensure they saw him as an impulse they were configured to accept, so that they presented themselves as a porous mesh rather than an impenetrable wall.

Confident in his disguise, he had pushed his consciousness towards the barrier. He'd never tried breaching a system this sophisticated before, so remained alert for the unexpected.

As it turned out, he simply slipped on through without drawing any reaction at all.

Once inside, he discovered a wealth of encrypted information and locked files. On that first visit he had simply studied them, familiarising himself with the structure of McGovern's records as much as possible and deciding which files to target first. Now he returned, ready to take on the encryptions themselves and discover what secrets lay hidden behind them.

He couldn't have cared less what those secrets might be, it was the challenge that drew him, that and the thrill of doing something illicit and getting away with it. The problem was that he
had
been getting away with it, and was a sucker for the temptation to push the boundaries that little bit further. As a result, Philip had begun to think of himself as invulnerable; a trap he would never have fallen into in his professional life.

So when he began to unravel the code to a particularly tempting packet of information and the alarm went off, it caught him completely by surprise. There was no sound, it was more a sense of awakening around him, the realisation that something here had been alerted to his presence. Belatedly, Philip considered that maybe this time he'd pushed his luck too far. He immediately abandoned what he was doing and fled. Was it just imagination, or did the defences resist his departure far more than they had his arrival? If so, too little too late; as he successfully pulled his awareness free of McGovern's systems.

Yet it wasn't over. Something touched him; cold, implacable and deadly, and he knew that whatever this was, it was coming after him. A search program, a virtual hound tailor-made to seek and destroy, and doubtless one bristling with nasty surprises.

Philip had long ago learned to differentiate between taking a chance and being reckless. The first equalled excitement; the latter was more likely to prove either painful or expensive. His father probably had a maxim to cover this as well, but, if so, Kaufman junior had done his best to forget it.

He'd had the foresight to take a few precautions when first indulging in these night-time excursions, establishing and installing latent counter measures of his own. Now, as his consciousness fled for all it was worth along a predetermined route, he was more than grateful of them. Ghost programmes rose up at his back, presenting the hound with false seemings designed to confuse systems and cause delay - fractional, but that was all he needed. Next a myriad of misleading trails blossomed in his wake, so that his was suddenly one of hundreds of pathways that sprang from a single point, some of the others linked to genuine locations while many were complete fakes, leading nowhere and disappearing almost as soon as they were birthed. Behind him, his own trail was vanishing in much the same way, erased by his passage.

This was a desperate flight and one which Philip had never truly expected to make. He knew his safeguards were good, but he had a feeling so was the hound. Even so, as his consciousness returned fully to his physical body, he dared to hope that he might just have got away with it.

Philip sat up, gasping for breath and conscious of his pounding heart. He pulled the studs from his ears and ripped the mesh cage away from his head, dragging the blinders off his eyes in the process, before flinging the whole contraption down onto the floor. Philip Kaufman was rarely fazed but the past couple of days were proving eventful, to say the least; few things scared him, but what he had sensed pursuing him just then did.

"Phil, is there anything attempting to trace me?"

"Not as far as I can see."

"So the indications are..."

"... that you got away with it, yes."

Hardly a cast-iron guarantee, but better than nothing. No harm in double-checking, though. "Run a systems check. Any trace of intrusion, or of anything knocking on the door during the past five minutes, I want to know about it."

"Checking now. I'll get back to you."

While he waited for his partial's report, Philip reached for the applicator, a little dismayed at how much his hand shook. He took a few seconds to steady himself before jettisoning the spent red bulb and replacing it with a green one. He then lifted the applicator quickly to his neck and positioned it over the carotid artery before triggering, so that the addiction inhibitor was delivered to the brain as swiftly as possible. He sat there with eyes closed, waiting for the temptation to load another red ampoule to fade, while fearing, as ever, that this time it wouldn't, that the inhibitor would have no effect at all. Slowly the craving subsided, not disappearing entirely but at least reaching a point where it was manageable. He knew that from here it would soon slip away until he could pretend not to notice it at all.

When Phil did report back a few seconds later, it was to confirm the same thing as before: there was no sign of any continued pursuit. So why did Philip still feel so uneasy? Why did he have the nagging sense that perhaps he hadn't escaped as cleanly as he seemed to have done?

