This Alien Shore (55 page)

At last he came to a place where consumer traffic was low, and a larger than usual number of virts seemed to have collected as a result. A handful of them seemed to be involved in some group fantasy down at the end of the corridor, which would eventually draw official attention; in theory such games were prohibited from the public walkways, though in fact they popped up any time the pol were absent. He bought himself a drink and walked slowly with it, sipping its frothy green contents as he sought out the pace of the local traffic. You could walk and work at the same time if you were good. He was good. All it took was a place where no one cared if he looked zoned out while he did so, and this was definitely such a place.

Slowing his step, brushing his hand against a nearby storefront to guide him, he gave his attention over to his brainware, and called up the program which had so disturbed him back at the apartment, to take a look at it. Slowly, carefully, he unwrapped it. It was a nasty little thing, a sniffer program keyed to the brand and model of his brainware. Not his headset, he noted; that would have been the normal search procedure, much easier information to access. Anyone with half an ounce of talent could trace a headset. But this sucker went for the brainware itself, the thing you couldn't change by buying a new interface. And it had found his codes attached to his program, and dug in its little data claws, and ridden the thing all the way back to his head.

Thus far it didn't seem to be doing much damage, but that didn't mean it wouldn't start soon. Basically it seemed to exist only to locate him, and then send a signal back to someone once it had found him ... which thus far he had kept it from doing. Now he needed to see if he could figure out where it had come from, and who the hell had his brainware specs in the first place....

He took a table outside a local eatery, suitably crowded, and leaned back in the narrow chair, drink box in hand. Here in this public place the sheer number of users would help mask him from the enemy, if anyone tried to trace his signal.

....
the enemy.
Jesus. Listen to him. It sounded like he was back in one of those virts right now, substituting aliens for shopkeepers and exciting spy plots for the angst of teenage existence.

But the girl was real. The people who were after her were real. Maybe this time, for once, life had caught up with the virts.

He lidded his eyes halfway, enough to darken his field of vision but not enough to look like that's why he did it.
Just a lazy guy, out for a drink and a snooze.
Meanwhile, inside his head, he began to unwind the nasty little sniffer, taking apart its code piece by piece, seeing what made it tick. It tried to send out a signal almost immediately, but that was okay; he had taken precautions, and its messages weren't going anywhere. Carefully he picked at it, searching for the one line of code that would tell its signal where to go. That's what he wanted to know. That's what he
had
to know, if he was going to come out on top of this crazy little cat-and-mouse game.

Suddenly the code faded from his field of vision. He stiffened, expecting trouble—but it seemed he had triggered some kind of graphics program, embedded in the homing sequence. Glittering stars suddenly filled his field of vision, then gathered at the edges in a luminous border. Part of his brain was aware that this could be a trap of some kind, meant to distract him, but he was so damned curious that he couldn't look away. Slowly an image took form in the center of the darkness: faint outline of a waystation, encircled by half a dozen vast rings. Paradise. What the hell was this anyway, some kind of ad? That would be just great, all this work and fear and some stupid travelogue program had invaded his brainware—

And then an eddress resolved in front of his eyes. Just that. White letters against a black background: simple, plain, easy to read. Then it was gone. The after-image shivered in his sight for a moment, and then it too faded. The station and stars quickly followed, leaving him with only darkness.

The sniffer had self-destructed, code strings unraveling into meaningless data before he could stop it. Apparently it had done its job, delivering that little scene, and now it wasn't going to give him a chance to analyze it further. Phoenix opened his eyes and blinked heavily, took a sip of his drink—now warm—and tried to make sense of what he had just seen. This guy had made up a sniffer program to find Phoenix, right? And it had found him, and tried to send out a message saying where he was. But all that was just window dressing for a three-second vid designed to play out inside his head? Which had been its purpose all along?

Shit. This was getting stranger and stranger.

He knew he shouldn't go check out that eddress. Doing so was about as reckless as a guy could get. On the other hand, how could he resist? The programmer who had sent this was good, damn good, and he knew that Phoenix was good, too, and respected it. He'd figured the hacker could spot his program, neutralize it, and then take it apart to see what was tucked away inside. There was almost an inherent challenge in the process:
if you aren't good enough to find this note, you aren't worth my time.

How could any moddie resist that?

He had to take better precautions, though. He shut down his hacking programs for a few minutes, letting ads run mindlessly through his upper visual field as he walked to the nearest tube. In better times he might have altered them, just for the fun of it, stripping models of their clothes or adding mustachios and sending them back to their maker. Now he was too preoccupied for such efforts.

This guy who had sent the sniffer ... was he a hacker himself? The very nature of the invitation said he was, but other facets of his behavior argued against it. For now, Phoenix was reserving judgment. But whoever he was, he sure as hell was worth a hacker's attention.

He boarded an express tube bound for the upper levels. There were plenty of seats and he stretched out on three, body language making it quite clear that no one should ask him to move. He glanced up at the nodes in the ceiling, which would shunt his headset signal to the nearest outernet processor. At the speeds the tube would be traveling, that meant he'd be changing processors once every few minutes. If anyone was tracking him, they'd lose a lot of time adjusting, and time was everything in this game.

Content at last that he was as safe as he could ever get, he leaned back and shut his eyes and called up the eddress he'd been given.

He didn't head straight to it, of course. That would be too easy a trap to fall into, and not worthy of the invitation's maker. He rode the skip to Tiananmen Station, but then took a back door in through the shipping department of a local construction company. From there he hopped over to an educational processor, compliments of Rajastar University, and masked his presence with a torrent of undergraduate writing exercises, while he checked out the available routes to the data neighborhood he wanted.

So far so good.

