This Alien Shore (50 page)

He had spent the last E-week tracking the virus himself. Gaza's preparatory work had been excellent, of course, providing samples of every generation of the damned virus—every generation they knew about, anyway—but after a day of working with his figures, Masada had realized that he needed more data than Gaza had thought to provide. Perhaps on an intuitive level he'd sensed the numbers were all wrong, and gone to search for the right ones.

He'd designed sieve programs and sent them out to all the nodes, a repetitive and exhausting job, especially since he couldn't deal with the outernet directly. He'd sent out sniffers of his own, keyed to Lucifer's memory storage sequences. And then he'd waited, studying the most recent and deadly mutations while his programs scoured the outernet for spores of the elusive virus.

And there weren't enough of them. There just weren't.

He knew how many times Lucifer had replicated to date, give or take a generation. He knew what the parameters of that replication were. He knew—
knew!
—the numerical range that should define its current population. And that number was off from the real thing, by a good factor of ten.

Those extra spores were somewhere, he was certain of it. But where? And—more important—why weren't they still cruising the outernet, doing their destructive duty?

When his tea was done and his wellseeker was satisfied that no more caloric input was immediately forthcoming, he walked slowly back to the triple-locked workstation, running the numbers through his mind. Most programmers would have said he was crazy for focusing on a numerical discrepancy like this. Gaza wouldn't. Gaza's mind was like his own, ordered and precise, and like Masada he had utter certainty in his work. When Masada told Gaza that his projected numbers didn't match reality, the man hadn't asked—as Hsing might have—whether Masada had perhaps erred in his own calculations. He had simply said “What do you need?” and, when told that, provided it.

It was good to work for a man who didn't doubt him every step of the way. Even in the Guild, that was a rare pleasure. Gaza seemed to have utter confidence that he would beat this thing. He wished he shared it.

Be confident,
Masada. The answer is out there. You just have to figure out how to find it.

Frustrated by the failure of all his other search methods, he had finally sent out special versions of the virus to all the major nodes, with homing patterns woven into their substance. It was a dangerous move—anything that released more copies of Lucifer into the outernet was dangerous, no matter how much care you took to see that your versions could neither harm people nor reproduce—but it had to be done. All other methods had failed thus far, and every hour in which he failed to bring Lucifer under control, it was spawning new and deadlier spores. Any day now it might evolve into a form that would attack civilians, and then ... well, in Gaza's words, all hell would break loose.

Actually, hell would break loose the day the press got wind of this. Masada was amazed that hadn't happened yet. But then, why should it? Lucifer's creator would have gone to great lengths to assure that his program would remain a secret. No one in the Guild could possibly benefit from the matter being made public. So it hadn't made the newsies ... yet.

One small thing to be thankful for.

He wondered if Lucifer's creator knew that the Guild was searching for him. No doubt he would assume it; any sane programmer would. And he would have taken precautions, setting programs in motion to mislead the Guild, to confuse them ... well, thus far they had all worked. If Masada was going to track this damned thing to its source, he was going to have to think of some angle Lucifer's creator hadn't thought of, some element of data he hadn't thought to disguise.

Like the numbers?

He brought up the screen again, hating its limitations, and watched the cold code scroll across it in response to his mental commands. Every time he thought he had a handle on what made Lucifer tick, another mutation would surprise him. He understood now why Gaza was so tense about the thing, and that tension was infectious.

He sent out a request to the Guild's data node to collect anything which had arrived with his special icon embedded in it, and deliver it to him. It was frustrating having to deal with such a system, but necessary. Direct contact with the outernet would mean that if Lucifer's designer realized he was being hunted, he could ride Masada's signal right back up the line to Masada's own head. You couldn't take a chance like that, not with a programmer of such obvious skill and malevolence. This way, if Masada's tracking programs were detected, the most anyone could learn from them was that they were being collected by a processor somewhere on Tiananmen Station. That was a far different thing than having some hacker in his head, real-time.

The data began to come in. Sieve figures from Hellsgate, Reijik, Salvation. All wrong. Still. Then some private mail from various Guild officers whom he had queried, mostly amounting to some diplomatic version of “I don't know.” It amazed him that people so dependent on the outernet could be so ignorant of its workings. Guildmaster Delhi had invited him out to her station if he felt that would help him in his research, as had Varsav. Kent had not yet responded to his query on outpilot conditioning. There was a sealed packet, neatly bundled, which he opened with an icon—

And there it was.

He stopped breathing for a minute. His own code. His homing program, come back to roost. He drew in a deep breath, then flashed it the command to transfer to his screen, where he could see its message unfold.

