Memories End (7 page)

Without warning he felt himself being sucked into a headlong dive parallel to the banner-plastered cliff face of InfoWorld. Despite his best effort to remain calm, a protracted
ahhhh!
tore from his mouth and his sweaty hands tightened on the padded arms of the flight chair.

Within seconds he was being propelled at high speed down the Ribbon, then powered through sudden turns, rocketed across canyons, spiraled through windows and insertion points, and finally shot toward the stylish headquarters of Worldwide Cellular.

His stomach heaved, and an acidic taste back-washed into his throat.

Then the accented, falsely deep voice of his client whispered through the earbeads.

“I'm so glad to see you, Mr. McTurk,” Gitana said with adolescent enthusiasm. “Please remember to remain aware of where you are in the real world, and refrain from further outbursts of excitement.”

That wasn't
excitement,
Felix wanted to tell him, that was panic! But he managed to keep silent.

“We'll be entering Worldwide Cellular,” Gitana
went on. “Once inside, I'm going to steer you to the data I want you to retrieve, which are nested close to Cellular's switching nucleus.”

Felix cursed to himself. Gitana hadn't said anything about pulling off an infiltration run.

“Perhaps you're thinking that this constitutes theft. But I assure you that the data bundle belongs to me, and that I'm doing no more for myself than what you do for your clients. As to why I'm not making the retrieval myself, let me say simply that, at present, I lack the resources.”

Felix barely kept from speaking out loud.

“I'm aware that Virtual Horizons’ joystick doesn't allow you to perform a fraction of the tasks you can perform through your office cybersystem,” Gitana went on. “But even its limited abilities will allow us to accomplish our goal. Flick your joystick to the right if you understand all that I'm telling you, and so I can see that I have full control.”

Felix did as Gitana requested.

“Good,” his client said. “Once I've steered you into the switching nucleus, use your controller to highlight and drag the data I indicate. You may find it a bit cumbersome, as we're going to be uploading several terabytes of information. We're going to insert the dragged package into a cellular call I will place at the appropriate moment. Is that clear?”

Felix nudged the joystick.

Gitana proceeded to foil Cellular's security programs by deploying chaff clouds, program dazzlers, and logic bombs from a seemingly limitless
arsenal of espionage weaponry. Confronted with this, Felix felt useless. But the more he studied the route Gitana was laying out, the more he saw room for improvement. He used the joystick to plot what he thought might constitute a safer path.

“Yes,” Gitana said. “I see what you're getting at.”

The course of Felix's liberated bus seat was adjusted. He began to feel his heart race as Gitana guided the pod deeper into the virtual construct, straight into Cellular's core. An entry port blinked open, and the visor showed a color-coded vista of converging cell-phone calls and pager transmissions resembling tracer rounds fired from ground-based artillery.

Then they were inside the nucleus and tearing along the route Felix had helped to plot, cloaked from infiltration filters arrayed like suspension bridges across immeasurably deep canyons.

Gitana indicated a neatly wrapped but enormous parcel of data concealed among the millions of calls. Felix feared that dragging the data could affect the entire operation of Worldwide Cellular. Trusting that Gitana had considered the repercussions, he clicked and dragged the data from its nesting place.

Immediately Gitana launched Felix from the core into the operating system and presumably toward the call to which Felix was supposed to affix the pilfered terabytes. The trajectory took him through a web of phone calls, surely disrupting service to tens of thousands of cell-phone users. Felix couldn't imagine what the massive data bundle
contained, but he scarcely had time to think about it before security programs designed to resemble giant steel-jawed wire cutters poured from the tap Gitana had sunk into the switching nucleus and hastened after him.

Felix stifled an alarmed outburst and began to flick his joystick incessantly.

“Change of plan,” Gitana said, after what seemed an eternity. “We'll have to deliver the data in person. Hang on, Mr. McTurk.”

Boosted from Cellular with extraordinary velocity, Felix gave silent thanks to Virtual Horizons’ flight attendant for having damped down the motion-capture vest. With the security cutters still in close pursuit, Gitana launched him breathtakingly high above Cellular, then sent him streaking across the grid like a meteor. Felix watched the Ribbon, the Peerless Castle, and the dreaded Escarpment disappear below him, and all at once found himself free-falling toward a nondescript eight-sided construct located in the Wilds of the Network.