He wondered if the guy was watching him. Probably he had sniffers lining every path to his place, and Phoenix had triggered all of them. If so, he hadn't seen any of them yet. Damn, this person was good. Who the hell was he?

He was all set up to move forward, and maybe launch a message into the guy's chosen site to stir up some response, when something hit him.

His field of vision suddenly went blank. He must have been pretty keyed up, because his heart almost stopped when it happened. Before he could respond in any way, an image appeared before him. Bright wings, red flames, a powerful bird flying headlong into a pyre of scarlet and gold. His namesake, the phoenix.

This was just too spooky. He tried to call up one of his own programs to break the thing down, to take control again, but every time he tried to bring up code, he just got another copy of the picture. It was as if he was surrounded by birds, and every time he tried to move, one got in the way.

For a moment he just sat there, breathless. Then he sent out an image of his own.

WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?

The birds faded. Words took their place.

ONE WHO SEARCHES.

He didn't ask for what. That would have been too obvious. Only an amateur asked obvious questions. Only a amateur would answer them.

He thought about it for a moment, then flashed: MAYBE I CAN HELP

And held his breath, waiting.

A data capsule appeared before him. He hesitated, knowing he shouldn't be taking chances ... but curiosity won out. Just like this guy probably knew it would. He called up an antiviral program just in case, and cracked open the enclosing code on the thing....

And saw what it was.

And closed it up again, really quickly.

Now his heart was pounding. Really pounding. There was nothing quite as scary as having that virus stare you in the face, and not know if it was a neutralized version or the real, very hot thing. Shit. He slapped a few extra security programs on the now-closed packet, just to make sure it would stay closed up tight, and then, for a lack of a more inspired response, flashed, NORTHSTAR.

YES.

Shit. Shit.

WHY? appeared before him.

Shit.

Okay, think this out. If he's the one who designed the damn thing, then he wants to know why you were fucking with it. There's no safe answer to that one. On the other hand, if he really was its designer, then he could have sent you a copy that would be in your head already, searching out the data he wants. Right? That damned thing was designed to snitch data, so why not just use it?
Suddenly he realized how utterly reckless he had been, opening the data packet up like that. But nothing bad had happened, right? So that told him something about the guy who sent it.
Okay,
so
let's say the odds are he's probably not responsible for it existing in the first place ... and both of you know that. Right? So what does he want with it? And me?

You didn't get that kind of data without offering something.

He thought about it for a few seconds, weighing his various options. Finally in his mind's eyes he formed the words, IT KILLED A FRIEND. And sent them.

There was no response.

Finally he added, YOU?

A long wait. Then: IT KILLED.

For the first time in several minutes, he found he could actually draw in a full breath.

YOU SEARCH FOR IT? he asked.

Again the answer was long in coming. It took no great genius to figure out why. If the guy was legit, and was really hunting the thing, he had to be sure that Phoenix was too before he committed himself. He'd be reviewing everything they'd said now, and everything he'd seen in Northstar, and assessing him with a hacker's eye. Because oh yeah, the guy had to be a hacker himself. There was no way around that. You could teach a good programmer how to track viruses and such, but you could never give them the cultural language that went with it. The minute Phoenix had seen the birds surrounding them, he knew this was one of his own.

I SEARCH FOR ITS MAKER.

He drew in a deep breath and sent back, DITTO. And he added, SO DO OTHERS.

YOU KNOW THEIR WORK?

Was it a trap? WHAT THEY'VE DONE. NOT WHO THEY ARE. That was true enough. Half of the people he talked to he only knew by their hacking nomen. It also was a clear signal to this guy that if he wanted information on others who were following the virus, he wouldn't get it from him.

WE SHOULD COMPARE NOTES, THEN.

MAYBE. He was taking a risk here, but shit, if this guy had more information on the virus than Phoenix's crowd had been able to dig up, that was a risk worth taking. He could see Chaos standing before him, bright as life, begging him with her eyes to find her killer, punish him, and see that no more moddies fell prey to his creation. NOT HERE. TOO INSECURE.

AGREED. LIVE ONLY.

He stared at the words in shock, not quite believing them. Was this guy crazy? Suddenly he was reassessing the whole conversation, and wondering just who and what it was on the other end. No hacker would have sent that suggestion to him. Hackers sometimes went their whole lives without meeting each other, outside of electronic forums. Did this guy really think he was going to put his body at risk for this? It was bad enough letting a stranger connect to his signal, he sure as hell wasn't going to walk into the office of some unknown person and just see what came of it.

NO FUCKING WAY, he sent. And he prepared to terminate the contact, just in case something nasty was to follow.

YOU WILL, the other assured him. BY YOUR OWN CHOICE. YOU WILL KNOW WHEN. And he signed it below, like a letter: MASADA

The signal was gone. He tried to trace it, but realized pretty quickly that that wasn't going to happen. So he called back up that final image, that infuriating signature that promised too much and delivered too little.

Masada?

The
Masada? As in Kio Masada, who had written the only handbook on computer security that any moddie respected? Who was a pain in the ass to Phoenix and his friends precisely because he understood them so well? Who had designed the Guild defenses so well that testing them was almost a hacker rite-of-passage these days?
That
Masada?

Couldn't be. Shit. That would be like ... that would be like meeting God online, and having Him-drop you his eddress. Not damn likely.

So who the hell was using his name online?

He scoured around the data neighborhood for a brief while more, hoping to find some sign of the guy, some more information on him. But whoever he was, he hacked clean; every trail Phoenix could find dead-ended in a loop, sending him back where he started.

At last it was clear he wasn't going to find anything useful, and he gave up in frustration. He flashed an icon that cleared his field of vision so that he saw nothing but the real world again. The dead world, as some of his friends called it. People. Packages. The tube's interior. Blurred images outside, local stations not worth the time involved in stopping.