Murderworld, p.23
Murderworld, page 23
The costume consisted of a snappy red-orange jumpsuit with a furry fox tail at its rear, Kit’s versatile electric spanner that slotted into a shiny silver tool belt, and his distinctive blue-and-white helmet with the logo of a wrench initialed with the letters “KK.” The helmet’s clear visor created a dimensional projection of Kit’s face right over the wearer’s. If the wearer whispered words without vocalizing them, the helmet perfectly produced Kit’s voice to complete a rather charming illusion.
Perry bought it, and as he paid, wondered whether dressing as the hero of a children’s show was going to help his cause at work.
fifty
Bernhard had spent an entire day in a state of fugue. He knew that yesterday he’d gone to work, but couldn’t remember anything specific that he had done; the previous 24 hours was a phantom, less than a memory. He didn’t sleep, but instead had existed for hours in a floating miasma of half-consciousness, like a fever-dream, and at last sat up in bed in the wee hours of the morning with a craving to do something about his pervasive feeling of wrongness and dread.
He was certain that Lissa’s death was not accidental.
Seized by an idea, he grabbed his spex and began to probe the base’s security server. He soon saw that the system was a proprietary set of complex mechanisms evolved by the company’s god-machines.
Every data structure built by Outlandish was quite secure, so the massive market for elaborate Game hacks and cheats was not entirely the company’s fault; while Outlandish could secure its servers, it was impossible to lock the physical hardware of a console, and so they could be modified with either bootleg chipsets or illegal software that could change the operation of the device and the signals it generated.
The security system’s nodes utilized call-and-response protocols that, like every access point in the base, required biometrics as keys. Bernhard guessed that the lock on his door accessed the same biometric data that every other system used. He got out of bed, and from his desk grabbed a butter knife sitting on a two-day old dirty plate still speckled with toast crumbs. He used the knife to unscrew the metal plate behind his door handle, an operation which revealed the small square slot of an access point. Into the slot he inserted a datacube, which interfaced with his spex.
Within moments he pulled up a node-view of the entry point for the biometric database, the part of the system that inhaled biometric data that it compared to its list of users and their access permissions. Most of the time it ran two checks: Does Person A exist in the system? Does Person A have access permission for Entry Point Z? A “yes” answer to both gained a user entry. A “no” answer to either question resulted in denial of access, and might also trigger a security alert.
Biometric data was just a digitized form of an analog input such as a fingerprint, a voice pattern, or a DNA string. Bernhard opened his door, and pressed his thumb to the lock’s entry pad. A long string of numbers flashed across his spex display, and the lock queeped as its bolt retracted into the door with a loud click.
Bernhard examined the number string with node analysis tools on his spex. The string was not a node, but could be examined as if it were one; the extreme sophistication of node theory meant that all data could be examined for patterns, and those patterns could be represented as geometric shapes (or clusters of shapes) and as various colors. The theory had created a way for users to visualize numbers—and therefore computer programs—in symbolic, geometric form. This allowed for new methods of program construction and problem-solving, and meant that programmers could study the higher orders of program complexity generated by evolutionary algorithms without knowing the nuts-and-bolts operations of the nodes themselves. Node theory, in an age when machines wrote software, was a necessity.
The node parser that Bernhard ran rendered the data string as a blue parallelepiped, a cube squashed until its angles were either acute or obtuse. The number of the node’s faces and vertices were a measure of its data’s complexity. Although the string was long, Bernhard was now sure that the data contained a great amount of redundancy, much of which would be taxonomic; the input gathered by Bernhard’s door was housed inside a kind of metadata container that identified the string as a biometric key, and which was labeled as a thumbprint. These metadata were doubtless replicated in every string of biometric data captured by the door system.
Node color was another measure of complexity, but reflected its function. This node’s color was blue, but close to pure primary blue, which meant that the data was almost all information rather than a set of instructions like a program. Bernhard had expected as much.
Access to the security system was going to take more than a thumbprint, and likely required a tissue scraping. Since he wasn’t going to be able get a DNA sample from a member of the base security team, he would need to figure out another way to get inside it.
Bernhard sat in his lab, wearing his professional-grade spex rather than the low-level consumer pair he kept in his room. He’d worked for hours in deepest concentration, manipulating and cajoling fields of nodes to do his bidding.
Before his eyes unfolded a glorious and awe-inspiring visual simulation of the god-machine in operation. Like the process of protein synthesis, a large clump of connected nodes acted as a factory to weave together a baroque new node-molecule by using free-floating node strings of specific kinds and colors as raw material. The resulting creation was intricate and beautiful, a sinister starburst node-cluster. Bernhard had harnessed the power of evolution to design and build this new program, without doubt one of the most difficult objects he’d ever constructed. This particular version was spawned from the 10,436th generation. His creation had gotten more effective and devious over succeeding iterations, and he couldn’t wait to test this newest one.
Late in the morning, Lucy Pease poked her head into the room.
“Hey, Bernhard,” she said, raising her voice to get his attention while he was wearing the interface and ear plugs.