CHAPTER SIX

P
hilip tended to work from home most of the time, dropping into the office whenever a significant sim-run or other important event was scheduled - once or twice a week at most. But things were suddenly different. Life had acquired new zest and nothing could have kept him away from the office just then. Not for any rational, quantifiable reason. Had he bothered to sit back and analyse it, he could almost certainly have worked as effectively and achieved as much from the 'virtual' office at home as he could from the physical one across town, and saved the transit time to boot... but that would have meant missing out on so much. 'Job satisfaction,' Malcolm would have called it. All Philip knew was that he wanted to hang on to the previous day's buzz for as long as possible, and that could only be done if he were at the heart of things, able to feed from and also contribute to the collective energy and vibe rather than merely sip from its edges.

Besides, there were other reasons for going in. The latest variant of bastardised Syntheaven should be ready for testing later that day, and they had high hopes of this one. Then, too, there was a call he needed to make, one which would look far better coming from the office - presentation might not be everything, but it counted, and he wanted to avoid any suggestion that this was a casual or social call.

"Philip, good to see you."

"Hello, Geoffrey, thank you for sparing the time to talk to me."

Geoffrey Hamilton was more than a decade older than Philip, though you would never have known it to look at him. He possessed the sort of youthful vigour, not to mention the permanent yet subtle tan, which seemed reserved for politicians and other public performers. Philip had yet to catch him with a single strand of his sandy brown hair out of place, no matter what the hour. As reigning global president and a member of the wider star-spanning government, he was also nominally the single most powerful person on Homeworld, commercial interests aside.

"Not at all; always available for you, Philip."

Total bollocks and they both knew it. Though, as one of the man's principal supporters
and
head of Kaufman Industries, Philip knew he was pretty hard to ignore.

"How secure is this signal?" he asked.

The president smiled. "As secure as anything can be, or so my people assure me."

Philip had known as much but was keen to impress upon Hamilton a sense of gravitas. "Good. I'm going to send you through some images, with your permission." Or without it, for that matter.

"Go ahead. Care to tell me what I'll be looking at?"

"Sure.
The Noise Within
. We've discovered her identity," Philip said casually, as the familiar image materialised in the air before Hamilton.

"You have? About time someone made some progress on that front, but I wasn't expecting it to be you..."

The president's voice trailed off as the image began to rotate and shed attachments, in a repeat of the previous day's performance.

"What you're looking at is
The Sun Seeker
," Philip explained as soon as the display reached its conclusion, and before Hamilton could admit his ignorance by asking.

For a moment the older man looked blank, but then realisation seemed to dawn. He stared again at the image, then at Philip and back. "
The Sun Seeker
? That old wartime experiment? You mean this
Noise Within
business is all your friggin' fault?"

"Hardly," Philip assured him, prepared for such a reaction. "I wasn't even alive at the time and all Kaufman Industries were doing was carrying out a government commission, so if anything it's
your
friggin' fault, or rather your predecessors'." He knew the man well enough to talk to him like that, and had no qualms about doing so. He had always half-suspected that Hamilton appreciated such straight talking - something he was unlikely to hear from those around him, most of whose jobs depended on the president's goodwill.

Hamilton waved a dismissive hand. "We can apportion blame later. I'm more concerned with the here and now. Don't think I'm not grateful for your information, it's all very interesting, but how exactly is this going to help us stop the wretched thing?"

"Well, I could harp on about knowing your enemy being the first step to understanding him, and understanding him being the first step to defeating him..."

"But you're not going to."

"No. Because, you see, there's more..."

Philip sent across the second parcel of images. The stripped-down ship was replaced by a three-dimensional map showing a section of space. Within that map, shaded elliptical areas appeared, depicted in pale blue.

"These are the areas of space in which
The Sun Seeker's
test flights took place." Four red dots followed, each pulsing so the eye couldn't miss them. "These are the locations of the four attacks to date which have been credited to
The Noise Within
."

The four red dots all sat squarely within a blue-shaded section.

The president nodded. "So she's sticking to the areas she knows." He looked up towards Philip suddenly, accusingly. "How come no one else has spotted this before?"

"Because nobody else was looking. Why would you, unless you'd already made the connection with
The Sun Seeker
? But now that you
do
know, this should make the job of anticipating where she's going to strike next a hell of a lot easier."

The president stroked his chin before nodding again, very deliberately.

"There's something else."

"Not a 'but', I hope."

"No." Philip laughed in what he hoped was a reassuring manner. "Actually, it's a bit of good news for a change. Give me a month and I'll be able to deliver you a system which can take on
The Noise Within
at her own game."