The Scarab (2 page)

For the next several months, each night or so, I began
refining the various subsystems of my design, toying with only one or two new
features per game to preserve secrecy. With a modified spin model, I could be
totally invisible while standing still but completely visible at full speed. At
half speed, the satellite could show me at any speed in between, going any
direction. The more forward motion I had, the easier it would be to fix my
position. I was able to stay hidden longer by painting my hull to look like the
track and using terrain creatively.

In working out the design kinks, I
would often drop into games under an alias, and sometimes leave before the end.
Players that figured this out would have a contest to see who could “spot the
Scarab” first. If they caught me, I had to stay for the whole race to protect
my reputation.

Since I couldn’t rely on satellites
for my own direction and speed, I installed tiny solid-state accelerometers
like they use in jet fighters for backup. As a pleasant side-effect, I wasn’t
instrument-blind whenever my prototype went through a tunnel. Most of my
controls now had double safeties. This was good because when any GEV system
fails, you’re going to crash, it’s just a matter of how hard. This principle,
along with the high expense of building a real prototype, was the primary
reason new vehicle testing had moved toward simulation.

Next I noticed that, at high
speeds, my oval hull would rotate too slowly, and the craft would wobble too
much to be controlled by human reflexes. It was a matter of balancing the
power. Since all the tiny elements in the grid were computer controlled to
begin with, I programmed the air-cushion system and the small canard wing on
top to compensate for these instabilities 32 times a second. This arrangement
limited my peak speed, but made me unbeatable in a dog-fight.

I also beefed up the cockpit armor,
and searched for a means to halt the hull spin in an emergency situation. I
rigged the radial armor to blow off at the touch of a button. It still took
over fifteen seconds to spin down to a dead stop, but if anyone were close
enough to hit me, the shrapnel would put them out of commission too. Afterward,
my GEV would be a traveling skeleton, but it would survive.

Now my prototype was no longer just
a one-trick pony.

This week I had repeated nightmares
about my childhood in Brazil. With no local games over the semester break, I
began playing with variations of the invisible transponder effect. I was
particularly interested in the results from the FedNet satellite traffic
monitor.

One quirky variation traded the
front and rear bumper transponders between two vehicles. As long as the pair
stayed in the same sample grid, on the same road, the two would appear to be
moving side-by-side. No matter how fast they went, the velocity indicator would
be an average of the two. This glitch wasn’t of much practical use for the game,
but might be a slick dodge for smugglers. The trick wouldn’t be easy to spot,
but on any curves, there’d be a slight lag time between the ghost position and
the real. On a whim, I down-loaded some public-access data from around the
State Park system for a period of ten days. Overnight, I crunched through the
numbers looking for vehicle pairs that strayed from their lanes on turns.

I don’t know what I expected, but
on the scan for last Friday night, I found a distinct double image signature
that snaked into the beach area and then back toward the city. The signature
repeated itself at 2:00 AM this Friday, just before my data snapshot ended.
What should I do about it? Something obviously illegal was going on, but I didn’t
have any concrete vehicle identification or destination. Since the multi-state
superhighway system, the national parks, and the satellite guidance system were
all under Federal jurisdiction, they required a special type of Federal Marshal
to police them—the Hover-way Patrol. This was also necessary because local
police often couldn’t accelerate fast enough to catch perpetrators before they
left city limits. The only member of the Hover-way Patrol I knew on a
first-name basis was Mary Ann Anselm.

She was a no-nonsense kind of gal
with long legs, shoulder-length, brown hair and three older brothers. Mary Ann
played Lady Macbeth in our high school Senior play in a performance that sends
sado-masochistic shivers down my spine to this day. She could also smell BS a
mile away, and wouldn’t tolerate a lie.

I met Mary Ann again just after
high school graduation when she brought her cruiser in for a maintenance
check-up. I mustered the nerve to ask her out, and we ended up dating steadily
for over a year. She’s in great physical shape, knows as much about vehicles as
any guy, and is one of the outright best friends I’ve ever had. Being with her
felt like home.

Eventually, I had to cut it off.
Things were getting too serious. She wanted to get married, and I couldn’t do
that to her. You see, she’d be legally responsible for my debt, too. I couldn’t
see dragging two people through that misery. The final straw for me was that
any kids might inherit my hemophilia. I could barely afford my own medication.
One male in ten-thousand has my severe problem with clotting, so I try not to
take it personally. But I had seen first-hand the constant worry my condition
could cause a mother.

