Cyberdrome (10 page)

He tasted salty
tears as he returned the gesture. Without parting lips, she turned sideways and
sat on his lap. He felt the pleasant weight of her body sink down on him, and
all at once, the three years since their last lovemaking seemed like only
yesterday.

She lifted off
him slightly. “Am I hurting you?” she whispered.

“Not at all,” he
replied.

“Can you feel
anything? Down there, I mean?”

He smiled.
“Can’t you tell?”

“But I thought—”

“My problem’s up
here,” he interrupted, pointing to his temple. “Remember?”

She smiled back,
then put her head to his side, and gently bit his ear lobe. “Come with me,” she
whispered.

“Where are we
going?” he asked, trying not to blush as he followed her to the elevator door.

“My place,” she
said.

Five minutes
later, they were inside her office. She entered a symbol on the door lock and ordered
the room’s lights to dim. “No calls,” she said aloud, then added, “Turn off all
room sensors for 30 minutes.”

“Won’t they be
looking for you?” he asked, and then wished he hadn’t.

She didn’t
respond, but instead walked over to the sofa against the wall and pulled on the
lower cushion. It slid out becoming a makeshift bed.

“You do this
often?” he asked, and then realized that, again, he was saying all of the wrong
things.

She gave him a
cold look, but then smiled. “All the time, actually. Every day.” She unzipped
her pants and let them fall to the floor as she walked slowly toward him. “In
fact, three times a day when I can get it.” Her blouse came off next and she
dropped it on the floor next to his chair. “That’s what we do here, you know,”
she whispered as she slid down her underwear and stepped lightly out of them.

She straddled
his lap, her long, tan legs wrapping around the sides of his powerchair. The
weight of her body pressed down in just the right spot. “I came to work at this
top secret, multi-billion-dollar facility just so I can have sex in my office.”

He opened his
mouth to speak, but she grabbed his jaw with her hand and pulled him to her
open lips. They kissed passionately.

“All of the
offices have sofa beds,” she whispered when they finally took a moment to
breathe. “We have to sleep here sometimes during long experiments.”

“I didn’t mean
to imply anything,” he stumbled to say.

With the fluid
movement of a gymnast, she rotated off his lap and onto the bed. “Shut up and
take your clothes off, Alek,” she said.

He did.

Twenty minutes
later, he found himself staring at the darkened ceiling. Maya’s body felt warm
and familiar beside him, but he still felt cold inside. “I need to know why he
died,” he whispered.

She let out a
long sigh, and whispered back, “I understand.”

“The truth this
time.”

She sighed again
as she sat up in the makeshift bed. “So much for the romantic afterglow.”

“I’m sorry,” he
whispered.

She moved to the
side of the bed. “We should get dressed first. Someone might come looking for
me soon.”

She tossed him
his clothing and went to look for hers. A few awkward minutes later, he was
back in his powerchair and she was sitting on the newly folded up sofa.

“All right,” she
said, “The diagnostic computer said that your father—”

“Not
how
he died,” Alek interrupted, “I want to understand
why
he died. I want to
understand these Intelligent Avatars of yours.”

“Okay. I’m not
sure—”

“I’ve been
thinking about what you said before,” he interrupted again, “and I realized
that an interface running a hundred times faster than normal would mean that
your Avatar would have to interpolate more than just your movements.”

 “That’s right,”
she said. “Our Avatars have to interpolate our thoughts as well, otherwise,
they would react to situations differently than you would, and that would screw
everything up”

“But, how the
hell can you make an Avatar think like you?”

“I told you that
we use a high-resolution biological scanner to digitize your brain and body.
What I didn’t tell you is that the digital copy of your brain is used to
pattern a type of quantum neural net for your Avatar. That’s why we call them
Intelligent
Avatars.”

“Modeling
intelligent programs after human brains have been experimented with for decades,
without much success. What’s your trick?”

“Memories,” she
said.

His mouth
dropped. “You’re telling me that you can copy people’s memories and put them
inside a program? That’s science fiction. Even worse, it’s fantasy. It can’t be
done.”

“We don’t
actually copy memories themselves—that would be a huge database, even for our
system. What we do is copy the synaptic layout and the chemical makeup of the
brain perfectly, and when the Avatar accesses its own digital brain, the
memories are rebuilt from scratch. We don’t know how perfect these memories
are, but they help make our Avatars react just like us when we are interfaced
at higher speeds.”

He thought about
that for a moment. “If these Avatars of yours really can think and react just
like the humans they were modeled after,” he said, “why don’t you just send
them in to deliver the deletion routines for you? Why risk more human lives?”

She paused
before answering. “That’s a really good question, Alek, but I don’t think it
would work. We designed the Avatars for sensory interpolation, not stand-alone
operation. Without the human symbiotic link, they could potentially wreak more
havoc inside Cyberdrome than Ceejer. That’s one of the reasons we keep them
offline until they are needed.”

“So, I take it
you’re still going ahead with the upload at three?” he asked, even though he already
knew the answer.

She refocused
her gaze on him. “Your father’s death just proves that we can’t sit back and
wait any longer. We still have 42 other people to worry about.”

“I wish I could
go with you,” he said.

She nodded her
head and smiled. “I know.”

He tried to
smile back. “All right, so how else can I help?”

She placed her
hand on his shoulder. “We still need that Swarm program you described; otherwise
no one’s going in. Can you build one for us in the next two hours?”

“I can build a
Swarm program in my sleep,” he said. “If you give me the specs on the
deletion routines, full access to your program writing software, and lots of
coffee, I should have it ready in plenty of time.”

