State of War

32

Jay was bugged. He’d spent several hours ripping apart his code for that superhero scenario he’d written, the one that he’d used to locate the inflow of CyberNation money into the country, and he just couldn’t find anything wrong with it. Which was what he’d expected, of course, except that he still couldn’t explain that weird patch of fog he’d run into, and Jay didn’t like things he couldn’t explain — especially not in code he’d written himself.

The problem was, he was almost out of options. The only other thing he could think of to try, now that his software had checked out, was replacing some of his hardware. He kept duplicates of most items on hand — he couldn’t very well tell Alex Michaels that some bad guy had gotten away because his DVD drive had broken down. He also tried to keep up with upgrades in the industry, both because it was his job and because it was his passion, and usually ordered new models as soon as he heard about them. With some companies, ones he’d worked with for years and had a lot of confidence in, he had standing orders to ship at least one unit of everything they made.

And there were a few companies he helped out by serving as a beta tester, getting a chance to try out some items before they were even ready to hit the general market.

It always helped to stay ahead of the game, especially in this business.

He’d gotten a new reeker in the other day, an Intellisense 5400 olfactory presence generator, guaranteed accurate to within 500 PPM, and he wanted to try it out. This seemed as good a time — and as good a reason — as any.

He opened the box. The new reeker was a little slimmer than the one he had, a brushed-aluminum finish with tiny air intakes and little nozzles where the chem was mixed to make smells.

He smiled as he looked at it, all shiny and modern and new. His best guess was that almost all this hardware would be gone within five years, replaced by direct stimulation of the brain through induction. In the meantime, however, you used what was available.

Jay moved back to his computer, removed the old one from his VR rig, and plugged the new one in. Pulling on his gear, he toggled his hardware-room scenario.

Instantly, he was in a huge space, dimly illuminated by hundreds of readouts — old analog dials, LED projections, backlit LCDs, and various screens. Over in the corner, under a large blue-neon nose-shaped icon, a red light was flashing. A computerized voice sounded an alert.

“Warning. New hardware detected. Initializing virus hardware check. Warning. New hardware detected—”

Jay snapped his finger and the voice went silent. A few seconds later, the drivers for the new reeker loaded, and he was ready to calibrate.

A green light shone near the nose.

“Let’s try some… candy,” Jay called out.

A moment later he was in a old-fashioned candy store, filled with hundreds of huge glass jars of every kind of sweet, tooth-rotting treat imaginable. He went to a container of fat red-and-white-striped peppermints and lifted the lid. The distinct smell of mint blossomed as he inhaled. Ah. Nice.

He took a deeper breath and was pleased to note an increase in the odor’s intensity.

Must have an airflow rate sensor.

He tried several other pleasant-smelling jars, noting each time that the scent was as close to the real thing as he could recall.

After five minutes or so he decided it was time to try some other olfactories.

“Outdoors, swamp,” he said.

He stood in a swamp, looking out at cypress trees thick with Spanish moss. The trees weren’t as well rendered as they could have been — he would have done better if he’d written the calibration proj — but he was here for the smells, not the visuals.

The air had just the right combination of suffocating murkiness he remembered from his one trip to a real swamp. Jay was pretty much a VR guy, not much RW, but a VR programmers’ convention he’d attended in New Orleans back in the early days of VR had included a tour of the surrounding bayous as part of the “get it right, make it real,” theme of VR work. He’d been bitten probably ten or twenty times by mosquitoes while he’d sniffed, touched, and looked around the swamp, and had contemplated briefly going into another less nature-based life of coding.

But no. VR was the way — using human senses to interpret digital data. It worked with what nature had given man and extended it. Jay had always wanted to be at the cutting edge of things, and VR was it. So he’d put on anti-itch cream and gone back to the convention, and every time since he’d taken whatever tour was available for wherever that year’s meeting was.

He inhaled slightly and got a hint of woodsmoke. A thin breeze wafted against his face, and the smell intensified.

Nice. Good resolution on this hardware.

“Clear scenario, reload Pulp Hero.”

