Murderworld, p.29
Murderworld, page 29
When she put the interface back on, she discovered that she had a message. She played it back.
She found herself atop a soaring snow-capped mountaintop surrounded on all sides by a range of similar, lesser peaks. The air was crisp, the view unnatural in its clarity; she felt as if she could see a hundred kilometers in any direction. Before her stood Artus Ods, dressed in a sharp, light linen suit and unaffected by the simulated frost. Right behind his head was the late afternoon sun, and it gave him a golden corona.
“Congratulations, Mari Night,” he said. “This is an official notification that you have qualified for the final rounds of the current Halloween Tourney. The Round of 32 begins on October 31st at noon, Pacific Standard Time, which, according to your location data, indicates 4:00 am your time. You will need to confirm your participation at the enclosed dojang coordinates one hour before the start of the first match, at 11:00 am pst. If you do not check in by 11:15 am pst, then your name will be withdrawn from the match and another player will be substituted.
“The Round of 32 will be a free-for-all within a classic dojang specially modified for the Tourney, and will end when exactly twenty-four of the competitors have been eliminated. The Round of 8 format will be announced an hour before the actual match.
“Like the rest of the Tourney, all matches during the finals are still forfeit battles, and normal looting rules apply, including the standard prohibition against owning more than one Armilon. Only Armilon exchanges are permitted.
“Whether you got here by skill or luck, you will soon be fighting the best players in the Game. So, from myself and the entire staff of Outlandish, we wish you success. Happy hunting!”
The message over, she was bumped back into her clan spawnpoint. That just happened, she told herself.
“Mari!” said a voice from behind her, and she turned to find Sorrow hanging upside-down like a bat from the bloated central chandelier. He straightened his legs and dropped, then bounced from a sofa and back-flipped to the ground. “You bail. We don’t know what happen to you. All sugar?”
“It is now,” she said. “I’ve been working out for the finals.”
“Bet you be.”
“I’m wearing a brand-new Temujin.”
“Really? Now I’m jealous. Can we trade lives?”
She smiled. “No, but you can help me train.”
Maxwell appeared in Sorrow’s hand. “Ready to be spoinked?”
sixty-one
Bernhard intuited that the answers to the puzzle of Lissa’s death were inside the secret section of the base where she did her work. He was determined to get past the heavy, locked door that barred his way like a sentinel.
Although Bernhard’s hard work had allowed him to crack the base’s security system he now had a different problem. He couldn’t just walk up to the highly-secured door and hack its lock without creating a glaring record of his entry, no doubt backed up by flawless, high-definition recordings of him jimmying the door shot from twenty different angles; even if he were to alter the security logs to remove the evidence, his alterations might create obvious gaps. Plus, the more often he broke into the system, the likelier it became that he’d be caught. He needed a more subtle method to get inside.
Bernhard waited in his room. He sat on his bed, impatient, trying to read an old paperback novel, and his eyes skimmed it with a mechanical motion, too distracted to absorb the meanings of the words. He looked at his watch, which now displayed only two minutes later than the last time he’d checked.
At last he heard an electrical whirr from outside his door, and the latch opened.
In glided the machine. Twice a week during the afternoon a custodial treader made its rounds through Bernhard’s wing and retrieved trash from each room’s small waste receptacle. Bernhard had an approximate idea of when it might arrive, and had staked out his own room.
The treader ignored Bernhard and made straight for the garbage can, which Bernhard had moved to the corner of the room furthest from the door, between his bed and a wall. The machine carried its own waste bin in a special rack that sat behind its body like a large but sturdy backpack, and which rested upon the treader’s base. The bin was solid plastic, and was about one-and-a-third meters tall and half as deep and wide. As the robot crossed the room, it flipped open the bin’s lid to receive a new load of trash.
As soon as the machine reached down to lift the room’s trash can in its grasping arms, Bernhard sprawled across the bed on his stomach, then stretched out his arm to pop open a small panel near the base of the robot’s body. Once the panel was open, he tapped the plastic button that turned the machine off, and the robot froze in place.
Bernhard grabbed a datacube from his nightstand and slotted it into a socket right by the treader’s power stud, then hit the button to restart the machine. It activated, still locked in its last position with the trash can in its arms as it ran Bernhard’s instructions.
On a narrow display set into the treader’s chest scrolled command lines:
PROCESS
FUNC SUSP [0,0,0]
FUNC RES [0,1,0]
CMD SYS READY
Bernhard slipped on a transparent pair of spex. They were now tied to the datacube, and so a text menu of the treader’s functions appeared onscreen. Bernhard activated node-view settings on his spex, and the treader’s operating system was now represented by standard-looking, simple clusters of nodes. He tapped a succession of colorful dodecahedrons to drill down into the proper branching subsection of the node structure, then pulled up a plump cluster that looked like the cubist representation of a bunch of grapes. With haste, he manipulated these shapes by pushing them into a modified configuration.
Bernhard figured he had a few minutes before somebody from the maintenance department came to his room to find out why this unit had stopped. He hurried through a series of short steps to reprogram the robot’s functions.
