The Sapporo Outbreak (26 page)

Skinner had watched the exchange and was worried. Sakura's attempts to placate the group were clumsy and transparent. Almost desperate. It was as if Sakura wanted them to ignore what was happening around them. To ignore the strange noises drifting in from all around now. The muffled shouts, the banging, the crashing - the sound of a dozen street fights racing through the research labyrinth.

This was serious.
 

Skinner felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket. He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled it out and glanced quickly at the screen.

On my way to some sort of riot at WhiteStar Palo Alto centre. Local cops say it's bad. Also trouble at WhiteStar New York and London centres. Stay safe. Call me when you can. Steve.
 

Hurriedly shoving the phone back in his jacket pocket, Skinner felt he understood now. The Palo Alto attack. Clark's investigation. What he'd seen and heard in the Sapporo facility. Yes, he understood. Almost 200 years earlier, Charles Darwin stated that any species entering a 'new world' is forced to adapt or die. That's what was happening here. The hyper-realistic iSight 3 game blended the real with the unreal, the physical with the digital, so perfectly that to any player iSight 3
was
a new world.
 

Which meant players had to adapt or die.
 

Survival of the fittest was kicking in. Only this time it didn't happen over thousands of years. It happened in minutes.
 

Movement in the large research room to his right caught his eye, and he glanced through the glass to see a muscular, shaven headed man who seemed to be
staring
menacingly at him. White trainers, tracksuit pants and a white singlet, with tattoos covering most of his body, the man paced the room. Moving restlessly in the room behind, pushing, shoving, occasionally striking out at each other, were at least twenty others - an odd collection of old, young, men, women, Japanese, black and caucasian. The only thing they had in common was a jerky, almost birdlike head movement and - in most cases - red raw skin surrounding their eyes.
 

The shaven-headed man smiled savagely, hungrily, as he pushed his way through the skirmishes breaking out around him and strode forward, coming to a halt directly opposite Skinner on the other side of the glass. The man was staring straight at him - but how? The thick glass was transparent to Skinner and mirrored when viewed from inside the room. How could he possibly know that Skinner was there?

As Skinner stared into the red eyes filled with menace, the man slowly tilted his head back, screamed at the ceiling and cracked his forehead hard against the glass. Hairline cracks spread out from the man's bleeding forehead as he lifted his head and smiled at Skinner. The group behind screamed in delight and started crashing into the glass. The cracks multiplied and shards of glass started crashing onto the hard floor tiles.
 

Skinner watched in horror as their blood-red eyes glinted in the LED lighting. He'd seen that same look before - in the eyes of the 13 year old girl that ripped apart Sandra Brennan in Palo Alto.

Skinner turned back to the group, grabbed Santos by the arm and barked.

"Run!"

Everything went dark.

#

"Quiet!

Everyone, Quiet!"

The frantic, panicked chatter echoing through the 5
^th
floor Network Operating Centre was instantly replaced by an uneasy silence.
 

Watched by an army of technicians, David Tait stared - baffled - at the monitors on the wall. Nothing made any sense. In the last 12 minutes, the reassuringly predictable graphs, charts and endless scroll of data had been replaced by seemingly random data. The game's virtual personalities appeared to be multiplying, with each new character randomly assigned different personality traits. The game scenarios were blending together. Social networks were blending into fantasy worlds.
 
Bizarrely, the behavioural and social control systems appeared to have stopped working altogether.
 

It was a disaster. The most expensive, the most realistic, the most complete virtual world ever constructed was being destroyed as he watched. No, wait. It was destroying
itself
.
 

Tait scanned the wall of chaos. He could feel a wave of panic rise. He knew if he lost it, right now, then they were screwed. He needed to figure out what the hell was going on soon, or they'd lose everything. He closed his eyes and took three deep, slow breaths.
 

"Come on David, get a grip. Think. Think. Every problem has a solution."

