Spirits in the Wires (9 page)

“So how come you don't hear more about these sites?” Aaran asked. “You know, like in the press?”

For a moment he thought Jackson was going to continue to ignore him, but he finally looked away from the screen and back at Aaran.

“That's just more of their weirdness,” he said. “It's like you can't talk about it—at least not publicly. You can send the URL to someone, but you can't seem to write about it.”

“I don't understand.”

“There's no point in trying to figure it out,” Jackson said. “I knew a guy who was doing a piece on another site like this for
Wired
and he just couldn't submit it. When he tried to e-mail it to his editor, it came back as undeliverable. But here's the really weird part: It was also erased from his hard drive. After that, whenever he tried to write about it, the files would disappear from his hard drive—like someone was sitting inside his machine, keeping tabs on what he was doing. Finally he wrote it out by hand, but that doesn't do you much good.”

“Why not?”

“Everything's on-line these days. Everything's connected. The same computer a publisher uses to lay out an issue is hooked up to the Internet. And if his isn't, the printer's is. Somewhere along the line these things always just disappear. The only pieces I've ever seen on sites like this are what somebody photocopied.”

“So you
can
get the information out.”

Jackson shrugged. “I guess. But who reads hardcopy anymore?”

“Hopefully
The Daily Journal's
readers.”

“You know what I mean. Everybody's getting their information off the Net these days. It just makes more sense.”

“I can't argue about the convenience.”

Hell, he cribbed half the stuff he used in his own pieces from on-line reviews and articles—suitably rephrased and given his own spin, of course.

“Look,” he said, figuring Jackson was calmed down enough by now to get back to the business at hand. “We've gotten off on the wrong foot here. I know it seems like an unfriendly thing that I'm asking you to do, but this woman's just been asking for it. I've let it slide for a few years—truth is, she burned me good, but I was willing to let it go if she would. But lately she and her little circle of friends have been making my life hell. Every time there's the smallest mistake in the book section, they're all over it with letters to the editor, badmouthing me to publishers' reps and in the bookstores. It's gotten to the point where my boss is on my case about it.”

He took a breath.

“See, it's never anything big,” he went on, “but if you get enough people complaining, it looks worse than it is. My boss doesn't know a book from a coaster, but he understands negative feedback and he doesn't like it. Which means it comes down on me and …”

He let his voice trail off when he realized that he was beginning to rant. Just thinking about Madding and her friends these days was enough to get him going. But from the look on Jackson's face, Jackson couldn't care less, and he wasn't here to air his own dirty laundry. He was just here to get a service done.

“So I take the site down,” Jackson said, “and we're good? You won't be coming around asking for another favor two weeks down the road?”

Aaran shook his head and put his hand up in a Boy Scout's salute.

“Scout's honour,” he said.

Which would mean something if he'd ever been a Scout.

Jackson studied him for a long moment, then finally sighed.

“Okay,” he said. “I'll get on it.”

“Any idea how long it'll take?”

“Two, three days. By the weekend, for sure. Unless …”

“Unless what?”

“Whoever put that site up is smarter than me.”

True to his word, Jackson started working
on the problem as soon as Aaran left the apartment. The first thing he did was write a simple virus program—nothing fancy. Simple was as capable of shutting down a computer as complicated. Maybe it wasn't as impressive, but
it
usually had a better chance of slipping in and getting the job done.

The virus he wrote now would worm into the ISP's computer that housed the Wordwood's site, dig through every file stored on it, and erase any HTML links it found, replacing them with random gibberish. Any site hosted by that ISP would immediately be rendered useless.

It wasn't a permanent meltdown. But it would require anyone using that ISP as the host for their site to send clean files to replace the ones his virus had damaged. That could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days, depending on how much material they had to transfer back onto the site. Considering the size and complexity of the Wordwood site, it should be enough of an inconvenience and take them long enough to satisfy Aaran's need for revenge.