He had prepared several thousand truncated versions of the virus, too weak to do any damage, and had added to their substance a sequence which would report back to him if it was interfered with. Any collection program which was gathering up random spores would have triggered such action, sending back a signal to Tiananmen that in this place, and at this time, a spore of Lucifer had been yanked from the outernet.

And it had worked.

He wondered if he should report it to Gaza yet, or wait until he knew more. It could be mere coincidence, after all. Perhaps some antibody program had simply been scouring the outernet for viruses, and had caught his. Or his “Lucifer-X” had accidentally wandered into some system where security programs inspected all foreign material, and had gotten trapped.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps the enemy was out there, even now.

He felt a rush of elation in his soul, a flood of chemicals in his brain such as other humans might know in a moment of love, or perhaps religious insight. It was a rare experience in iru psychology, that left him dazed for a good minute or two. Then, with meticulous care, he reeled in the precious code, and began to dissect the message that it carried.

Something had grabbed hold of his spy-spore, all right. Its response had been immediate, triggering the signal to Masada before any real analysis of the threat could be completed. That was all right. What mattered was that now he had a way of tracing exactly where a spore had disappeared, and could search for the program that had intercepted it.

He called up a locator program and fed it the information that his spore had gathered. A good second passed while it consulted its files, which seemed like eternity.

Then the words appeared before him.

SOURCE NODE: SALVATION

SOURCE STATION: AIRES

SOURCE SYSTEM: NORTHSTAR HOTELS, INC.

SUBSYSTEM: RESERVATIONS

He stared at the words in silence for a minute. A hotel chain? Perhaps a
nantana
could have made sense of such information, armed with the proper instinct for such things. He couldn't. Fortunately, it wasn't his job to. Once he confirmed that spores were disappearing into the bowels of Northstar's computers, and he could hand over the data to Gaza in a nice ordered packet, the Guild could sort through questions of motive and means until the next step of this search was defined for him. That was their job, for which the gift of Hausman had prepared their brains.

A hotel chain?

He wanted to track it himself.

For a long moment he sat before the silent machine, studying that thought in his head. What had prompted it? Pride? Curiosity? Or even ... boredom? Too many days spent staring at a screen, instead of interacting with the wealth of data that was out there?

Going after the trail of this thing meant hooking up to the outernet, plain and simple. It couldn't be done any other way. It meant letting the touch of that vast beast into his head, that living thing so unlike other living things that no man truly understood it. Tides of data no man could control. Hungers and diseases and tensions and conflict—

He shut down the screen and turned away from it, eyes shut. His hands were shaking. Data still filled his field of vision until he shut that down, too. Then there was only darkness.

It was only data. He had given it other names, he had called it
alive
in the hopes of understanding it, and he had used the language of life to help others learn how to program for it. That didn't mean it was really alive. What did he think that it was going to do if he connected to it, eat him?

Silently, without further thought on the matter, he rose up from his seat and stretched. A ritual stretch, allowing him to concentrate on each muscle rather than the thoughts that might otherwise be in his head. Sometimes he could shut down like that, sometimes when he was very tired ... or afraid.

It was only data. Right?

S
he came to him in his dream, just as he remembered her. Dressed in blue, as always. Perfectly coifed sleek black hair. Meticulously groomed, as always.

He watched her as she played the keyboard for a while, aware that she was dead, strangely undisturbed by it. She was playing a Bach fugue, and for a while he lost himself in the overlapping cascades of melody. Data. It was all data. All the world was data, codes and patterns rearranged into a thousand different forms. Even living flesh broke down to the same simple codes, if you looked deep enough.

He heard the rustling of her dress before he saw her move. He looked up and saw her dark eyes fixed on him, strangely soft.

“And love?” she asked him. “What is love?”

He smiled faintly. “Data of the heart.”

“And hunger?”

Such wonderful eyes. He would never forget them. “Data of the soul.”

“And fear?”

He had no answer.

She kissed him on the tip of his nose then and, even as she did so, began to dissolve. Pink lips fragmenting into fractal patterns of light and dark, skin breaking down into an array of chemical symbols, dark eyes giving way to a glittering display of retinal sparks.

And fear?

H
e couldn't do it in his lab, of course. That room had been designed without net access deliberately, to avoid any chance of accidents. Instead he would have to do it—where? All spaces on Tiananmen were equally unfamiliar. It generally took months for his iru soul to settle into a new environment, and here he had barely had an E-week. No place would be comfortable, it was as simple as that. There was simply the choice to be made between doing it around people or not, and nothing else mattered.