Memories End (8 page)

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Felix said.

The technician eyed him with suspicion. “You were gone before we even reached InfoWorld. I saw you flicking the joystick back and forth.”

“That was just nervous twitching,” Felix said. “I have a fear of flying.”

“Our pilot is one of the best in the business,” Dak said quickly. “He claims that he had you one minute and that the next minute you were gone. Exactly where did you go, Mr. McTurk?”

Felix crossed his arms, as much in defense as to get control of himself. “You're the experts. You tell me.

Dak adopted a conciliatory smile. “Please don't get us wrong, Mr. McTurk. We're not suggesting it was your fault…”

Felix pretended to be miffed. “I certainly hope not.”

Straightening her glistening smile, she said, “Inform Network Security.”

Harwood Strange twisted the top from a bottle of flat room-temperature soda, poured three glasses, and carried the drinks into the front room of the apartment, where Tech and Marz were still puzzling over the coded information Mystery Notes had conjured from the minidisk. Strange had been dismayed to learn how easy it had been for the brothers to locate him and had insisted on knowing everything about Felix, Data Discoveries, and the illegal run into the EPA.

“So Cyrus didn't show up until
after
you had launched Subterfuge,” Strange said.

Tech set aside the tasteless soda. “If you're talking about the gremlin, then, yeah, it didn't appear until after we unzipped Subterfuge.”

“Well, of course, I mean the gremlin,” Strange said, laughing. He lowered his tall frame into an old armchair, atop which were perched two calicos
and a tabby, all three of them purring up a storm. “Cyrus and the gremlin are obviously one and the same.”

Tech frowned. “How is it that obvious? Cyrus is a person. And what I saw was a gremlin.”

“Perhaps the gremlin you saw was merely Cyrus's cybercraft.” Strange sat back, eyes half closed, hands placed together like he was praying. “Or perhaps Cyrus dispatched the gremlin as his messenger from wherever he is in hiding.”

Tech and Marz traded excited glances and leaned forward, eager to hear more.

Strange picked up one of his cats and held it close to his face, where he could look it squarely in the eye. “Do you think these two boys can be trusted with such information, Reaper?” he asked the creature. When the cat let out a long
meow
of either affection or protest, Strange placed it gently on the floor and regarded Tech with a serious expression. “You're in luck. Reaper believes that you can be trusted, and I have implicit faith in Reaper's judgment.”

Tech rolled his eyes. “Whatever. I'm just curious how you knew Cyrus.”

“Ah, you see. You and Reaper have something in common.”

“Curiosity,” Marz said, clearly caught up in the spirit of Strange's mind games.

“Precisely,” Strange said. He paused, then added, “Cyrus first contacted me about twelve years ago. My user name at the time was m-s-t-r-n-t-s—as you've guessed, a kind of vanity tag for Mystery Notes.”

“Cool, man.” Marz nodded his head.

“Marz is all over your DVD,” Tech said, reining in an amused smile.

Strange tilted his head to one side to regard him. “Not your style, eh? You prefer synthesizers to guitars, just as you probably prefer computer-generated characters to live actors.”

“Yeah, so?”

“No matter,” Strange said, waving his long-fingered hand. “You came to me to learn about Cyrus not about music.”

“When you say Cyrus contacted you, you mean he made e-contact?” Marz asked.

“Yes—exclusively so.”

“Then you two never met in person,” Tech surmised.

Strange shook his head and took a sip of soda. “I was working in North Carolina, and Cyrus was living in wealthy isolation with his father in Silicon Valley. For good reason—the constant threat of kidnappings and such—Skander Bulkroad was obviously determined to keep his son out of the lime-light. I never read or saw anything about Cyrus in the media, or about Skander's wife, for that matter. Of course, Cyrus and I talked about getting together, but we never made it happen.”

“How old was he,” Marz asked, “when you were e-mailing back and forth?”

Strange smiled lightly. “Well, he claimed to be about your age, but I always suspected he was younger. Maybe eleven or twelve, but brilliant beyond his years. A genius, like his father.”

Tech detected a note of disdain in Strange's voice
when he mentioned the elder Bulkroad, but before he could even ask about it, Strange offered his own explanation.