I decided to show Mary Ann the FedNet
tricks I’d found and see if she could get any mileage out of it. Because of the
potential for misuse, I hid my files on the university Meteorology department
computer. After taking a few days to get my courage up, I made a lunch date
with her at “the Oasis,” a Mediterranean food joint that had been one of her
favorites. I figured at a worst-case scenario we’d talk about SimCon, which was
coming up in another three months. Maybe at best, I expected her to be grateful
enough to spend the weekend with me over Labor Day. I wasn’t counting on
anything, just enjoying the fantasy.

Thursday afternoon, on a tan cement
patio with white iron lawn furniture and huge umbrellas painted to look like
palm trees, I watched traffic whiz by for half an hour till I saw her walk
through the gate.

My heart raced like a teenager. Dry
mouthed, I finally managed to say, “Hey, Mare. I got you a shwarma and Dr.
Pepper, just the way you like it.”

She said, “What do you want, Hayes?”
Suspicious? No, just cautious. Her chair made a grating sound as she pulled it
out.

I hastened to clarify. “Call me
Ethan; I’m not selling anything, and I haven’t clubbed any baby seals. I’ve
stumbled across an abuse of the law, and I thought you might be able use the
information. Hell, it might even get you that promotion you’ve been waiting
for.” I signaled the waiter.

“Bring the Lady a fresh set of
everything, and a Baklava for me.”

Mary Ann mellowed a little. “Are
you sure you can afford it, Ethan?”

I shrugged, “I skipped a meal
yesterday, so I’ll have two today.”

“You look tired,” she said, genuine
concern creeping in. “Have you had a check up recently? What your mom had could
be hereditary.”

“I’ve just been up late
programming. Forget about me. How’s your life been going? How’s the patrol unit
running?”

“Fine,” she said in a tone that
sounded exactly like the word lonely. “Ethan, spit it out. I have to be into
work in less than two hours.”

“We might go in together,” I
hinted. She said nothing, but raised an eyebrow. She plucked one of my cold
fries and put on her “convince me” face. I started explaining. After I told her
the whole thing, she had finished eating and was even beginning to smile at the
right places.

“I didn’t want to leak the secrets—partly
because I want to use them myself in the game—but mainly because ignorance of
these loopholes is preventing a lot of crime.”

She snickered. “Don’t worry. Even
the smart crooks are still pretty ignorant. I appreciate what you’re telling
me, but how many busts can we make? We can’t afford to link our computers into
real-time satellite feed for a week at a time to catch just one speeder.”

I shook my head and snatched a
little of her drink. “Let me run the pattern detectors for the five sure-fire
dodges I’ve come up with, and I bet you I’ll find a dozen regular offenders in
this city alone.”

She gazed at my left shirt button
for a full minute, and in a soft, almost apologetic voice, she said, “I’ll give
you a chance. Tonight. I’ll get permission from my shift chief, and bring a CD
of data over from the last two nights. You show me something concrete, and we’ll
owe you some reward money.”

Again, I shook my head. “Sorry,
babe. No money. I’ll never see it; the Credit Recovery Bureau sucks it like a
leech. I wouldn’t mind, but with a debt that big, throwing in a measly hundred
is like spitting in the ocean.”

My mother ran up incredible credit
bills in the year before she died, the year I turned eighteen. It was also the
year that several major banks pressured Congress into making credit debts pass
on to the beneficiaries of the debtor. I can’t blame them. Ever since hospitals
started taking plastic, people have been taking advantage. Technically, I could
have fled to Brazil to pursue my citizenship there. They don’t recognize debts
from the United States. But I like this country. A servant here is richer than
95 percent of the people in the third world, plus the water is safer.

“Okay. No money, your favorite
charity, anything. Hell, we have a few lawyers who owe us big. I could give you
your reward in free legal visits.” Mary Ann got a lopsided grin as she
considered the ramifications. “You may help me catch more than one slippery
customer.”

Later that night, in Sam’s place,
she looked over my shoulder at the color-enhanced read-out. “I don’t believe
it. That came from a high-speed chase that stretched out across three counties.
The Masserati just vanished.”