“Drop the data bundle into the octagon,” Gitana said without his usual calm. “Drop it now! Hurry!”

Harwood Strange was widely profiled on the Network, but if he had an e-address or a phone number, they were either unregistered or listed under a different name. Stumped, Tech and Marz had set about locating and downloading a copy of Strange's
Mystery Notes
DVD-ROM. Fleetingly popular a decade earlier, the self-published interac
tive album featured track after track of extraordinary music, each composition linked to various Network sites. Contact information provided with the album had given the brothers a starting point for tracing Strange's current whereabouts.

On learning that he lived in eastern Long Island, only an hour's monorail ride from the group home, they had decided to pay him a personal visit.

School would have to wait.

The town was small and weather-beaten, the shingled homes bleached gray by the nearby ocean. From the elevated monorail, Tech and Marz had gotten glimpses of working farms, fruit stands, vineyards, and fishing boats returning with fresh catch. The first hint of spring was visible in the green lawns that fronted enchanting homes. Surveillance cameras were obvious at the monorail station, but scarce in the town itself. Painted signs posted in the central square warned against loitering, boarding, ‘blading, and noise. A plastic playground sat inside a circle of cushioning material.

Strange's address corresponded to an apartment over a bait store in sore need of renovation. A creaky, dilapidated exterior staircase ended at a door stripped bare by wind and salt spray. The boys picked their way to the top and, after a moment of hesitation, knocked.

The man who eventually answered was a stooped giant with long, unruly gray hair and a thick beard. He was wearing a hooded cloth bathrobe that was spattered with either different colors of paint or various foodstuffs—egg yellow, strawberry red, coffee brown, jalapeño green. He
gave his head a sudden tilt that slid wire-rimmed glasses to the tip of his long nose, and he looked Tech and Marz up and down.

“The lawn doesn't need mowing and the windows don't need washing.”

The boys traded glances. “We don't do that kind of work,” Marz said.

“Well, you should think about doing it. You can make good money.” His gray eyes narrowed behind the rectangular lenses of his glasses. “Don't tell me you're selling cookies.”

“We're not selling anything or collecting for anything,” Tech said.

“Then I can only assume that you're lost.”

“Not even—if this is 466 Maple,” Marz told him.

The man twisted around to regard the rusted numbers nailed above the door, then eyed the brothers once more while he scratched at his beard.

“Are you Mystery Notes?” Tech asked.

The man's eyes widened, and a short laugh escaped him. “Ah, right to the point, I see.”

“I'm Tech. This is my brother, Marz.”

Strange squinted at them, scrutinizing Tech's blond hair and Marz's nut-brown face and curly dark hair. “You two are brothers?”

Tech gave his standard reply. “We were designed to be different.”

“Tech and Marz?” Strange said skeptically. “Those sound like robot names. And yet you appear to be flesh and blood.”

“We're cyberflyers,” Marz said, staring at
Strange as if he were a comic superhero come to life. “Tech and Marz are our user names.”

“‘Robots in disguise,’ “Strange sang, then straightened somewhat and rubbed his bearded chin. “What exactly brought you to my humble abode, Tech and Marz?”

Marz held up the minidisk. “This.”

Strange took the disk between his thumb and forefinger and peered at it curiously.

“Most of the data is encrypted,” Tech said, “except for one phrase. The phrase says that Mystery Notes will know what to do.”

Strange's eyes darted from the disk to Tech. “Who's doing the talking?”

“We're hoping you can tell us,” Tech said. “Do you believe in Network legends?”

“Legends of what sort?” Strange inquired, his eyes sparkling. “Spooks? Spies? Aliens? Mad, gray-haired hackers?”

“Ghosts in the machine,” Tech said. “Program gremlins, in this case. A gremlin that knows you.”

“A… program gremlin actually mentions me by name—Mystery Notes?”

“Actually, what it says is ‘m-s-t-r-n-t-s.’ ” Marz explained.

“We ran hundreds of possible combinations,” Tech said. “Mystery Notes was the only phrase that made sense because of the link to you.”

“Then you know who I am.”

“Author of
The Strange Manifesto,
” Tech said.

“Legendary cyberflyer,” Marshall added almost breathlessly. “Freeware radical. Musical genius.
Mystery Notes
is awesome sound.”

