Virtually True (33 page)

True sails down and is about to squirt through when he catches a whiff of trouble. Datamines: saucers in designer raspberry, pink and yellow, a screen of them floating inside the door.

Odessa’s inner words again. “You’ve only got a couple minutes. Get shut inside, you don’t get out. These mines are armed and ready to rock, except for one of them. Don’t know which, yet.”

True floats over, studies the mines from assorted angles while Odessa searches for the key to breaking through. Twelve of them, three in a row, four columns, fill up the door. Except for color (all are in the pastel family), and the rate they rotate, the mines seem identical.

“Got it, True. The winner is... the light blue mine near the bottom-right corner.”

True looks. There is no light blue mine near the bottom right-hand corner. A light cherry one, a lime one, a powder concord grape one, no blue. True points, shrugs.

“You don’t see a blue one, do you. And I don’t even know if the data are based on color or location. All I got from the codebreak is it’s the light blue one, lower right corner. Someone’s jiggled it. A quake precaution. Smart. Very smart. Get back here and I’ll work on it. Fuck me fuck me fuck me. But don’t worry. I’ll get it.”

True stays, looks at the lower right hand corner. A red one, almost too bright to be pastel. True thinks. When blood hits oxygen it turns red, but inside the body it’s blue. True still hovers.

Odessa taps on True’s inner ear mike. “Don’t even think about it. Don’t worry. I’ll get it. But you’re going to have to chill your enthusiasm a while.”

True remains in space. Reaches for the mine.

“True. You’re being rash. OK. I’m telling you. Get back here. Don’t do this. True? True?”

At the last instant, True grabs the mine diagonally left, pulls it out.

Nothing happens.

He waits some more, but nothing happens, so he shoots through.

“How’d you know?” Odessa’s yelling, excited. “Never seen anybody do something like that. Your rep is deserved. Reiner? You ever seen anybody—of course you haven’t, because you’re not into this kind of thing, but let me tell you, your colleague is microdude of the net.”

True still in the matter at hand. He heads to Recent Entries, senses Sato’s presence everywhere, his idiosyncrasies, taste, business acumen. True skims the data and skims
over
the data—the entries are arranged by date, size, and content—checks the content abstracts and selects R & D Testing, Misc. Lists of various tests conducted the world over, divided by Technology Type, Testing Site, Test Results, Investment Yield Projections. He selects the Site category, scrolls a list of countries where Sato R & D Testing was or is taking place. Luzonia. True dives into this file, follows roads paved with bricks of info, stops when he gets to one labeled Virtual Reality Weaponry, Luzonian Interior, dated a recent day—three weeks prior.

He picks up the brick and looks in. Watches insurgents fire from tight bunkers, gunpowder and laser juice in the air. In a wink their world turns topsy-turvy. They fire wildly. Splotches of them disappear. Abstracts confirm the success of the test. Confused, True access a log of Fortune 1000 meetings. Meetings, private sidebars replete with threats and accusations. Sides broken into two camps: Sato’s and ADC’s. Private memorandum, from Sato, confirming Luzonian R & D test results. Computer models predict success against Sato corporate foes. The reality of this virtual reality discovery outstrips his wildest electrical musings. What he’s discovered is deadly.

Light pulses, bleached whiter than heaven’s white, shoot by his ear. Odessa shoots intercept missiles. “Out of there, True!” A plasma blob paddles by. Odessa fires manually, tries to knock the tracers off line. Only has to miss one, though, for True to be ex-True. He feels Odessa’s furious salvos, the mice clicking reminding him of monsoon rain pummeling plastic roofs.

True thinks
escape hatch
, like in cartoons, settles for the door he came through, but the mine screen is back online, undoubtedly with a different code. An errant laser grits the door behind the screen three-quarters shut. True slips up toward the screen, but slicing lights pin him down from behind.

Odessa from somewhere inside True’s brain. “Reiner. Go in. Take this mine deactivation software in to him. I can’t reach him through the interference. When you get near, shoot it to him.”

True can’t hear Reiner. A barrage of lasers caroms off the wall, over his head. He’s trapped, aware that Sato’s CyberSecurity are on the way.

“Just get in there!” Odessa’s screaming.

Then Reiner’s voice in the back. “I’ve never been in there before. I don’t know how.”

“I’ll back you up. You have to cover him or he’s dead! Reiner! Fuck! She ran out. True? Can you hear me?”

True doesn’t think Odessa will hear him anyway. He hugs silence.

Odessa, panicking: “Who the hell are you? What are you doing? Put that down. No-o-o-!”

True assumes things on the outside aren’t going well either. Hopes Odessa and Reiner are all right. The door inches shut as lasers fire unabated. True thinks about risking a hit, but knows he wouldn’t survive. Is it better to die in Sato’s log? He jumps into a pond of investment algorithms, hopes he can lose himself in the digital data, although he knows all Sato has to do to flush him out is apply them. True elbows an equation out of the way so he can rest more comfortably, then peers up through the numbers to see the door opening, heaven’s light streaming inside.