His eyes flicked open again, and he was back. His entire life he'd been the smartest guy in the room. With Tanaka's help, he'd translated that into incredible wealth. Which - it turned out - bored him.

This,
this
was what he was made for. There was nothing magic in this world, nothing that couldn't be explained.
 

So - first things first.

The iSight game system was designed to be unbreakable. Massive data centres spread the load around the world. The computer and cooling systems drew more power than small towns. The code was mind-bendingly complex, with layer upon layer of security. Different parts of the game ran completely independently of the other. And every single element several parallel failsafe systems.

It simply could not break.

And yet it just had.
 

This simply shouldn't be possible.
 

One part of the game failing completely? Extremely unlikely. Two failing at the same time? Tait felt it was so improbable as to be almost impossible. But to have them
all
fail at the same time, indeed for them to go rogue? They had never even simulated a situation like this ... because no one had ever imagined it happening.
 

The firewalls were wide open and
disguising
what they were doing. Thousands of different game components were replicating. Tait shook his head.
They were replicating.
Rogue software was dividing, then dividing again, with each section then worming its determined way into other areas of the game.

It was brutal. Devastating. It was brilliantly elegant.

No. This was an attack. A vicious act of terrorism. It must have taken months, maybe years, to plan something this massive.
 

Based on the rate of the attack, Tait figured he had - maybe - an hour to stop the bleeding before the game - or whatever it ended up looking like - would be stripped bare and released to the world. If he didn't, WhiteStar would lose tens of billions of dollars. One of the world's most spectacular tech success stories would be ruined. Tait's personal fortune would be gone.

Ok. Right. Let's fix it.

Tait closed his eyes again. He could feel eyes staring at him. The best software engineers money could buy, all waiting for his direction.
 

He let his mind race.
 

It was a state of mind that felt a little like free falling - like accelerating down the side of a mountain with no brakes. He knew he'd come up with something - he always did.

A sudden thought sent a surge of fear and nausea surging through his body. His knees buckled. For the first time in his life, he thought he might faint.
 

"My God. All the behavioural controls are offline. The worlds are blending together. It's going to be anarchy for anyone still in the game. They're not going to know what's hit them - and we have no way of stopping it."

Tait knew what he had to do first. Get everyone - over 300 million people around the world - off the game. Right now.

He started barking out a stream of orders to the team gathered around him, parallel conversations rang around the room. People typed furiously, some whispered commands while gesturing in the air. Screens sprang to life, numbers danced on the giant monitor.
 

Tait breathed out. He knew a way. All he needed was a little time, and he might just stop this hurting people.

Then the power failed.

#

A native of Saint Johns, a blue-colour suburb in North Portland, Oregon, John Evans had been an outstanding athlete as long as he could remember. His father had been a promising boxer until a stubbornly detached retina put paid to his career. A strong, principled man, Evans' father spent his evenings with his young son, teaching him to box with an old punching bag, a skipping rope and two weathered and split gloves.
 

Evans was a natural fighter. He loved the speed, the skill and the rush of contact sports. In his early teens, a friend introduced him to Muay Thai. Evans soon experimented with mixed martial arts before, surprisingly to those around him, settling on Karate. There was something about the discipline and structure of the art that appealed to Evans, and he set about practicing day and night. Encouraged by his father, Evans was Massachusetts State champion by 17. Two years later he won the first of three consecutive national Open championships. His talent earned him a scholarship into the University of Portland and, one year and another national championship later, the university sponsored Evans' transfer to Hokkaido University in Portland's sister city of Sapporo Japan.
 

John Evans, Portland native, Sapporo resident and iSight 3 volunteer tester rubbed the top of his shaved head then slapped his cheeks hard enough for a large purple bruise to instantly appear. His heart pounded and his mouth felt bone dry. Adrenaline coursed through his veins, he felt energy surge through his powerful body built through years of martial arts training.
 

