Springboard

25

Wu was not a man given to rash action. He had never been one to just leap off a cliff in the hope that the river below was deep enough to keep him from breaking a leg. No, Wu was the kind of man who climbed down the escarpment, waded into the water with a long pole, probed to find the exact depth, marked the spot, and judged whether or not he could hit that precise place when he jumped. If he could not, he stayed on the cliff.

And yet, here he was, lying on Mayli’s bed as she finished her shower, enjoying the fragrance of sandalwood incense and the memory of their recent actions, considering telling her things that a careful man would never reveal.

Why was that? What has happened to you, Wu, that you would even dream of taking this road?

Well, Mayli was more than passing adept as a lover. She already knew what Shing was up to, of course. That was part of her job, to get Shing talking about anything and everything. That and keeping an eye on him, and keeping him happy.

But she had also been probing, albeit subtly so, to find out what Locke was up to, and even carefully working Wu himself. Nothing blatant, nothing slap-your-face obvious, but it was apparent. She wanted to know what was really going on.

He could keep her in the dark. Take her along and continue to enjoy her company without ever filling in the blanks. But she was a smart woman, and eventually, she might figure things out, and then she’d be dangerous. He might have to… take care of her, and that would be such a waste. She was the best Wu had ever been with when it got right down to it.

But: The thought of not seeing her again, of her being married to that smug idiot Shing had, oddly, become… repellent. Why should Shing have such a delicious treasure? Why should that narrow and shallow lout be polishing Mayli’s pearl, when Wu was a man much better able to appreciate her in all her dimensions?

He was not a man to delude himself — love was not a factor here, nor did he want it to be. But he knew exactly what she was. She was a trophy woman worthy of a great man. With her close at hand, she could be valuable in so many ways — not just as a lover, but as an ally he could rely upon — as long as their interest lay in the same direction, of course.

A man wanted a mate who not only would help him, but who could help him. Mayli was nothing if not wise in the ways of men.

As rich as he was going to be, she would prefer his company to that of the callow computer-nerd Shing. Yes, Wu was older, but he was fit, adept, and a woman like Mayli would always be drawn to such as himself. He could buy her houses, cars, yachts, cover her in precious gems, give her anything her heart might desire. And if she wished a lover on the side? What did that hurt? She would be happy, and it would not detract from their time together.

Did he not deserve a way to relax, to keep the tensions at bay? It was a small thing against the totality of what lay ahead. Great men had burdens, but they were not bound by the same constraints as the ordinary.

But — Mayli was far too clever a woman to stand by blissfully ignorant. She would wonder, and if she was going to be more than a bedmate, he needed for her to understand why he wanted her. How important he must think she was to tell her.

And in truth, Wu wanted to tell somebody. No one knew the full details of his plans, not even Locke, who knew some, but not all.

If it all came off the way Wu planned, it would be a thing of major importance, and the secret was Wu’s alone. There would be more than a little satisfaction in telling somebody, in putting them in awe of his genius. She would certainly be impressed. She was worldly enough to appreciate the magnitude of it.

Was it a foolish leap into unknown waters? Wu thought he had a pretty good idea of Mayli’s basic character. She was, like him, pragmatic. She served her own interests first, doing whatever was necessary to obtain her own desires. She was skilled. And, of course, she was beautiful, smart, and ambitious. If she knew what Wu knew, who on earth would be a better match?

Betraying him would gain her nothing, and linking with him, the possibility of the world at her feet? A shrewd woman would look at her choices, realize there was little risk, and go with the flow. Mayli was not a Taoist per se, but she was smart enough not to try to swim against the current of a huge river.

The shower cut off — it had been a selling point when Wu had rented this apartment, the water’s pressure was great, and a long, hot, needle spray possible. A cloud of vapor wafted from the bathroom as Mayli slid the shower’s curtain open and stepped out. She stood framed in the doorway, slick and gorgeous, and turned to smile at him as she reached for a towel. She knew she was beautiful, and she knew men liked looking at her.

Wu felt his interest stirring as he watched her dry off.

She glanced at him. “Ah,” she said. “It appears I may have to shower again.”

He smiled. “It is possible,” he said. “Come here and let us see if that is the case.”

They could always talk later, he thought.

Tell her? Or kill her? It might come to that. Which would it be?