A familiar voice, a familiar aura, a radiance enters this void. True sees Eden, towing a shield of scavenged binary code. She feathers down, takes True’s hands, wraps them around her waist. Using the screen as protection, she pushes through a phalanx of CyberSecurity leaking through the door and deactivated mine screen. They are too far away by the time anyone can fire. Into a safebox room. They funnel through a prism, up so fast True suffers mental bends. A crushing roar in his ears. Blackness.

True wakes up on the floor of WWTV’s Tokyo Bureau, arms and legs wrapped tightly around Eden. Odessa’s shaking him alive. “Are you copacetic or what? Should I leave you two alone to get better acquainted? Who is this hacker extraordinaire?”

Reiner’s in the corner, her hand muffling her mouth. Failure doesn’t set well with her. When she sees True looking her way, she says, “True. I’m so sorry.”

She swings through the door.

“Who is she?” Odessa looks at Eden, shakes his head.

“My wife.” True gently nudges her awake.

“You’re one lucky man. Weren’t for her you’d be smoked, served on a platter with bagels, cream cheese, and shit.”

True, Eden, eyeball to eyeball, limbs snaked through limbs. “How did you know where to find me?”

She licks thick lips. “Finding you was easy. The hard part was rigging a software screen from binary junk in less than a minute.”

“Why’d you find me?”

She sits up. “The only way I can make things right is to get that software back from ADC.”

“Before that, we have something more pressing.” True calls Reiner.

A shuffling sound outside the door. Reiner leans in.

“Get ready to record, Reiner. You have a story to air.”

“No. You. It’s yours. I’ll do the grunt work.”

“I’ve got to do a little research before we air, but then—”

“What?” Eden, Reiner, Odessa’s voices overlapping.

“War.”

PART FOUR

VIRTUALLY REALITY

CHAPTER 25

True watches Eden teleshop for computer parts through the net, virtual price comparison at chop shops ringing Asia—Singapore, Hong Kong, Chiang Mai, Bombay. She trades a vintage transducer and infolink carrier she tracked down in a Thai junk shop for Setup-and-Go hardware from a Nerulan rounder. Plows the profit into super-speed, brain’s-edge data blasters, transmitters, surveillance software, debugging algorithms, virus detectors. She’s running ten deals at once. He understands this is what she did for international aid, piecing together computer systems from ancient history, holding these crackpot inventions together with electrical spit and virtual glue. One 24-hour cycle and she has the core tech. Boxes, packages by courier, have been arriving all morning. On her way to constructing a hacker’s wet dream—her words.

It’s comfortable and comforting to be with Eden. Familiar with her tiniest nuances, how she craves aromatic coffee, can’t face morning without it; how when conducting a deal over the net she splays her fingers, the crook of her thumb a triangular well; how she puffs at tickling stray hairs. In the shower he remembered how he missed her hothouse cheeks, crystal collarbone, her yearning breasts. Yet their love-making is unsatisfying, as if he was making love and she was making love but
they
weren’t making love.

The sound of the telelink, and Slovo de Bris’s face sparkles in wall-length 3-D. “I can’t believe you called and left a message. I thought you were dead.”

“Just lying low.”

“Why did you contact me over conventional lines?”

“Eden’s rigged up some surveillance protection.”

De Bris has again ballooned due to unchecked gluttony. An IV drip for his arm. Home liposuction. “Now that I know you’re alive and I should be happy, what the hell do you want?”

“You catch Reiner Jacobi’s story?”

“Incredible.”

“It was my scoop.”

De Bris knows better than to question. “Just when everyone gives up on you, you uncover the biggest story in years.”

“You helped.”

“A tiny bit—if at all. But I’m confused. Why give up the glory? Your career isn’t exactly cutting-edge.”

“It’s better no one knows I’m alive. There’s more.”

De Bris idly checks his IV drip. Taps the tube. Milky white glue goo inside. “Like?”

“Tell you later. But I need you to answer a question about Aslam’s autopsy. You said he’d been exposed to various intestinal ailments. What were they?”

De Bris sucks up the pre-referenced data, comments as he reads, “Bilharzia, no surprise. They eradicate it in Africa only to discover it in Southeast Asia. Never heard of a case in Luzonia, though. That was thought to be too far south. Dysentery, giardia, and malaria, which isn’t intestinal but I figure you should know.”

“Check your WHO environmental factor charts. Exempting Nerula’s shanties, where in this city could you contract any of these?”

“According to the literature, the malarial mosquito is Luzonia’s national bird. You get dysentery at any restaurant where the waiter’s keeling over. That’s it, far as these charts go. They haven’t been updated in years, since the U.S. withdrew funding. Anything else?”

“No.”

“Answer me this: Jacobi reported that while ADC was testing VR programs to use as weapons, it was also developing an army of clones. But something happened to the first batch of clones, and this is what escalated tensions between ADC and Sato?”

“Right so far.”

“What happened to the first clone batch?”

“I’m not sure. Sato probably launched a pre-emptive strike, somehow infected them with a virus. Find out what kills one, you can kill them all. This prompted ADC to plot stealing Sato’s prize weapons technology: virtual reality systems. This was the weapon Aslam hinted at, but I was too slow to figure it out.”

“Where do things stand now?”

“Latest word is that war’s imminent. Sato’s been plaguing ADC’s clones and ADC’s been ripping off Sato’s VR weapons technology. It’s a standoff.”