“He didn’t vanish. His twin car was
this station wagon, which means he really disappeared about... here,” I said,
pointing to a stretch of rural road just off the main Hover-way, three miles
from where the trace stopped. “Masseratis can’t swallow dirt in the intakes for
long. If the driver’s any good, he’ll pull it off into a barn or under a
bridge. Then tomorrow, after they’ve switched their rear transponders again,
they can drive off in broad daylight.

“This wasn’t much of a challenge
for the package I put together. All in all, I found twelve loopholes in FedNet.
When I plotted the reply addresses for all guidance queries, I found hundreds
of scattered points with inactive or incorrect transponders. Some of those are
just defective, but if we filter out the ones we see every day in the same
residential speed zone with this button here, we’ll see the people who are
traveling illegally. If you hit the animation button here, you can track...” I
wanted to impress her with the interface I’d designed, but she wasn’t listening
any more.

“Stop. Go back!” I hit the button
to return to the Masserati example.

Mary Ann gawked for a minute,
looked over at me, and then back to the map again. “Is this time stamp from the
data or when you processed it?”

“I process it in real time. The
time stamp is from the satellite,” I explained.

“This data is less than five hours
old. We can still get him.” Quick-drawing her police mobile-phone from its
holster, she dialed dispatch. All four units in the area were told to converge
discretely on Salem’s Pond.

On her way out, Mary Ann surprised
me with a quick kiss that gave the promise of many more. The faint taste of
raspberry lingered. It was the same lip gloss that she’d worn when we kissed
for the first time.

“As soon as we nab the bad guys, I’ll
be back! If you can give us a couple of these gadgets, we’ll get you all the Philadelphia lawyers you can handle. The police have an edge again for the first time since
radar.” She barely finished her sentence before the shop door slammed shut
behind her. Dazed from the kiss, I waited three hours before shutting down the
glowing screen and taking the wine coolers back to my apartment.

Monday morning, I got a call. I was up to my elbows in fleet
cars from a local business that had bad coolant control chips, and it was
causing the coolant pumps to shut down when the computer overheated. It seems
that a warning to this effect appeared in the chip’s warranty and that nobody
had taken the time to read it. I took the call on my headset in the service
bay.

Mary Ann said, “Ethan? Could you
come in and talk to my captain some time today?” I’m the chief mechanic, so I
have to close the place and we still had about fifteen regular customers to
see. I set the appointment for 7:30 that evening. I could’ve made it over
lunch, but she pissed me off by not calling for two days.

Technically, I didn’t know till now
that she had survived the early morning raid after our last meeting. I’d worked
all Saturday on a cheap, portable “decloaking device” for the Patrol. I had
some software that ran four scans simultaneously in a target grid square,
compared the results, and plotted any anomalies. It was nothing special, just
modifications of some traditional image-processing and pattern-recognition
algorithms. The hard part was knowing what to look for. Burning the whole thing
on a programmable microchip was easy; we do it a dozen times a day for vehicles
with built-in computer software patches.

The Patrol Building was in the
middle of nowhere, about two miles from the New York border. To most people, it
was just another stop on the commuter train, or a long drab gray building on
the road that reminded one to slow to the speed limit. When I reached the front
desk, I was met by several men in dark suits and Captain Jenkins. They drooled
over the little black box and CD case I brought with me, but I ignored them.

“Mr. Hayes, a pleasure to meet you.
I’m Fred Jenkins, the captain at this station, and these gentlemen are from the
Federal Satellite Surveillance Bureau.” As he escorted us to his office, Agents
Lawrence and Morris introduced themselves. Since Agent Lawrence had frizzy
blond hair that reminded me of one of the Stooges, I privately dubbed the pair
Larry and Moe. Soon, the captain’s office door shut behind us.

“Where’s Mare?” I asked.

“He means Officer Anselm,”
explained the Captain.

“She’s not cleared for this
discussion,” said Larry. This suit was taller and had a nasal twang to his
voice that would have been better suited to a clown on a children’s cartoon
show. “Mr. Hayes, how long have you been an expert in electronic
counter-measures?”

“I’m not. I’m just a good mechanic
and a fair programmer.” Moe, the suit on the right tried to casually grab my
compact data disc case. I jerked it away and held it above my head. He was a
short bastard, but my temper was getting shorter.

“Your father held a security
clearance at Exotech Industries. Did he at any time while drunk or sober
discuss electronics technology of a sensitive nature with you?” asked Larry.