The treader was ready, now under Bernhard’s control. He shut the panel with the datacube still in its socket, then lifted the treader’s large trash bin out of its containing rack. He dumped the trash onto the floor on the other side of his bed, then re-slotted the bin onto the robot’s back. He stood on his bed to carefully step inside the bin. It turned out to be quite sturdy, and the treader bore his extra weight without becoming unbalanced. Within the bin Bernhard half-squatted to settle into the container. His lower legs were jammed against one wall and his back pressed against the other in a permanent partial knee-bend, and his head was mere inches below the top of the bin. The position was uncomfortable but functional for his needs. He put on his spex, and could now see through the treader’s cameras.
He issued instructions to the machine and gave it specific coordinates. It set down his room’s trash receptacle. The bin’s lid, which until now had hung unused on one side of the container, slammed shut over Bernhard’s head and sealed away most of the outside light. It was dark and confined inside, though a tiny amount of light seeped in from the space between the lid and the bin.
With crisp efficiency the bot exited his room and shut the door behind it. It trundled in a perfect straight line down the hallway. Watching the journey through the robot’s eyes Bernhard saw another machinist round the corner, a low-level man whose name Bernhard didn’t even know. He held his breath as the man passed, but the other fellow didn’t even glance at the treader—it was as if the machine was invisible, or just a kind of background noise.
As the treader crawled through the building on Bernhard’s programmed course he used the spex to work on a few problems. First, Bernhard had to alter a specific variable tracked by the machine’s software, which was the amount of space in his treader’s bin; unless this information was changed, it would cause the treader to report to the maintenance server that its bin was full and thus not available for service. He modified the trash-detection subroutine to report that his bin was only 25 percent utilized.
While researching treader operation, he’d realized that there was a good chance that rooms on the base gave treaders selective entrance permission, the kind that might even be required to fall within a particular schedule in order to not send up some kind of warning flag. He’d prepared for this situation by breaking into the maintenance logs to find out when specific treaders were supposed to clean specific rooms. He’d discovered that while each room did indeed have a scheduled window for trash pick-up, the actual assignment of each treader to their next job was somewhat random, based on which robot was available and nearest to a particular space, an efficient arrangement that saved treaders travel time and thus energy. Furthermore, treaders were issued a one-time key that gave them access to a specific room for a small window of time, a situation for which he’d made extensive preparation.
As the treader cruised down the base’s halls, passing occasional and unsuspecting staff members, Bernhard ran a small program he’d devised. It uploaded itself to the maintenance server where it propagated itself to every treader on the base. The program instructed each machine to stop its current task, count out five minutes of time, then proceed on its way. The maintenance server would receive a signal from every treader—other than the one under Bernhard’s control—that it was busy. By default, Bernhard hoped, his treader would get the assignment to enter the secret server room to collect its trash, and would thus receive the room’s temporary passkey. It was a gamble, as the maintenance server might just decide to give Bernhard’s treader a different assignment. But by tricking the server to give him the key in voluntary fashion, Bernhard also avoided the potential security flags created by forcing the server to reveal it.
After a period of time that felt to Bernhard, confined inside the bin, far longer than the clock on his spex said had passed, the treader stopped. The view through its cameras displayed the heavy door with its multiple biometric locks. Bernhard held his breath as he waited to see what would happen.
On his spex, a subscreen displayed all communication between the treader and the maintenance server. Every fifteen seconds, the treader pinged its current location to the server, which it now did as Bernhard monitored the transaction.
The maintenance server was slow to respond. It labored to troubleshoot the fact that all of its treaders but one had stopped in its tracks. After a long moment, it sent out a new set of priority instructions to every treader: return to base.
Bernhard’s treader rotated in place, and he watched in frustration as the big door swung out of view. With haste he tried to regain control of the device. Yet the “return” command was part of the bot’s underlying core protocols, an order that overrode all others, like a primal reflex hard-coded into its artificial mind. Bernhard watched as the machine took him through a small automatic door into a low-ceilinged access corridor built for the sole use of treaders. He realized he’d been thwarted by the maintenance system’s careful failsafes; his plan had broken down, and he needed to get back to his room and re-think his approach. He pushed against the bin’s lid in an attempt to escape only to discover that it was latched shut, trapping him in a tiny prison. He could neither get out nor reach the off switch, and his repeated efforts to deactivate the treader through its operating system weren’t working.
Bernhard was infused with swelling dread. The treader was going home, and home was in another building. And to get there, it was going outside.
At the end of the low corridor an automatic door opened, and snow flurries clouded the air as if they were a species of swarming winter gnat. The treader exited and cruised down a small ramp that led into the snow.
It was evening, and Bernhard checked the current weather conditions on his spex: far below freezing, a brisk -38ºc, with wind that gusted at 23 kilometers an hour.