The scene flickered for a second, and suddenly he was at the New Jersey docks again, dressed as he had been when he’d traced CyberNation’s payment to the clerk when it had entered the U.S.

Let’s see — he’d been over there…

Jay moved across the rooftop, the cold wind blowing against him as he headed for the vantage point where he’d had the stinky fog glitch.

Got some soap for you, you dirty little glitch.

SOAP was an acronym one of his college professors had been fond of using. The man had repeated it so often it was just about the only thing Jay could recall about him. Old Doc Soap. The word’s letters stood for the steps taken while troubleshooting: Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan. Jay had found out later that his teacher had borrowed the method from the health profession, where it was used to assess a patient’s state of mind, but it served equally well in the tricky business of finding soft- and hardware bugs.

Subjective. What had happened? He’d been standing here, and a few tendrils of fog had drifted past. He’d reached out to touch them, and he’d been able to feel them, which wasn’t supposed to happen. Then he’d smelled something that made him think of a sewer. Bad feel, bad smell, not supposed to be there.

Okay, so much for the subjective. Objective: He’d done a full check of drivers after the VR run and everything had been up to par. He’d also just finished checking out his own code and knew for sure that the problem wasn’t his fault. The properties of the fog object had not been set to stink, at least not in that particular way.

Assessment time. It wasn’t the drivers, it wasn’t the software, but there had definitely been a problem. So try a new reeker, which rolled him right into Plan.

Here we go.

A thin tendril of fog rolled past, and as he had before, Jay reached out to touch it. This time there was no sensation other than a slight coolness on his fingers. The fog smelled a little like the ocean. Perfect.

So it had been the reeker after all. Another problem solved.

He snapped out of VR and disconnected his gear, and then decided that as long as he was working on his system, he might as well load another little item he’d gotten in the mail recently. This one was a small package sent to him by Cyrus Blackwell, a sensory artist and one of the best.

Cyrus took real-world scenery and collected it into VR: odors, tastes, visuals, feelies — everything. While it was true that Jay worked hard to get every detail right for his VR scenes, it helped sometimes to have the legwork done for him. He’d had Blackwell do a custom set of scans on a series of bank vaults for a robbery scenario he’d been planning.

Jay took the data cubes out of their media protectors and jacked them into the computer terminal he was using. He put his VR rig on again and went to a blank workspace.

This was supposed to be an analog for his next firewall breach, a huge bank that he was going to “rob.”

He called up the directory, and large red letters appeared in front of him. He scrolled them up until he saw what he wanted.

Interiors.

An info blurb explained that the vaults and bank interiors were taken from several large metropolitan areas in both the U.S. and Europe. He reached forward and pulled out the VR thumbnails, tiny models that were slightly translucent so he could see inside of them.

There was one with gorgeous neoclassic columns on the exterior, and high-vaulted ceilings within. Jay threw it on the blank space in front of him and activated it. The tiny model grew rapidly in size, translucent walls giving way to RW textures, and Jay enjoyed the perceptual shift that made it seem as though he was getting smaller.

Suddenly he was inside of the bank. He could hear an air conditioner running, and there was a clean but not overpowering scent to the place. The ceilings were high, like something from a movie set, and a long row of teller cages stretched from one side of the large room to the other.

Perfect.

Jay scrolled through the building, working his way to the vault. There was a set of stairs leading down to an underground chamber with a barred door in front of it.

No — I want something bigger.

Jay brought up a list of individual items and scanned for vault doors. He popped out several that looked promising before he found one that he liked. It was a huge circle, maybe a foot or two thick at the center, with huge gears that had to be thrown by a large wheel before it would operate. The door was shiny chrome steel, an ultramodern crimestopper that had just the look he wanted.

He grafted it onto the opening in the bank cellar and saved the file. He had the basic form now; he would work on some of the functional elements later.

Michaels decided to skip lunch and hit the gym instead. He’d been indulging in snacks a little more than he should have lately. He had found that he tended to eat when he got tense, and had decided that being unhappy wasn’t as bad in his mind as being fat and unhappy.

As he changed into a pair of baggy cotton shorts and a T-shirt, he thought about his morning. It wasn’t as if the lawsuit was the only thing on his plate, but every time Michaels saw another cart stacked high with papers go by, it reminded him that it was a pretty big chunk of it.

