Cyberdrome (3 page)

“I need you to
do this, Maya,” he interrupted, “and I need you to leave right now.” His face
suddenly looked older and darker as his virtual head leaned toward her and
whispered; “You were almost my daughter-in-law once, and I still care what
happens to you.”

“What does that
have to do with—?”

“Just go,” he said,
and then his image abruptly vanished.

Well, that was
weird
.
In the six months she had worked for Mathew Grey, not once had he brought up
her past engagement to his son. Even now—three years later—she didn’t want to
think about Alek, let alone discuss their breakup. She shook it off, then
grabbed the transmitter, and switched back to the non-secure channel on her
earphone. “So, are you guys ready to get out of here?”

“The pod’s back
on the Rover and a Dragon’s on the way to pick us up,” Dobson replied. “Should
be here any minute. Where do you want to meet us?”

“Since all of
the villagers seem to be between us, I’ll just double back down the hill.
There’s a small clearing north of the village—you can pick me up there.”

“Got it. We’ll
be there in ten.”

Her shoulder
still hurt like hell and her legs felt like they were made of rubber. “Give me
thirty,” she groaned then shut off the connection before Dobson could ask why.

A half hour
later, Maya stood at the edge of the clearing. When she felt a blast of hot air
from above, she looked up to see the Dragon descending vertically through the
narrow opening in the tree canopy. When it touched down in the center of the
clearing and dropped its large rear door, she ran toward it.

The all-terrain
Rover with its huge wheels and attached Research Pod took up all of the
Dragon’s interior cargo space. As she ran up the ramp, the rear hatch of the
pod opened for her and she climbed in. Dobson stood there, leaning against the
inner wall, smiling.

“Glad I’m not
you,” he said.

“Shut up,” she
said. She emptied her pockets into a bin and then headed through the pod’s
forward hatch. This one took her into the Rover’s large cockpit where she
settled into one of the back row seats. A moment later, she felt the Dragon
lift off the ground.

As they slowly
gained elevation, she glanced over to a side window showing an outside view of
the aircraft. She saw someone standing at the edge of the clearing, staring in
her direction. When she increased the magnification, she saw that it was a young
girl—one of the villagers—and her eyes were wide with fear. Maya tapped the
shoulder of the Rover’s driver, a man named Wilson. “Is the Blacklight working?”
she asked.

Wilson checked
his dashboard before answering. “Perfectly,” he said. “Both ours and the
Dragon’s. Is there a problem?”

She pointed to
her window display at the child clinging to a tree, looking straight at them.
“She looks terrified.”

“Probably just
the exhaust from the thrusters. The Blacklight generator only affects optic
nerves. It can keep her from seeing us, but it can’t do anything about the wind
we’re creating.” He turned back to his dashboard and muttered, “Besides, she’s
not real anyway.”

As the aircraft
swiftly gained altitude, leaving both the child and the planet behind, Maya
leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and whispered under her breath,
“Neither are you, pal. Neither are you.”

o     o     o

Alek took a sip from
his fifth cup of black coffee, and stared out the window of the “All Day”
coffee shop. On cold, rainy mornings like this, it felt comforting to see the
sun shining over the Seattle skyline, even if it was just a synthetic
projection. “Reality’s over-rated,” was the
slogan du jour
, and in the
past few years, he had come to believe it himself.

He glanced up at the
TV in the far corner of the room, which showed a holographic map of the
quarantined section of Utah. It would otherwise be old news, but since today
was the one-year anniversary of the worst man-made plague in U.S. history,
nearly every network had devoted 24-hour coverage to it.

When he looked back
down, he saw an attractive woman with purple-tinted glasses and a long blonde
ponytail standing right in front of his table. She wore a metallic blue
miniskirt and a thin, almost transparent tank top with nothing on underneath.

“Are you Alek?”

“Do I know you?” he
asked, trying not to stare at her breasts. Her perfume threatened to overpower
his nose—vanilla mixed with something he couldn’t identify.