“Despite the age difference, Cyrus and I developed a true friendship over the course of the two years we communicated. From the start he revealed a vast knowledge of the Virtual Network, and his beliefs in a free Network and free information were much in keeping with my own and not at all like those of his father, who has succeeded in turning the Network into yet another mindless playground for tourists and thrill-seekers.”

Tech frowned, but kept his thoughts to himself.

“Little by little, however, I began to realize that Cyrus was deeply troubled about something going on at Peerless Engineering.” Strange's forehead creased in dark recollection. “He never admitted this to me outright, but I could tell from the information he was beginning to send me that he wanted me to investigate Peerless on my own. He even furnished me with entry codes that would allow me to sneak past the company's highly sophisticated security programs.

“Then, without warning, Cyrus stopped contacting me. I was puzzled and deeply worried. Rumors began to spread that Skander was denying Cyrus access to any cybersystems. Other rumors emerged that Cyrus had died of a rare blood disease. I could never corroborate any of them. There were no obituaries in the media, no hints that Skander Bulkroad was in mourning. It was as if Cyrus had suddenly vanished off the face of the earth.” Strange glanced at the computer screen where the
minidisk code was still scrolling. “And now, after all these years, we come to learn that Cyrus may have been kidnapped.” He blew out his breath and shook his head.

“What kidnappers would be crazy enough to take on Skander Bulkroad?” Tech asked.

Strange smiled enigmatically and smoothed the ends of his drooping gray and yellow mustache. “About the same time Cyrus disappeared, there was a lot of hacker buzz about Peerless Engineering's real purpose in commercializing cyberspace. A more sinister purpose.”

“Like what?” Marz asked, literally on the edge of his seat.

“There were rumors that Peerless was in fact constructing a cyberdomain all its own—a top-secret domain no one outside of Peerless was aware of.” Strange smiled ruefully. “Unfortunately, we never found out, one way or another.”

“But you tried,” Tech said.

“Yes, we tried. Peerless had yet to complete and secure the castle it was building in the Network, so my hacker friends and I were certain we could penetrate the construct and uncover whatever secrets the company was harboring. We made use of all the passcodes and tricks Cyrus had fed me. But we failed. We were caught in the act and uncloaked. We had no idea that security inside the castle would be so advanced.”

Tech's jaw dropped in surprise. “Was that the hack that sent you down? The Net says you jeopardized national security.”

“Actually, the run made me quite a celebrity
among the hacker elite,” Strange said offhandedly. “But Peerless used all its power and influence to convince the media that my friends and I were a threat to the creation of the Virtual Network. You know how the media eats up cyberterrorism. I was banned from the Network. The rest, as some say, is history.”

“And now the Peerless Castle is the most complex construct on the grid. If it wasn't for the Escarpment, Peerless would have expanded well beyond the Ribbon, into the Wilds.”

Strange smiled, mostly to himself. “We left that little something behind to keep them in check.”

Tech glanced at his brother, then looked hard at Strange. “You were one of hackers who designed the Escarpment.”

Strange's smile broadened. “A nice bit of cyberengineering, wouldn't you say?”

“Not if you've ever gone over the edge without a bungee cord,” Tech said.

Strange's raised his bushy eyebrows in surprise. “It is bridgeable, you know—as well as jumpable. After all, Tech, it's only code.”

Tech averted his eyes from Strange's penetrating gaze. Glancing around the apartment, he tried to absorb the old man's disclosures. And the more he looked around—at the cats, the computer sculptures, the musical instruments, the precarious piles of comic books and graphic novels—the more he became convinced that Harwood “Mystery Notes” Strange was just another burned-out hacker nursing a bruised ego over what Skander
Bulkroad and Peerless Engineering had been able to achieve. Venture anywhere in the Wilds and you were certain to bump into flyers who claimed that Bulkroad had stolen their ideas or had ruined their reputations. Like Strange, they talked in glowing terms about a free Network when in fact they
did
want to keep cyberspace as their private backyard. That's what the Wilds was—a place where the discontent and the disenfranchised could gather.

“The shadow program that pursued you in the EPA,” Strange said suddenly.

“Scaum,” Marz said.

Strange glanced at Tech. “You said Cyrus claimed that Scaum was after him.”

“Yeah. But it didn't act like a security program.” Tech shuddered, but didn't betray his disquiet. “The thing… I don't know, it was like it had a mind of its own. Like it was a neural net or something.”