He hadn’t gotten into federal law enforcement to spend his time playing games with lawyers. It was a waste of time and energy, and he was finding it increasingly frustrating.

Back in the early G-men days, the bad guys had taken their lumps when they’d been caught, gone off to prison, and done their time. It would never have occurred to them to sue the cops who’d caught them doing wrong. Definitely a better class of criminal in the old days; guys who knew what they were.

He shut the locker door, spun the combination lock, and grabbed his towel. Toni was coming in at noon. John Howard’s boy had been watching Alex half-days, and that seemed to be working out okay. Guru was supposed to be back soon — her great-grandson had gotten worse, then better, then worse again, and as of this morning was still in the hospital. Apparently the doctors were worried about some kind of secondary infection, maybe a virus. The worry was that it was one of those things that mice carried.

As he padded out onto the workout mats, Michaels wondered for the hundredth time if maybe it wasn’t time to get out of this business. He had gone about as far as he could, he figured — farther than he’d ever expected, to be honest. He had, on a couple of occasions, even briefed the President himself — pretty high circles, admittedly, but his chances of moving any higher in the federal system were very slim. The director of the FBI was a political appointee, as was the CIA’s head. NSA usually had a working agent or military officer running the show, but you had to come up through that system to get a shot at it. Alex Michaels didn’t have any clout to offer anybody for putting him in charge of a bigger agency. And in truth, he really didn’t want the headaches that came with that kind of job; this one was bad enough.

Besides, Alex had never worried much about promotions. He hadn’t taken this job in the first place because of what he himself could get out of it. He had taken it because Steve Day asked him, and because he felt he could make a difference.

These days, watching the carts of paper go by, feeling the pressure from Mitchell Ames, he felt that all he was doing was marking time.

He began stretching, working his legs, watching himself in the mirror. There was a handful of people around the place exercising instead of eating, though most of them looked to be pretty fit.

Did he even want to stay in Washington? Yes, this was an important job, even if it didn’t always seem like it, and somebody had to do it. And, he had to admit, he was pretty good at the job, but there was so much about the work that he didn’t like. The politics. The groveling for appropriations. Things like this lawsuit, which called into question almost everything he had done during his entire term as commander.

Who needed it? All it did was stress him. When he’d been alone, he could deal with it all right. He was remarried now, though, with a young son, and there were things in life that seemed a lot more important than lying awake at night worrying about a lawsuit without merit.

He shook his head. He still couldn’t understand how this lawsuit could have ever gotten this far. How in the world could anybody feel sorry for a murderous thug who’d been shooting at his men? How could that thug getting shot in return be worth a lawsuit, be worth all the cost and all the waste?

Probably some jury would give his widow ten million dollars. Where was the justice in that?

Alex could get other work. He knew that. He’d been offered good jobs, making more money and doing a lot less to earn it, in places where you could hear yourself think, too. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a house in the country somewhere, trees, fresh air, a home for his son to grow up among normal people? Wouldn’t it be great not to be at the mercy of congressional whim, to not have to sit in front of a committee while some bozo from Wide Patch, Ohio, who didn’t have two IQ points to rub together, asked questions that a third grader should know the answers to?

Yeah, that sounded pretty good. Kind of like a dream.

Of course, he had to think about Toni, what she wanted. Was she ready to bail from the biz, go off to some rural spot, sit home and make cookies or spend her time at PTA meetings? She could work, too, of course, the net gave a lot of freedom in that way. She could probably even work at whatever company hired him, if she wanted. But he’d have to discuss it with her before he started gathering himself to jump, find out what she really felt like.

Toni had told him, during those times when things got really bad and he found himself complaining about work, that she would go wherever he wanted. All he had to do was point at a place and she’d go looking for a house. But that had been him just venting steam, and her saying what he needed to hear at that moment. Would she still feel that way if it was real?

He sat on the mat, stretched his legs out in front of him, and bent to grab his feet, working his hamstrings and calves. Maybe it was time to move on. He really needed to think about it.