“I’m Stacy,” the
woman said. “Cheryl’s running late this morning and asked me to fill in for
her. She gave me a description of all of her regular customers.”

He frowned. “So,
how’d she describe me?” He could guess, of course.
The geek who always sits
alone at the back corner table drinking gallons of the world’s most expensive
coffee and staring at his empty table for no apparent reason.

“She said you were
late twenties, muscular upper body, blue eyes, short brown hair, and full, luscious
lips.”

“She said
‘luscious?’”

Stacy leaned in
close. “I added that part,” she whispered, her hot, moist breath in his ear sending
a chill down his spine. She stood back up and added, “So, can I get you off?”

His mouth dropped.
“Can you what?”

“Top you off,” she
repeated straight-faced. “You know, refill your coffee? You’re drinking the
French roast Kona Peaberry, right?”

“Right,” he said,
feeling his face turning six shades of red.

“You have incredibly
good taste,” she added with a wink, then turned and headed back across the
room, hips swaying seductively. Alek took a deep breath and tried to clear his
head. He wasn’t the kind of guy that beautiful women hit on any more—not since
the accident.

He took another sip
of coffee and looked back down at the small, robotic creature standing in the
middle of his table. Instead of drilling into the surface, as it should, the
holographic image of his newest “Cyberphage” program stood there motionless.

He put down his cup
and signaled a status query on his wrist computer. A moment later, his contacts
displayed a message above his table. “Reason for activity suspension: Unidentified
program scanning this sector.”

He quickly sent an
encoded signal to recall his program. This was an illegal test of his Cyberphage
anyway, and getting caught was not an option. He made a decent living as a Software
Plumber, locating and repairing data leaks in big corporate databases—problems
that the big A.I. systems either couldn’t fix or maybe even created. It was a
skill few humans possessed, and he didn’t want to screw things up by having one
of his best designs used for something illegal. It wasn’t as if he could go
back to playing ball.

He was about to
reach for his coffee cup when another message appeared. “Unable to comply. Program
recall is being blocked.”

What the hell?
He ordered his contacts to block out the coffee shop and display the Phage’s
sensor feed in full mode. The room suddenly went black and he saw the intruder
as a 3D construct. It looked like a simple Beta-class program less than a Gigabyte
in size—probably some sort of new sentry patrol which his program could handle
all by itself. Then again, it could be something else. He took a gamble and
transmitted a wave towards the intruder.

“Is that you,
Doyen?” a voice spoke into his ear bud.

“Doyen” was the
title given to him by his fellow programmers during the past year. It signified
the most knowledgeable, or eldest member of a group. Considering that before
the accident three years ago, he had never written even a single byte of
computer code, the title was a little absurd. However, since nobody knew his
real name or anything about him, he saw no problem using the false reputation
to get the best jobs.

Raising his wrist
computer to his mouth, he whispered, “This is Doyen. Who’s this?”

“Your fellow
Plumber, Klaxon,” the voice replied. “Long time, no talk, good sir. You’ve been
luxuriating in the Big Blue Room for too long.”

Klaxon was a
topnotch Plumber he had met online about six months ago. A bit of a flake and a
showoff, but he knew how to write code.

“Klaxon. What brings
you online, good man?” he replied, mimicking Klaxon’s trademark, 20th century
surfer/hacker lingo. “Seeking winnitude over yours truly?”

“Exactamundo, Doyen.
Heard from the Big Grape that you were going after the WDB today. Glad to see
you’re still in the programmification game, my man. Though you are a poet among
Plumbers, I didn’t think you could pull this one off. Impressed, we are.”

What the hell are
you doing here?
Alek plotted the trajectory of Klaxon’s program and saw
that it was now on a direct course to his Cyberphage.

“You know the rules,
Klaxon. Go be impressed somewhere else,” he warned, all humor gone from his
voice. “This isn’t a spectator sport.”

Klaxon’s program
suddenly doubled its speed, confirming Alek’s suspicion that his former ally
wasn’t there to watch. “Don’t touch it, Klax. My baby’s armor-plated. She’ll
knock you into the next dimension.”