She stood and
finished buttoning her blouse. “You can use my office,” she said, pointing to
her desk. “I have a direct link to the main computers and there’s a coffee
dispenser on the back wall. It’s not Kona, but I think you’ll like it.”

“Are you
leaving?”

She straightened
her hair before answering. “I have a meeting in a few minutes. There’s a lot to
go over before the interface.”

He reached for
her arm as she started to leave, but missed. “Be safe,” he said.

“I’ll do better
than that,” she said as she unlocked the door and slid it open. “I’ll be successful.”

o     o     o

When Alek lifted
his head off Maya’s office desk and saw the numbers “5:13 AM” on the wall
clock, his mouth froze in mid-yawn; he had missed Maya’s interface by more than
two hours.

He remembered
working on the Swarm program until about two, at which point he uploaded it to
the main computer. He then tried the door and found that it was locked from the
outside. He must have dozed off waiting for someone to let him out.

He downed a
half-cup of cold coffee and tried the intercom again. When no one responded, he
decided to find his own way out. It didn’t take him long to break through
Maya’s desk security. In fact, he quickly discovered that the security for the
entire facility was only industry-standard, and therefore easily bypassed by
someone with his skills. After combing through a few dozen highly
classified—and very boring—files, he found a link to the building’s security
cameras. He cycled through several dark offices and empty corridors, until he
found the camera for the Fluidal Computer room.

He zoomed in on
the tower and in the dim light of the room, the fluid inside seemed to glow. He
ran his hand along the desktop and stared into the green liquid. Something
about the image bothered him, but he couldn’t quite place it. He thought about
the fact that the facility itself had very few software safeguards, while the
Cyberdrome simulations seemed overly protected. His father’s neuroprobes didn’t
make sense either. What would prevent them from leaving the human host? Was it
an error in their collective programming, or something else? None of these
things made sense by themselves.
Unless you put them all together
, he
thought as a pattern began to form in his head.

“Alek,” a voice
said.

He lurched in
his chair when he saw Leconte’s face gazing up at him from Maya’s desktop
screen. “God, you startled me,” he said. He then remembered the time and added;
“The interface was two hours ago. Why didn’t someone come get me?”

“I take
responsibility for that,” she said. “You looked so tired and we were all busy
preparing for the mission. May I ask why it took so long to finish your Swarm?”

It took him a
second to realize that she had changed the subject. “Why? Was there a problem?”

“No, I’m just
curious why it took you so long. I thought that you could write a Swarm program
in your sleep.”

He remembered
saying that to Maya in private. Had Leconte been eavesdropping on them, or had
Maya simply told her? Maybe it didn’t matter.

“The Swarm
itself wasn’t the problem,” he said. “Breaking something up into a million
pieces is easy. Putting all of those pieces back together again in the correct
order is the hard part.”

“You’re talking
about the Queen program?”

“That’s right.
Can I assume that it worked?”

“Perfectly,” she
said. “We are over two hours into the mission, and so far, everything’s proceeding
as planned.”

He thought about
what Maya had told him and realized that for her, as well as the other members
of the mission team, over 200 hours had already passed—more than eight full
days and nights. For all he knew, they were nearly finished with their objectives.
Then, his earlier thoughts came back to him. “I have a question,” he said.

Leconte’s face
disappeared from the desktop and reappeared on the wall screen in front of
Maya’s desk. “That’s a better angle for me,” she said. “Please continue.”

“What are you
doing here that you don’t want anyone else to know about?”

He noticed a
slight, but perceptible hesitation before she answered. “All companies have
trade secrets,” she said. “Surely you know that, considering your line of work.”

“This facility
is completely cut off from any of the Global Networks,” he said, “including
satellite-based, which tells me that your secrets run deeper than most. I also
noticed that your system security’s no better than industry-standard, which
completely threw me at first. However, then I remembered an old Plumber’s rule,
which states that the best place to hide the combination to the safe is inside
the safe.”

“What on Earth
does that mean?”

“It means that
none of your important data structures are stored on your servers. You’re running
everything on virtual computers—systems inside systems—probably from within
your simulations. I think it’s safe to say that you’re doing something so
illegal here that you’re willing to lose everything to avoid getting caught.”

“I think it’s
time for you to leave now,” she said, all politeness gone from her voice.

Alek ignored her
and continued. “So, what could it be? The fact that my father’s neuroprobes
won’t leave your people was the first clue. You can’t reprogram nano-scale
robots once they are built, and a construction error couldn’t be so specific or
so widespread. That tells me that you designed your probes to ignore a recall
command under certain conditions. The only reason I can think of for keeping
people interfaced against their will would be if something inside your simulations
infected them. That way you would have physical control over who, or what, you
allowed out.”

“I’ll have your
payment deposited in your account by the time you get back to your apartment,”
Leconte said, acting as though she had not heard him.

“The second clue
I didn’t get until just a few minutes ago, and it involves your Fluidal
Computer. The only reason I can think of for using something as unstable as
DNA-based memory, is that you actually
want
a system that will collapse
if someone inside tries to break the rules you have programmed into it.”

Leconte pressed
something off camera, and the door to Maya’s office slid open. “Security’s on
its way to take you back to the surface.”

“T-H-I,” he said
tentatively. It was just a guess, but when her expression froze on the display
screen, he realized with a stomach-turning shock that he was right.

“Stand by,” she
said and then flicked off the camera’s feed. The wall image changed back to a
holographic garden in full sunlight. Damn, he thought.
Why did I have to say
that?
Another important Plumber’s rule is that you don’t accuse people of
criminal acts while trapped inside their building. He glanced at the open door
and for a moment, considered making a run for it. Then he looked down at his
powerchair and frowned.
Man in a wheelchair found dead in Nevada desert—news
at eleven.