Bernhard wore only pants, indoor shoes, and a thin cotton shirt. Right away he felt the arctic bite, and was thankful that the bin somewhat protected him from direct contact with the wind. Yet since the bin itself was exposed to open air its walls cooled within seconds. By his recall the maintenance shop was on the far side of the base, several hundred meters from his own building. The treader moved at a steady five kilometers an hour. He guessed he was going to be inside the bin for a few minutes, even longer if the snow was thick enough. Through the treader’s cameras he saw darkness punctuated by wisps of falling show, but thought that he could make out the twinkle of distant lights from an approaching building.
He did some rapid calculations on his spex, and factored in temperature and wind chill. He realized that he had a mere five or six minutes before he became hypothermic, or even got frostbite. He started to shiver.
The creep of claustrophobia compounded by survival panic spurred him into action, and he pounded against the bin’s lid. It was thick, industrial-strength plastic, designed for durability under extreme arctic conditions. It didn’t budge.
There was nobody he could call for help on his spex as he’d be caught. Even if he managed to force open the lid of the bin and re-entered his building, he’d need to explain to security how he got outside without passing through a biometric lock, and his entire scheme could be blown. He resigned himself to the fact he’d have to wait it out, and once inside the maintenance warehouse could figure out a way to make his treader return to his own building without arousing suspicion.
He’d now been outside for two minutes, and already his fingers were starting to cramp and stiffen as the blood withdrew from his extremities and pooled within his core. His shivering worsened, and became violent and uncontrollable. He knew that if his body temperature dropped by just two degrees he could become disoriented or even lose consciousness.
As he shook, he tried to concentrate on the treader’s internal workings. On sudden inspiration he examined the control system for its motor. He soon saw that the treader’s top speed was locked in place by a kind of inhibitor. He guessed that it was designed this way on purpose so that just like every other device on the base it conserved energy: speed burned additional power. If he could remove the inhibitor, he could speed up the treader. It should have been a simple procedure for him, but his thoughts were becoming disconnected, his mind clouded with a chill so intense that it seemed to reach inside his brain and squeeze the rationality right out of him.
Lissa’s face, cold and dead, appeared before him, and he saw every pore on her blue-white skin with utter clarity. Her lips were still parted as if forever locked in the moment of her final exhalation. Her blank, lifeless eyes stared into some unknown eternity, then swiveled to look right at Bernhard.
He lurched, gasping, his mind snapping back into focus. Concentrate or die, he told himself.
With deliberate effort, he pulled the inhibitor’s program nodes apart. It took every shred of intellect he could still muster to remodel their configuration. As the final node clicked into place, he felt the treader lurch into a higher gear to speed across the tundra toward its nest.
The rest was a gauzy half-dream of ice and death, which together tasted just like black licorice.
sixty-two
Perry sat in his living room and pondered his next steps. Recent events had pulled him so far away from what he’d felt to be his normal life that he hadn’t taken time to evaluate his current financial situation.
Mari’s incipient fame was doubtless going to save his ass. Only an hour earlier he’d found his inbox stuffed with messages Soo-yun had forwarded him: these included an assortment of offers to represent her (to which Perry replied that he was already her manager); lucrative sponsorship offers from weapons designers to use their product in the Tourney Finals (though tempting, Perry wouldn’t dream of telling her which weapon to use); or scam artists offering too-sweet deals that were certainly fraudulent. Everybody wanted a piece of her.
Perry did indeed want to create some immediate short-term gain, especially since he soon might no longer be able to practice law. But sponsorship deals were premature; the better Mari did in the Tourney the more she was potentially worth. Endorsement deals were certain at the Tourney’s end, but they’d be with bigger companies offering much greater compensation.
Perry’s pressing need for money was best met by the fact that he had information that almost nobody else in the world possessed. In the first place, he now knew that the Game’s reigning player wasn’t human, and therefore possibly unbeatable. He reflected back upon what his mother had told him last night. She’d been hired by Outlandish for a top-secret project to train Eraser X. She hadn’t been told what he actually was, yet as she worked with him she noted that she only had to go over a move once before he perfected it. Acting on her suspicions, she’d made small-talk with Eraser during their sessions and asked him little things about himself: his favorite foods, about music and old movies; what he’d do with any prize money he won; how he felt about current events or scenes in ongoing dramas; how he spent his leisure time when not gaming; if he was dating anybody and whether they were a good kisser. His answers were odd, fragmentary, and stilted. Maddy’s from-the-hip version of a Turing Test had keyed her into his true nature. Eraser’s unbroken string of wins had only solidified her suspicion.
Perry’s second piece of data was that he was certain that Mari Night was the most gifted player he’d even seen—good enough that she might even be able to defeat the presumably unstoppable killing machine. In the multibillion-dollar world of Game bookmaking, this specific bit of insider knowledge was incredibly valuable.
Perry wasn’t poor, and though his main source of income had recently been cut off, he still had several hundred thousand dollars in the bank. Through several different betting services based in multiple countries, Perry placed various wagers. Eraser was the favorite, and the moneyline odds for him to win stood at -1000, a 1-to-10 chance that he would win. Nobody was going to get rich putting money on the champion, who was ranked, as always, a sure win. Mari, on the other hand, had no record, so there was little information for bookies to go on; plus she carried the least-respected Armilon. He felt good about his chances.