All Jackson had to do was get somebody at the Wordwood end to open an attachment, but he didn't think that would be too hard. Since they seemed to collect texts of books, he'd simply hide the virus as a macro inside a file purporting to be a book with a trigger that would make the macro run as soon as the file was opened. Then the next time the Webmaster updated his site, the virus would piggyback along with whatever he sent and the server would go down.

Piece of cake, really.

He hummed as he worked on the program, then tested it. The programming soothed his anger the way it always did. That was half the reason he'd gotten into computers in the first place. Mostly, he loved the clean logic of programming. Computers were so much better than people. They were straightforward, doing only what they were programmed to do. They didn't lie to you, or make fun of you. Or blackmail you.

He was ready to send the virus by two
A.M.,
only a few hours after Aaran had left.

Now, he thought, we'll see how tight the Wordwood's security is.

Logging back onto the Internet, he established his protocols through a confusing labyrinth of false trails and dummy ISPs that left no way to trace him back to the computer he was actually using. He aimed his browser at the Wordwood's site. When the forest background appeared on his screen, he began to type into the white box floating in the center of the screen.

Love your site. How do I submit a book to add to your library? An eager reader

He'd barely finished typing when a response appeared, replacing his own text:

Hello eager reader.

Simply send the document file as an attachment addressed to: [email protected]

Whatever you say, he thought.

He opened Eudora, typed “a book from an eager reader” as a subject heading, attached his file, and hit “queue.” When he closed the e-mail software, he got a prompt telling him he had an unsent message. He chose “send and close” and watched the progress bar until the file had been sent. Eudora closed and he was looking at the Wordwood site once more.

He stretched his arms over his head, then got up and went into the kitchen, returning with a can of soda and a bag of chips. He doubted that anything was going to happen immediately. If the Webmaster at the Word-wood was anything like every other Webmaster Jackson knew, he'd be so overworked that he probably wouldn't get to the e-mail for a few days. And then he'd have to actually update the site before the virus could even start to do its thing.

He had a sip of his soda to wash down a mouthful of chips.

This really was an amazing site. The video and audio of the background alone were enough to mesmerize him. No matter how long he studied it, he couldn't detect a loop in either. Then there was the swiftness of response time to messages and the sheer volume of material on the site itself.

He did another check for code, but there was still none available to view.

Whoever had done this really knew his stuff. How did you make code invisible, but still readable to the viewer's browser?

Magic.

Voodoo.

His mouth went dry, and not because of the chips. He had another sip of his soda, remembering what he'd been telling Aaran.

He wasn't entirely ready to believe that the Internet was spawning A.I.s somewhere out there in its pixelated reaches, but there was no denying that there were some brilliant programmers. If the Webmaster of the Wordwood was as good as he appeared to be, he might just detect the virus before it ever did any damage. Worse, he might be able to track it back to this computer.

You didn't need magic for that. You just needed good hacking skills.

And maybe, once the Webmaster had Jackson's I.D., he might want to deliver some payback. Do a little walkabout through, oh say, Jackson's bank accounts and set all the balances to zero.

Jackson stared at his monitor and began to regret sending the virus. He hadn't wanted to do it in the first place—who got pleasure out of trashing somebody's hard work except for emotional misers like Aaran Goldstein? There was something creepy about this whole business. The site. Aaran's need for revenge. The blackmail.

The forest on his screen was starting to give him the willies just the way a real-world forest did. The few times he'd been out in the country in the past few years, he'd always gotten the feeling that something was hidden in among the trees, watching him.

It hadn't been like that when he was a kid. As a kid, he used to spend all his spare time in the wood lots behind the housing development where he'd grown up. At least he had until a bunch of kids had taken to lying in wait for him, chasing him through the trees and beating him up whenever they could. That was when he'd first started to spend so much time in front of a computer.

Maybe that was why forests still creeped him out. Why he always felt like he was being watched. Logically, he knew it wasn't true anymore. Just like there was nothing hidden in the branches and leaves of the Wordwood's index page, watching him now.