The Dyson sphere had come up empty. It was discouraging, but Jay wasn’t going to lie down and die, so he shifted his search.

First, he sneaked into one of the black-ops systems nobody was supposed to know about — but, of course, Jay Gridley wasn’t just anybody. He had heard they had a very nasty program running that kept track of all kinds of e-mail it wasn’t supposed to keep track of, and this was his first chance to take a look at it. You never knew but that some idiot might think he was secure when he wasn’t and say something stupid, like, “Hey, didja see how I screwed up the military’s VR war games?”

Jay didn’t really believe his prey could possibly be that foolish, but stranger things had happened. People said things when they didn’t know they were being watched that they would never say if they thought somebody was peeking over their shoulder.

He went in, popped the firewall and encrypted password open, and looked around. He didn’t see anything useful. He left. This was a top-level system, supposedly bullet-proof, but that was a joke against a man of Jay’s caliber.

He smiled at the metaphor.

Then it was back to CyberNation. Maybe something new there.

Jay stared at the hole in the fence, a small, irregular-shaped blank space in one of the planks making up the stockade wall in the small abandoned mining town. This was where players came to pan for gold, and the idea was that the local streams and rivers had played out, but that there was still at least one bonanza claim waiting to be found here, one missed by earlier panners.

Something was not right about that hole in the wall.

Of course a lot of things seemed odd here. Little things — the details in the programming, the quality of sensory input. It wasn’t bad — most people wouldn’t ever notice it — but most people weren’t Jay Gridley. However, as Jay was a guest, he had to stick fairly close to their existing VR scenario.

Another attack had hit CyberNation recently, this time an on-line SCA enclave. The SCA was the Society for Creative Anachronism, a group that enjoyed harking back to the good old days, and pretending that they were knights and ladies in medieval times. In the RW, they spent much time cooking authentic foods and beating the daylights out of each other with padded swords and sticks.

In VR, their battles and lifestyles could go farther, including interaction with elves, unicorns, and other creatures from myth. Which meant that when the combined elf/unicorn attack had come, it had completely shocked the SCA members. Particularly when the avatars used by the hackers had proceeded to perform acts with each other that pretty much negated the whole had-to-be-a-virgin-to-ride-a-unicorn thing.

The attack had then escalated into violence as the attackers engaged some of the SCA members in combat, proving yet again that in video games the computer always wins.

Apparently it hadn’t all been bad, however. Although the peaceful elf-loving contingent had pulled out of VR in shock, the more physical SCA warrior-types had actually expanded its membership.

Jay had backtracked the troop of attackers to this small hole. They had apparently entered the CyberNation system here, and then taken what resources they needed to expand their numbers before the attack.

But there was really something wrong with that hole.

He tabbed his visual input control and instantly he was in full Raptorvision. He ran his new glasses at low rez most of the time, because at high rez he found he sometimes had to reinterpret details that seemed too blocky or fuzzy when sharpened. Which meant that going to high rez was kind of like putting on X-ray glasses. Kind of.

The scene before him shifted. He could still see the hole, only now there were faint gridlike lines around it.

A patch!

Someone had hidden the network details on the incursion space.

Jay extended his forefinger and a small probe shot out. He slid it around the now visible hairline crack surrounding the hole, separating the code that wrote the patch from the VR code that made the hole.

The patch slid off into his hand, and Jay popped it into the satchel strapped over his shoulder, a small VR analyzer.

This could be good news — he hadn’t found anything like this before. If this virus had been programmed to cover its tracks, there might be something interesting about this access node that would give him more information about how it worked.

The analyzer chimed and a code window opened up at eye level. He scanned it and frowned.

It was a patch designed to conceal part of their network interface. He’d been given access to their system, all right — but they hadn’t wanted him to see everything, so they’d tried to cut off from the bits they didn’t want him to know about.

What, did they think he was that stupid? Didn’t they have a clue who they were dealing with here?

He scanned the woods nearby. If you knew where and how to look, it wasn’t that hard to find…

There it was — a programming back door, concealed as an old tree stump. Easy to hide if you weren’t looking for it, because it was an integral part of the environment, not anything added, like the hole.