Bernhard snapped out of his reverie, slid the spex onto his forehead, and pulled out one of the earplugs, from which leaked the sounds of some gritty 20th century garage band. “Hi, Lucy,” he said.
“What’re you working on?”
“Just running a little experiment.”
“Oh. I forwarded you a QA ticket this morning about some anomalous activity. I noticed you hadn’t read it. Please give it priority.”
“Sure.”
“Eaten lunch yet?”
“Not hungry, thanks.”
“Okay. I’ll let you get back to it.”
She left. It was the first time he’d seen her in days, as she was a hands-off manager who allowed Bernhard to respond to issues at his own pace. She may have been his department head, but hers was a bureaucratic job that required more basic knowledge than the kind Bernhard possessed, and like many other technicians she had bare-bones understanding of what he did.
Bernhard slipped the spex back on. His new fabrication was almost finished.
Bernhard ran a contained simulation. Within its boundaries ran a commercially-purchased security firewall of the highest grade. It had been expensive, designed as it was to protect the data of major corporations, but Bernhard earned far more money than he could ever spend.
Inside the sim’s sealed environment, he’d let his Frankensteinian creation loose, free to attack the firewall as it would during an actual hack. He’d begun to call it an animalcule, an archaic term for bacteria; in its action it wasn’t a virus, or a worm, or a lock-pick, but some weird, evolved creature that behaved with single-minded and intelligent purpose. Bernhard watched the action unfold within an expanded timeframe that was billions of times slower than that at which nodes operated.
The spiky node-mass drifted down the datastream towards the firewall, part of the standard free-floating node traffic that swam like corpuscles to the firewall’s access point, where it was stopped, checked, and either blocked or allowed to pass. The beast Bernhard had built hesitated right before it hit the firewall’s gate. There it hovered for a moment, then lashed out, deforming part of its surface into a tentacle with which it reached toward a nearby swimming node, a red-and-yellow flippered corkscrew of data, like it was an octopus grabbing its prey. Its wriggling arm touched the node, palpated it, then stabbed the arm right through its surface and inside of it. For a moment the prey turned transparent, and Bernhard watched with fascinated glee as the animalcule injected a tiny piece of itself into the smaller node as if it had deposited a parasitic egg. Its tentacle withdrew, snapped back into its body. A new tentacle formed on the animalcule’s opposite flank, and its arm whipped out to penetrate a different victim, whereupon it repeated its egg-laying operation. The speed of its movements accelerated, and it hit dozens of targets within the space of seconds—which Bernhard knew meant nanoseconds in actual time.
Without incident or exception, each of the animalcule’s targets were allowed passage through the firewall’s gate. As soon as they crossed to the inside of the firewall, the “eggs” wriggled free of these nodes as if they were tiny worms. They swam toward each other and converged into a growing shape that within moments became an exact copy of the animalcule that waited on the outside. The duplicate swam over to the firewall itself, a short distance from its gate, where it merged with the wall’s node architecture. At the point where the animalcule touched it, the firewall spasmed, then deformed outward. The original animalcule surged forward to merge with the deformation on the outside of the wall, and the two creatures fused into a new shape, a glowing hexagon that outlined a door distinct and separate from the firewall’s guarded entrance. Bernhard’s creation had restructured the firewall to create a private entrance just for him.
He whooped with joy. Now he needed to see if it worked with the real thing; the thought gave him prickles of sweat beneath his arms. But he had to know.
fifty-one
In his apartment, Perry put the costume on, adding a pair of black work boots he hadn’t worn in years. He stared into the mirror and activated the helmet, and in an instant his face was obscured by Kit’s furry, grinning features. Perry experimented, changing his own expressions and watching as Kit’s face matched them, from small movements like raising one eyebrow, to more complex gestures like winking with his tongue out.
He mouthed a few words. “Hi, kids! I’m Kit Kitsune, here to save the world!” His voice was a pleasant tenor with a mischievous edge. “Jump aboard the good ship Pepper Mill and we’ll drill to the center of the earth!”
It was effective, even creepy. Might as well have some fun, he thought, if my career might fall apart at any second. Too bad that Linda wasn’t going to come as Vicki Vixen, Kit’s fetching romantic interest; they would have made quite a pair.
Perry walked the few blocks to Union Square, and arrived at the Westin St. Francis Hotel right around 8:00 pm, where he waited for Linda out front. The towering structure bore the name of the original hotel that had once stood on the same site, but the new building was but fifteen years old, one of the many constructed after the devastating 2069 earthquake had remodeled the City. It was the disaster anticipated by hungry developers for decades, the excuse they’d long needed to erase much of San Francisco’s past: forty-three seconds of violent shuddering followed by a massive tsunami that gave them carte blanche to knock down two centuries’ worth of damaged but classic buildings that happened to sit on some of the most valuable property in the entire world. Historians and lifelong residents thought of it as a cultural and architectural bloodbath, while investors and contractors called it “Christmas.”