He slowly panned his surroundings. Mid-town Tokyo, 2055, three hours into the infection. A sea of mangled cars - a jarring cacophony of car alarms beeped, honked, wailed and warned of impending doom. Broken windows, charred doors, flames licking the fancy corporate towers and the modest stores around him.
 

And everywhere, charred corpses. John didn't think twice about the gruesome tangled dead spread around him. A day ago he'd have been terrified, but today he didn't care. Because the dead around his feet weren't a problem. The strangers roaming through the carnage weren't his problem.

They were his colleagues. His soldiers at arms. His
pack
.

No, his problem was the infected. Grey, anonymous people. The same people who had paraded confidently,
arrogantly,
 
through the packed streets of crowded cities around the world, consuming too much of everything and destroying everything in their quest for an easier life. They had been top of the food chain.

Until the virus hit. Now they were sick, polluted. Blind to the world. They moved slowly, fumbled stupidly through the streets. They were worthless. "Now who's on top?" Evans smiled to himself as he remembered the Armani's, Gucci's and Jimmy Choo's cowering in dark corners.
 

It was so clear to Evans. The pathetic creatures were a plague that he had a duty to destroy. We have to put them out of their misery. Rid the world of these locusts. To finish what the virus started. To clear this plague and start again. Some ran. Some hid. But Evans knew that eventually they'd all be caught and ripped apart at the hands of his pack.
 

Evans scanned to his right and spotted a group of unchanged - four men, two women - standing together in the corridor of a nearby office block. One - a slim, sandy haired man - was staring straight at him. Challenging him.
 

Evans felt a rush of pure joy. Yes.
This
is life with a purpose. He'd never felt so strong, so fast, so ... unstoppable. He barked a command to his pack then walked toward the small group, and nearer to the taunting infected scum gazing back at him. He felt a wall - some sort of protective shield - block his way. He would not be stopped. He lifted his head and with a scream, smashed his head against the shield. He could feel it crack. He did it again and a small hole appeared. He pushed his hands in and started tearing at the hole in space - pulling it apart. Soon he'd be through and then at the repellent group in front of him. His pack rushed in to help, and he could feel the shield start falling away.

Then the city lights failed, and darkness fell on Tokyo 2055.

#

Skinner couldn't believe it. Instead of sprinting for the lobby, Harper, Hill and Sakura did exactly the opposite. They froze and turned toward Skinner and Santos.

Hill looked quizzically at Skinner while Harper gazed back absently. Sakura seemed frightened, her eyes flicking nervously between Santos and Skinner. Behind the group of three, Skinner could see Itou pivot and turn. It struck Skinner that for such a heavily muscled man, he moved lightly, almost gracefully.

Hill broke the brief silence. "What the hell Ben ...."

A dull thud and the sound of splintering glass falling to the floor stopped the lawyer in his tracks. Now everyone turned toward the glass-fronted research room.
 

John Evans stared maniacally at the horrified faces looking back, thick blood dripping down his face from a deep cut on his forehead. To either side and behind him, the rag-tag collection of research volunteers had transformed into a slaughterous pack of animals straining to break free from their cage and take vengeance on their captors. The group watched in horror as Evans forced the fingers of both hands through a fist-sized hole which had just opened up at the centre of the cracked, splintered glass. Evans, blood streaming from his sliced fingers, yanked violently at the glass. Two sections of glass broke off, leaving a head-sized hole in the glass and releasing an endless torrent of catcalls, howls, abuse and wild laughter. The pack around Evans grabbed eagerly at the razor-sharp edges and pulled.
 

Skinner instinctively flinched as a deafening crash roared through the corridor. He turned his back to the sound, and covered Santos. He felt shards of glass scrape his back and quickly covered the the back of his head with his hands. As the chaotic sounds of fighting erupted all around he heard Sakura scream. Three fat warm drops of blood raced from the back of his head to his chin, splashing down on Santos as she looked up at him, her eyes wide.