Well, he’d pop the lock on it, and show these CyberNation jerks what a real VR coder could do. Once he was in there, he’d give himself all kinds of access—

Ping! Ping! Pingpingpingpingpingpingpingping!

Something had gotten caught in Jay’s snare. Ah.

His anger forgotten for the moment, Jay ran back the way he had come. As he had traversed the woods, backtracking the attack, he’d laid traps for code remnants that might still be around. It happened sometimes. A virus mutated and didn’t reach full functionality, left a bit of itself running around in the bushes, as it were.

It was one thing to see the traces of where an attack had come from, but to see a still-working example was far better.

He jumped a small creek, running hard, bare feet lightly treading the earth, long black braids flying behind him. He reached down and drew the tomahawk from his belt.

Just because he was in a medieval forest didn’t mean he had to be medieval. He was Jay Gridley, last of the Mohicans. Or at least, last of the movie version of them…

There.

Up ahead he saw a large fox in the trap he’d left. It moved strangely for a fox, examining the trap, as if trying to figure out how it worked.

As he watched, it looked up and saw him coming.

It opened its delicate fox jaws and then huge teeth sprouted, like in some werewolf or vampire movie, huge, metal teeth. Its mouth opened impossibly wide and it lunged for its own leg, caught in the trap.

No way, pal—!

Jay threw the tomahawk, a hard overhand toss, and watched it twirl end over end toward the fox. The hickory handle smacked into the side of the fox’s head; it yelped and fell over, stunned.

Now, that’s what I’m talking about: Jay Gridley has come into the forest, booyah!

He pushed a button on the satchel and it expanded. Quickly, before it could recover, he slid the fox, trap and all, into the analyzer.

A few seconds later a chime sounded, announcing that the virus had been analyzed.

Before he’d come to CyberNation, he’d uploaded the latest virus encyclopedia from the Center for Virus Research in Beaverton, Oregon. A special tri-split screen appeared showing him in the first pane the code for the virus, broken down into segments. In the second window was a representation of an insect. The insect metaphor had become the de-facto ideogrammatic standard for depicting viruses; various parts of the insect were colored to highlight the separate codes making them up, and the body parts always represented similar abilities. The legs showed its ability to spread; pincers or mandibles its ability to attack; the overall size could indicate ease of detection, and so on.

The CyberNation virus looked like no real insect Jay had ever seen, nor would he want to. It had large wings, indicating speed, and a huge stinger plus pincers. The venom reservoir was split, indicating that it could sting for several functions — to paralyze, and replicate.

Nice.

But the third pane of the split screen was what he was most interested in. The CVR had spent years tracking down viruses to their origin countries and, when they were lucky, to their earliest programmers. Since most computer attacks were based on similar methods, there was a synergistic effect to coding, where a hacker might steal an idea from another, or be inspired to create something new.

It looked as if this virus had been developed from code that had origins in Europe, with pieces of USA ancestry.

Jay tabbed a control and called up the reconstruction of the virus that had attacked the military network. Since they hadn’t caught it in its entirety, it was more of an identikit version, based on its effects. He compared the two.

They were similar. It was the delivery system that seemed to be the same — the speed, along with the venom replication. The military bug had some of the same code, but there were South American influences as well.

Interestingly, there were no influences at all from what could be called Asiatic countries. No Japan, no Taiwan, and no China.

Which by itself meant nothing, but combined with his earlier clue about China, it reminded him of his second favorite Sherlock Holmes adage. The one about the dog not barking in the night.

There were no Chinese dogs barking here.

And somehow, Jay knew that was a clue. No logic or reason to the knowledge, but a certainty nonetheless.

Which brought back a fleeting memory of an old movie farce about a superagent in the 1960’s, Derek Flint. In one of the funniest scenes in that picture, Flint walks down a hall past a couple of military guards. Suddenly Flint attacks the guards, uses his martial arts abilities to take them out, then picks up a fallen weapon and cooks them. When the head of the agency runs up behind Flint and whacks him, thinking he’s gone mad, Flint explains why he did it. They were imposters. What gave them away was, they were wearing Battle of the Bulge ribbons. Cramden, the agency head, says, “There aren’t any Battle of the Bulge ribbons.”

“Exactly,” Flint says…

If it took the rest of his life, Jay was going to get this guy. You could take that to the bank.

But it wasn’t going to happen today. He logged out.