Captain Jenkins offered me a seat
in front of the high-watt bulb. “I was ten when he disappeared, asshole. I want
a lawyer.”

“Officer Anselm said you came to
us,” argued Jenkins. “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you don’t need a lawyer.
We’re all friends here.”

And the check is in the mail. I
wasn’t mad at Mary Ann any more. No doubt she had put up with days of this
treatment before she agreed to call me in. “Sir, with all due respect, I know
what you’re trying to pull. I’ve come up with something you all want, and you
expect me to just hand it to you. No. I won’t say another word until I get a
contract attorney, preferably someone who deals in patents.”

“We can’t have a patent on this,”
said Moe, standing on his tip-toes. “Any putz with a stamp can get a copy of it
from the US Patent Office. This is a National Secret. We can clamp down on it
and don’t have to pay you a dime.”

I got dead calm. “Alright. Have it
your way.” I handed the compact disc to the captain. The data disc was his
anyway, I was just returning it. My decloaking device was another matter
entirely. While the sweaty-palmed thugs wrestled the CD out of the case and
into a reader, I quietly opened my black box and withdrew the crucial chip.
Before Moe noticed me again, I stuck it under the chair leg. By the time he
figured out what was happening, I had already thrown my full weight into the
chair, shattering the brains of my invention completely.

Moe turned red and almost burst a
blood vessel, pulling back his fist to deck me. The tall suit grabbed him from
behind and muttered, “Easy, Morris. We just get the FBI to search his place for
us.”

Just as he was regaining some
composure, I put in another dig. “Won’t find it,” I explained. They would have
to break the game security on the university computer system and know which
remote site I stored the data on. “You think someone who can program an
invisible car can’t hide things from some office weenie?”

Captain Jenkins was actually
suppressing a chuckle. “Gentlemen, I said we’re all friends here, and I meant
it. Mr. Hayes has done a good and patriotic thing. He’s been an upstanding
member of this community since his family moved here. If he hasn’t gone
anywhere by now, he won’t in the next few hours. Federal officers or not, if
you don’t ease up on this man, I’ll let him walk. I have no reason to hold him.”

Moe almost blew another blood
vessel on that announcement, but his friend came to the rescue. “Okay. He gets a
lawyer, we get a lawyer, and everyone signs the non-disclosure agreement.”

“Certainly,” I said.

When Larry pulled out the Bic pen
and self-triplicating form, I put my hands in my pockets. “I can’t very well
talk to my lawyer if I sign that now, can I?”

Captain Jenkins moved us to
adjoining rooms. For now, the suits had to settle for the remains of the black
box and agreed to wait right there until I obtained representation. Do you know
how many lawyers there are in a phone book? More than auto shops, and we’re
everywhere! Unfortunately, the kind of lawyers that were answering their phones
at this time of night might do me more harm than good. I was wading through the
C’s in the yellow-pages by the light of a desk lamp used in old movies for “the
third degree” when someone knocked on the door.

“Come in,” I said reluctantly. I
envisioned a strip-search as a continuing part of the night’s entertainment.

“Mr. Hayes?” asked a gray-haired
man in a polo sweater. The guy was holding a brief case that cost more than
everything in my apartment combined.

“What do you want him for?”

The old guy smiled. “I’m his
attorney, Nigel Foxworthy.”

It was a miracle, but how had he
known? Mare! I ran over to shake the guy’s hand and to drag him inside before
the Feds saw him. “Are you from Philadelphia by any chance?”

“Pittsburgh... Why?”

I almost kissed him.

“This is quite a house call.
Especially for this hour. Thanks,” I said, trashing the yellow pages before he
could see what I was doing.

“Don’t mention it. It’ll be on the
bill,” he said, charmingly but with complete candor.

“Aha. Yes. About the payment...”

“Ms. Anselm posted a 5000 dollar
bond to safeguard the investment of my time. She mentioned that you were an
inventor in financial straits who had finally hit the mother lode, but were
unable to exploit it due to circumstances she could not explain,” said Mr.
Foxworthy, pouring himself a cup of coffee from the corner of the room. I hadn’t
even noticed it there until now.

I paused a moment, licking my lips
before warning him. “I really appreciate this, but Mary Ann can’t afford this
and neither can I. I don’t think you’re willing to work for free.”

“If you’re half the genius she
makes you out to be, then she’ll get her bond back with interest. What seems to
be the problem?”