“You’ve got the only
working Cyberphage in existence, Doyen. I have a client who has already paid me
serious
mojo
for your baby, and he needs it right now. Just consider
this a compliment, man. You’ve created a work of true elegance. Theft is the
sincerest form of flattery, and all that.”

“Klaxon, my
program’s far beyond elegance, it is perfection, and it will defend itself. Violently!”

Klaxon didn’t
respond. Alek tried to relax, reminding himself that his Cyberphage could
easily handle whatever Klaxon’s little program threw at it. He switched his
contacts back to the remote camera view so that he could watch Klaxon get
slaughtered up close.

Unfortunately, the
remote view was offline. He tried to reset the connection several times but
nothing worked. A moment later, the image came back up, but there was nothing
to see—the Cyberphage had vanished.

“You son of a
bitch!” he yelled. He was about to log off when he noticed a small communications
node nearby. After scanning it for viruses and Trojans, he opened it and found
a six-word message from Klaxon. “Nice to finally meet you, Alek.”

Wait a minute
,
he thought.
When did Klaxon meet me?
How the hell does he know my
real name?

He blinked rapidly,
switching his contact lenses back to transparent mode, and looked around the
room. There she was—the new waitress—standing by the exit and staring right at
him. She winked once, then turned and walked out the door.

“Stop her,” he
yelled as he stood to run after her. He got halfway up, then fell forward, tumbling
over his table and hitting the wood floor hard.

A woman appeared
over him, looking alarmed. “Are you hurt, Alek? Let me help you back into your
wheelchair.”

“Damn it,” he
yelled. Then he remembered where he was and looked up at the waitress. “I’m
sorry Cheryl, but I can do it myself.”

As she picked up his
coffee cup and began cleaning up the mess, he pressed the help button on his
wrist computer. His powerchair partly deflated the big smart-rubber ball it
used for locomotion and extended several balancing booms while it lowered
itself down to the floor. He pulled himself in and with a whirl of gyroscopes;
the chair reinflated the ball and righted itself.

Nervous applause
came from some of the onlookers. They had obviously never seen a powerchair
like his before. With all the recent medical advances there were very few
people confined to wheelchairs anymore—at least in developed countries. His
powerchair was a little old fashioned, but in the three years since his
near-fatal car crash, it had made his life almost bearable. Almost.

“You’re lucky,” he
remembered his fiancée, Maya, telling him after he woke from a month-long coma.

“You call this
lucky?” he said bitterly, pointing to his apparently useless legs.

“They repaired the
damage to your head and face while you were unconscious. There’s not a single
scar left.”

“They said I have
permanent brain damage,” he reminded her.

“Only a small part
of your brain was affected.”

“Yeah—just the small
part that controls my legs. I had a soccer scholarship. What am I going to do
now?”

“You were run over
by a truck, Alek,” she said. “It could’ve been much worse.”

“Worse than being
told that they can’t do anything for you? That you will never kick a ball
again? Never walk again?”

“There’s stem-cell
therapy and cybernetic—”

“They use stem-cells
to regrow nerves and cybernetics to replace limbs—neither does me any good.”

“You’re alive,” she
said.

“Am I?” he
remembered yelling at her—repeatedly. She had no response. A few weeks after
the hospital released him, he stopped answering her calls. A month later, she
stopped calling.

“Sorry I wasn’t in
earlier,” Cheryl said, bringing him back to the present. “My stupid car
wouldn’t start this morning.”

“That figures,” he
said, shaking his head. “And I suppose you have no idea who Stacy is, do you?”
When she looked confused, he added. “Never mind, and thanks for cleaning up the
mess for me, Cheryl.”

“No problem. Let me
go get you another coffee. Just try to keep this one on the table, okay?” she
added with a polite smile.

As she turned and
walked away, he ran his hands underneath his table. As expected, he found a
small lump on the side where Stacy had been standing. He pried it off the table
and examined it.