“Could Scaum have been a cybercraft?” Strange asked.

“Only if it was piloted by some serial-killer cyberjock.”

“Scaum must have been created by Cyrus’ enemies,” Marz said. “The ones who kidnapped him.”

Strange glanced at Marz. “A very astute conclusion. But Cyrus could be mistaken about Scaum. Those who imprisoned Cyrus could have been foes of Peerless Engineering rather than personal foes of Cyrus. You have to remember that Peerless didn't achieve its present status without making a lot of
enemies along the way.” He shook his head in anger. “I can tell you there was no shortage of people who resented Peerless Engineering. Cyrus's kidnapping could have been prompted by revenge.”

“Wow,” Marz said. “It's all starting to make sense.”

Dismayed by the fact that his brother appeared to be swallowing Strange's bizarre theories lock, stock, and barrel, Tech motioned for a time-out. “None of it makes
any
sense. The whole idea is crazy. First of all,
you
were one of Peerless's chief enemies, weren't you?”

Strange steepled his long fingers and bounced them against his lower lip in thought. “I won't deny it,” he said at last. “But I certainly would remember if I had kidnapped Cyrus.”

“Okay, fine,” Tech said. “What makes you think Skander Bulkroad would let someone get away with kidnapping his son? Even if somebody did kidnap Cyrus, why hasn't Bulkroad told the FBI by now if it's been, like, ten years!”

“Perhaps Skander Bulkroad was warned to keep quiet about Cyrus’ disappearance or risk greater harm to his son—even death.”

Strange looked at Marz. “How did Subterfuge coax Cyrus’ gremlin out of hiding?”

Marz shrugged. “It just did.”

Strange nodded and stood up, his head nearly grazing the water-stained acoustic-tile ceiling. “Boys, there's only one thing to do.”

Tech was afraid to ask what that might be.

“We need to pay a visit to the place where you bought Subterfuge. Learning who wrote the pro
gram may yield a clue as to Cyrus’ current hiding place.”

“Right!” Marz beamed in enthusiasm and rubbed his hands together.

“And while we're at it, we should pick up the soft we'll need for our run.”

“Run?” Tech asked. “
We?
”

“Well, of course, ‘we,’ “Strange said matter-of-factly. “I've been out of the game for a long time, Tech. More important, I've never been especially fond of flying in Skander Bulkroad's Network. But with you at my side and your brother at the controls—why, we're practically assured of success.”

Tech continued to gape at him as if Strange were a character from a role-playing game intent on misleading him. “You don't even know anything about us. You haven't even seen us handle a game deck, let alone a cybercraft.”

Deep furrows formed on Strange's brow. “You described yourselves as flyers.”

“Well, yeah, we are,” Tech stammered. “And righteous ones… But Felix doesn't want us flying from the office cybersystem, and our system isn't anywhere near the speed of Felix's.”

Strange wasn't the least bit swayed. “Once we've explained everything to Felix, I'm sure he'll understand.”

“No way,” Marz said.

Strange frowned. “Then we may be forced to fly without his express permission.”

Tech shook his head back and forth. “Network Security slapped an access lock on the system. The lock's going to kick in this afternoon unless Felix
pays the fines he owes—which he can't do. Even if he does come up with the money somehow, most of our infiltration software got fried when the system took an amplified hit from the EPA trace.”

Strange stroked his beard. “We can disable the access lock. As for the software, you needn't worry about that.” He pointed to a pair of fifteen-year-old interface helmets outfitted with equally archaic data goggles. “Slip into those for a moment.”

Tech and Marshall snugged the awkward helmets down over their foreheads and adjusted the fit of the data goggles, which had lenses smudged with fingerprints. Tech nudged his brother in the ribs and whispered, “Ancient hardware. Can you believe this guy?”

Marz was examining the helmet closely. “I'll need some motogel, a box of shell screws, and a number-three ratchet. You won't recognize ‘em when I'm done.”

Tech had his mouth open to reply when Strange keyed in a command and a virtual garage appeared in the data goggles. Smaller in size than the garage Marz had created to house the brothers’ collection of custom cybercraft, Strange's featured the same type of roll-up door. Before the door had even risen halfway, Marz sucked in his breath in stunned surprise.