But it
felt
like there was.

He started to reach for his mouse to click himself off-line, when his screen flickered and went blank. A moment later, a familiar message appeared along the left side of his browser window:

This page cannot be displayed.

The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Website might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings …

Followed by a list of the things he could try to reconnect with the site. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

He watched, unable to move, expecting he didn't know what. But finally, he reached forward again and disconnected his computer from the Internet.

What do you know. His virus had worked. And quickly, too.

He didn't feel any sense of accomplishment—not like when he'd finally gotten past the bank's firewalls and realized he was actually in. He just felt kind of dirty.

I should take a shower, he thought. But first …

He picked up his phone and dialed the number that Aaran had left him. He got an answering machine on the first ring. It was going on three
A.M.
He supposed not everybody was up at this time of the morning.

“I don't know how long it'll last,” he said into the receiver, “but the site's down for now. They'll be able to get it back up again, but it'll probably be a few days.” He paused, then added, “So we're square now, right?”

He looked across the room, the receiver still at his ear, but he had nothing else to say, so he hung up.

He took his shower and went to bed, but lay in the dark, staring at what he could see of the ceiling above his bed for a long time. He found he could still hear the breeze of the Wordwood's site. When he closed his eyes, the forest was there, as though the streaming video was playing across his eyelids.

Neither left him as the rest of the week went slowly by.

He had the breeze in his ears. It was like what you heard after a loud concert—a faint, steady ringing. Because he was always focused on it, it seemed louder than it really was, a constant soundtrack to the routine of his life. Sometimes it was just static.

The forest lived on the inside of his eyelids like a video tattoo. He caught glimpses of it every time he blinked. When he closed his eyes for longer periods of time, the breeze in his ears grew louder and he felt swept away someplace. Then he'd start, look around, check his watch. He'd lost a minute or two. By the end of the week, sometimes the pieces of lost time stretched into half an hour.

He didn't see Aaran again until two days after the Wordwood went down. Walking down a hallway in the offices of
The Daily Journal,
he came around the corner, and there was Aaran. Jackson hadn't been avoiding the paper's book editor, but also hadn't gone out of his way to contact him again after he'd left the phone message the other night.

“Jackson,” Aaran said, smiling. “My man. I got your message. Excellent job. Fast service and the sucker's still down.”

“I guess.”

“You don't look too happy about this.”

“I don't see anything to feel happy about.”

Aaran shrugged. “Yeah, well, that's because you don't have the personal stake in it like I do. Man, I can't wait to see one of Madding's crew. Drop a little hint. Let them know who they're screwing around with.”

Don't, Jackson wanted to say. But what was the point? Sensitivity and discretion weren't exactly among Aaran's personality traits.

“And we're good now?” he asked instead. “You know. About the bank… ?”

“What bank?” Aaran said. He gave Jackson a light punch on the shoulder. “Gotta run. Editorial meeting.”

Jackson nodded. “Sure.”

He closed his eyes for a moment as Aaran turned away. The forest reared up on the backs of his eyelids, something still watching him from within the foliage. When he opened his eyes again, Aaran was long gone and he stood alone in the hallway.

He kept checking the Wordwood site through the rest of the week, but it remained down.

On the night that Saskia and Christiana met at the Beanery Café, Jackson was in his apartment. After heating up a frozen burrito in the microwave, he sat down in the living room to eat it while he watched some TV. He never noticed when he'd dropped off, but when he snapped back into himself, he realized that he'd lost four hours this time.

Four hours.

The half-eaten burrito was sitting cold on a plate on the coffee table. He picked up his can of soda and had a drink. The soda was warm and flat. He looked around the clutter of his living room. There seemed to be a space between himself and everything familiar. The TV caught his eye as whatever show had been on went into a commercial.

He picked up the remote. Pointing it at the TV, he hit the off button.

He remembered …

Trees … branches … leaves … an endless forest…