“Well, I can see that you boys have good taste.” Strange sniffed in playful derision and stepped back from the door. “Come in.”

The tiny, two-room apartment was crawling with cats, many of whom came running to rub themselves against Tech's and Marz's legs. The shabby, cat fur–covered furniture and woven rugs looked as if they had come from great distances and been made by people who lived in a different century. The place was also filled with instruments of endless variety—reed, stringed, keyed, and skinned. Obsolete computer processors, boxy monitors, peculiar keyboards, and laser printers took up an entire wall. Elsewhere were piles of hardcover books, graphic novels, videotapes, CDs, minidiscs, and DVDs—libraries of information that were now accessible with a few quick keystrokes or could be amassed electronically in individual rental-storage facilities in the Network.

Strange planted himself in a padded swivel chair before a large, dust-covered monitor and slipped the minidisk into an ancient reader that lacked a cover. For a long moment, he studied the jumble of numbers and letters that resolved on-screen, then he sat back, tugging on his beard.

“I know this code,” he said at last, poising his crooked fingers over the keyboard. “Let's see if we can't get this critter to tell us in plain speak what it's after.”

Strange's fingers began to fly across the keys, all of which were apparently linked to a music synthesizer, so that each phrase of input constituted a musical composition. He crossed his hands over
one another and expanded his reach to cover the entire keyboard. When he struck the enter key for the final time he might as well have been playing the last chord of a piece of classical music. Throwing his hands up, he leaned back from the keyboard like a piano virtuoso waiting for applause—which Marz, unable to contain his excitement, provided.

An instant later, the voice of the program gremlin issued through the room's untold number of speakers.

“My name is Cyrus Bulkroad,” the gremlin began. “I'm trapped, MSTRNTS. I need your help.”

Strange didn't say anything for a long while. He simply stared at the monitor screen while the boys continued to stare at him.

“Who's Cyrus Bulkroad?” Tech asked at last.

Strange, looking as if he had seen a ghost, swiveled to face him and Marz. “Cyrus is the only son of Skander Bulkroad—founder, president, and chief executive officer of Peerless Engineering.”

“Do you know him?”

“Cyrus was my friend,” Strange said. “He vanished ten years ago.”

“Just fifteen more minutes,” Felix mumbled, reaching out blindly to shut off the alarm clock. Instead of finding the clock, however, his hand made contact with something soft and yielding. Felix smiled and a woman squealed in unhappy surprise. Meanwhile, the alarm clock continued to chirp so
persistently that it sounded as if a dozen clocks were going off.

“Mr. McTurk?” another woman's voice said above the racket. “Mr. McTurk, can you hear me? Are you all right?”

Felix's eyes snapped open. Momentarily discombobulated, he found himself still strapped into one of Virtual Horizons’ flight chairs. All around him people were speaking furious hellos into incessantly ringing cell phones and glancing in enraged puzzlement at beeping pagers. No one seemed to know the parties at the other end of the connections or the phone numbers being displayed by the beepers.

Felix realized with a start that Worldwide Cellular had been dazed by the data extraction Gitana had engineered. He could only hope that Cellular's cybertechnicians hadn't tracked Gitana's coconspirator to Virtual Horizons.

Judging from the way his forehead and ears felt, someone had torn the visor from his face and yanked out the audio beads. The motion-capture vest was open, as was his now-buttonless dress shirt. The tour technician and a worried-looking Ms. Dak were standing over him, preparing to press self-adhesive electrodes to his chest and neck.

“Mr. McTurk, what happened to you?” Dak was saying, her own designer visor dangling around her slim neck.

Felix fought down nausea and fingered the chair's positioning switch to raise himself upright. His shaking hands waved aside the electrodes. The
sullen-looking technician helped him onto the couch while the other tourists continued their futile attempts at silencing their cell phones.

“Our pilot says that you
disappeared,”
she whispered, just loudly enough to be heard.

Felix forced his eyes to focus on his wristwatch. Twelve minutes had elapsed since Gitana's assault on Worldwide Cellular. Ms. Dak caught the gesture and said, “I'm sorry if we seem so confused, Mr. McTurk, but I assure you that this has never happened before. Our pilot insists that someone else was navigating for you in the Network.”