Thousands of costumed revelers filled the streets, as Halloween had long been a major holiday in San Francisco, an excuse to pretend that there was still some kind of edgy, alternative spirit in a town that had long since lost almost everything that had once made it cool. It was hard for Perry to imagine that this gated community for the rich could possess any creative qualities, packed as it was with the kind of people who imagined that dancing in costume while high on the latest Chinese synthetics was somehow equal to an activity as deep and thoughtful as painting a picture. A day trader wearing the latest bondage gear—the kind that ran hardcore fetish videos overlaid atop its simulated leather straps—was still just a stockbroker. Perry limited his own costumed adventures to the Game, where most people couldn’t recognize him—although his recent experience with ambush journalism had managed to ruin his anonymity. He wondered if perhaps he was no better than the drunk, whooping idiots around him.
Linda stepped up, easy to recognize in her own outfit, a traditional ensemble that didn’t use projections. She was dressed as Arabella Flit, a dark fairy from the popular fantasy immersion series, Annus Horribilis. The fairy was a fan favorite because of her questionable morals and over-the-top glam style. Linda wore the costume with perfect elegance, and had given herself arched brows with sparkling purple eye shadow and catlike fangs that appeared when she smiled. Her hair was midnight black and piled into a tall coif, and she wore a dark, glittering skintight mini-dress with a plunging neckline. On her back were translucent wings attached to small motors that made them vibrate on command.
“Fantastic, as always, my darling,” said Perry, with Kitsune’s voice.
Linda grinned, and leaned in to hug him. “Kit Kitsune—sugar!”
Perry spoke in a normal voice, which disabled the character’s speech. “I wish I’d had the time to put more effort into it.”
“You look good. It’s a fun costume.”
“Let’s go in and get this over with.”
“That bad?”
“I’d rather not talk about it right now. We should just try to enjoy ourselves.”
They rode the elevator to the 37th floor where the party was already in full swing. The event was inside a subdivided private ballroom with tall ceilings, and its enormous windows looked out over the Square and downtown. About 300 people were in attendance, including clients and coworkers’ dates, the larger portion of the room filled with tables where guests slurped free liquor and gorged on catered food. A smaller connected lounge to one side had a DJ who resorted to the time-honored strategy of spinning tunes that were hits ten or fifteen years earlier, when everybody in the room was young enough to pay attention to the pop charts; it never failed to get the over-thirty crowd up and dancing. At least the accompanying visuals were new, transparent projections of bats, skulls, black cats, and laughing pumpkins that flew around the room, climbed the walls, or landed on the guests, where they bounced or flapped in time to the music.
Perry made the rounds, greeting his colleagues and complimenting them on their costumes, and introduced Linda to those new enough never to have met her. Lording over the proceedings were the firm’s partners, holding court at different tables. Gabriel Dray enhanced his inherent gauntness, and appeared as a skeletal prince in a skin-tight garment that showed rotting innards filled with squirming maggots and worms, his face overlaid with a death’s head projection topped with a crown. Peter Schlimm, a corpulent fellow, was a bloated demon with a scaly, red body; curved ram’s horns at either side of his head bracketed a mask that projected an ugly, toothy, rough-skinned visage. Both men were ringed by sycophantic beasts straight from Bosch’s fever dreams, a pack of hungry creatures bedecked with teeth and claws, often wearing too-revealing garments that embodied extremes of carnality. Perry’s fingers twitched for a weapon.
Perry spotted Greg Horrow at a corner table, and found it hard to believe that his boss was dressed as Eraser X. Horrow’s middle-aged pudge was squeezed into a black suede bodysuit, while an expensive projection stocking-mask was pulled over his features so that he looked young, bald, and olive-skinned, with two dark rectangles that floated before his eyes like sunglasses. He’d set his copy of the Icepick across the table before him. The sword radiated light, and Horrow, illuminated from beneath by the weapon’s blue glow, leaned back and smoked an expensive Indonesian cigar.
Perry was trying to decide whether or not to greet Horrow when he felt a finger tap his shoulder. He turned to look down at a short version of Slaughterella, and flinched.
“Hey, Perry!” said the image of his mother, with the grating voice of Beryl Gaddis. Beryl was herself on the flat-chested side, and she’d stuffed her bra with an enormous amount of padding in order to approximate the correct size of the killstar’s legendary chest. The tiny woman looked like she might topple over.
“Beryl?” Perry replied, unsure how to respond.
“Yeah, man—like the outfit? I’ve always been such a big fan of your mom’s.”
“Nice job,” said Linda, choking back laughter. She pointed at Beryl’s breasts. “You really went the extra mile, there.”
“Thanks. Like your costume. Arabella’s such a calculating bitch!”
Linda buzzed her wings and gave a small curtsy. “Gotta destroy your enemies in style.”
“Wanna drink?” Perry asked Linda, looking for a way out.
“Sure. Gin and tonic. Lots of lime.”
“Be right back, ladies,” he said as he headed towards the bar.
He ordered Linda’s drink, and got a double shot of Scotch whisky for himself, a peaty Islay single malt that he took no time to appreciate; he lifted his visor and downed it before asking for another.