I had a seat, and mulled over how
much I should tell him and where I should begin. “Sir, have you ever heard of
the Federal Satellite Surveillance Bureau?” I whispered, pulling out the chair
next to mine.

“They don’t exist,” he replied with
a smile, taking a legal pad and a Cross pen out of his brief case.

“But?”

“The official name is the FCC,
Annapolis Division. You start with your full name, your parent’s names,
social-security numbers, and when we run out of that information, I’ll ask you
about your invention. Not too many details, just enough to let me know what it’s
worth.”

I talked for three hours, telling
him most of my life story, including the first time I got drunk and helped the
wrestling team steal signs from streets with funny names. I hadn’t even told
Mary that juicy bit, but I really trusted this guy. I explained how mom’s long
illness had drained our finances. Her coming to work on pain medication had
been just an excuse to fire her. They never intended to honor their
obligations, but I honored mine.

After he was done with the
interview, he said “I’ll get an injunction against these hotheads till I have a
chance to do a little research. Be polite, but answer no questions unless I’m
there. Sign nothing; that’s the only thing you did right in your last encounter
with our esteemed civil servants. The rest is my job. Ms. Anselm mentioned a
bounty on the last bunch the patrol caught with your scanner. That reward money
will cover tonight.

“It’s a safe bet that there’ll be a
lot more criminals caught with your little black box. Even a sanitized,
scaled-down detector would be better than what they currently have. A 2 percent
premium on all tickets and fines they collect with the device is not
unheard-of. That will go toward my on-going retainer. Since you have no
next-of-kin and I’m sure you don’t want the State getting it all, I need a
temporary beneficiary.”

I quickly decided on Children’s
Hospital, having spent a lot of time there.

“The biggest tragedy in this is
that you aren’t getting a dime yet. I’m curious, Mr. Hayes. If you could get
anything out of this, anything at all, what would that be?”

He caught me off guard. It was
nearly eleven, and all I’d wanted up till now was to stay out of jail and be
able to get to work on time tomorrow morning.

“Think big,” he said.

My eyes must’ve glassed over, and I
swallowed hard.

“Debt free.”

“I said BIG, Mr. Hayes. You could
skip out on this debt at any time. They can’t touch you if you leave the state.
Furthermore, they don’t have records preceding the last two years. It’s
simplicity itself to convince them your father’s life insurance covered your
mother’s bills. Without proof, they have to expunge your credit history, like a
newborn baby’s.”

“Nobody ever told me...”

“Please, Mr. H,” said Foxworthy. “You
have your trade secrets, I have mine. If everyone knew this, nobody would pay
their bills, and then the loophole would vanish. I think you’ve done your
penance already. What do you want? Three wishes.”

I stared at the muddy, circular
stain around the base of the coffee pot. I thought of the time I had spent off
the coast of the Carolinas with my Mom, on the last vacation we had together.

“My own piece of land on one of the
islands, just an acre or two that the tax man can’t take away. If I have
anything left after that, we’ll talk. Do you really think the decloaker box
will make that much? I mean in another year or two, folks will invent a whole
new batch of ways to get around the system.” I’ve never had money before, and I
wanted to make dead sure before I got my hopes up.

“Mr. H, you’re too modest. These
tricks are obvious to you, but not to the builders and maintainers of our
nation’s satellite monitoring system. Information nearly always carries an
expiration date for usability; the buyer expects it, and agrees to the price
accordingly. You, however, possess the insight to generate more information on
a yearly basis. That is rare. Some day, properly managed, you could live quite
comfortably.”

He folded up his glasses and rubbed
the bridge of his nose where the grips pinched. We were both getting tired. “Meanwhile,
I want to keep you safe till this matter is concluded. I don’t trust what’s in
your head to the goons in there. You’re staying at the Radisson downtown for
the next few days. My firm has a copyright infringement case about half an hour
away from here. I’ll volunteer to oversee it, and I can keep an eye on you
while we’re waiting on a few things from my research team.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Otherwise, I doubt I could keep
you out of someone’s basement interrogation cell.”

“But my job,” I explained.

“Is now making yourself rich. Your
boss Sam has already gotten rich off you. He’ll manage. As for your apartment,
bills won’t come till the end of the month, and that’s all you get for mail.
What do you say?”

“I love you. Am I paying you
enough?”

We both laughed on the way out to
his limousine, which was probably already bugged.