Cyberdrome (8 page)

“Not possible,”
he said confidently. “There’s no way for someone on the outside to place something
inside.”
That’s the truth
, he thought,
but not the whole truth. No
need to tell them that it was already filled with cargo
. “And regardless of
how a virus got in to your system,” he added, “what I still don’t understand is
why you haven’t already shut it down to get rid of it.”

“It’s
complicated,” Maya said.

He turned to
look at her. “Cloudhopper told me about the so-called ‘hostages.’ Do you really
expect me to believe they will die if you pull them out of interface?” He
looked at the others in the room. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

There was a
moment of silence in the room, before Leconte finally spoke up. “You might as
well tell him, dear,” she said to Maya. “It’s his father’s work, after all.”

“Tell me
already,” Alek said.

“Your father
designed a special batch of nano-scale medical robots called ‘neuroprobes’
which act as brain-enhancers,” Maya said, still avoiding direct eye contact
with him. “We inject several billion of them into the bloodstream and they take
position in key areas of your brain during interface. For reasons we still
don’t understand, the neuroprobes in our people are refusing the recall
commands.”

“How can they do
that?”

Maya shrugged.
“They have somehow been reprogrammed to remain active until each person’s
online Avatar is removed from Cyberdrome.”

He looked around
the room. “Why would they be tied to the Avatars?”

“We don’t know,”
Leconte said.

“So, what would
happen if you simply unplugged someone?”

“The neuroprobes
draw energy from an inductive current inside the interface chambers,” Maya said,
glancing at him briefly. “If we pulled someone out, the neuroprobes would shut
down and begin to clog up the tiny capillaries inside the brain. The person
would die within a matter of minutes from massive aneurisms.”

“I’ll remind you
that you signed a non-disclosure agreement when you entered this building,” Leconte
said. “What you have just been told is highly classified.”

“Not to mention
highly illegal under the current administration,” he said. “But, don’t worry, I
don’t agree with the ban on nanotechnology anymore than my father did.” He
glanced around the room. “All right, the way to get your people back is
simple.”

“Is it?” Leconte
asked, glancing first at Maya and then Cloudhopper, before turning her attention
back to Alek. “Do tell us, Mr. Grey.”

“The datapad you
gave me mentioned that all of your simulations can be accessed through
backdoors in your root memory, what you call the Core.” He began. “All we need
to do is get your people’s Avatar programs out of the simulations and into Core
memory. That’s simply a matter of breaking whatever encryption your supervisor
program put on the data streams. Then, when the Avatars are all safely out of
the simulations, we do a secondary system reboot.”

“How would that
protect our people?” Leconte asked.

“Core memory is
separate from the data space used by your simulations, so any programs inside
it will not be affected by the secondary reboot. If what you said about the
Avatars is true, then once the supervisor program is offline, the neuroprobes
should leave your people. Problem solved.”

Leconte scanned
the faces in the room. “Why has no one else thought of this?”

When nobody
answered, Alek spoke up. “Don’t blame them,” he said. “It’s a ‘thinking inside
the box’ idea. Most people spend so much time trying to think outside the box;
they forget that some of the best ideas are the simple ones.”

Cloudhopper
raised an eyebrow. “It’s a clever idea, Grey. The only flaw with your plan is
that the supervisor program has locked us out of the simulations. We can’t
locate or transport anyone from the simulations to the Core.”

“Give me a week
or two on one of your direct terminals and maybe I can break through your
supervisor’s defenses,” Alek said.

“There isn’t
time,” Maya said, still sounding irritated. “The neuroprobes were designed to
operate for a week at best. Our people have already been interfaced for three
days, which means that we will start losing people if we don’t get them out
within the next three to four days.”

Alek studied her
further, and realized that maybe she wasn’t mad at him after all. Maybe she’s
just tired. If this accident happened three days ago, it was a good bet that
she hadn’t slept since then. “So, what do you propose to do?” he asked.

Cloudhopper
walked over to the large rotating sphere. “This is a simplified rendering of
Cyberdrome,” he said. He made a hand gesture and the front half of the sphere
vanished, revealing a series of concentric circles, much like a cut-a-way
diagram of the Earth. The image zoomed in towards a hollowed-out central structure
in what would be the planet’s core. This was Cyberdrome’s Core.

As the image
continued to magnify, five flashing dots on the inner surface of the Core
became visible. “These are control nodes which surround and protect Ceejer’s
cognitive processing memory,” Cloudhopper said. “Our plan is to interface
directly with the Core, locate and attach deletion routines to each of these
five nodes, and then activate them simultaneously. Deleting the nodes will
cause a cascading reformat of Ceejer’s CPM, which should disable its control of
the interfaced personnel.”

“Once we have
control,” Maya added. “We should be able to pull everyone out safely.”

Alek thought
about it for a moment. “It sounds plausible, but I have one question. What’s to
prevent your supervisor program from detecting what you’re doing and stopping
you?”

“That’s where we
got lucky,” Maya said. “There’s a diagnostic sweep occurring at 3:00 A.M.
tomorrow morning. During this period, every program inside the Core will be
suspended for approximately two minutes, including Ceejer. We believe that
anyone interfacing during this period will go unnoticed by Ceejer when the
system starts back up.”

It took Alek a
moment to understand what she said. “You’re planning to send humans inside to
do this?”

“I’m afraid we
have little choice,” Leconte said. “This operation can’t be done remotely, and
this diagnostic event only occurs once a month, so this window is our only
shot.”

“So, who are you
sending on this suicide mission?”

“Your father
activated a room with seven new interface chambers in our construction level,”
Leconte said. “Six of those chambers are not being used. Mr. Cloudhopper will
be leading a five-person security team into Cyberdrome to place the routines.
His people are training for the mission right now.”

“You said there
were six chambers. Who else is going in?”

“Me,” Maya said.
When he looked at her, he saw that she was actually talking to Leconte. “I
helped design the interface. I’ve also logged more hours inside Cyberdrome than
anyone in this room.”

In the corner of
his vision, Alek noticed the way Cloudhopper had turned his body slightly toward
Maya as she spoke. Reading body language wasn’t exactly his best skill, but the
connection between Maya and the security chief was obvious. Was that why
Cloudhopper’s mannerisms had softened since entering the facility?
Is this
why you volunteered for this crazy mission? Do you want to be with your new
boyfriend that badly?

“We will be
monitored from this room,” Cloudhopper said, pointing to the rotating sphere.
While we can’t see other programs inside the Core, we have set up a way to
track human Avatars there. The people here will know when we have completed the
mission and will be able to bring us all home.”

Alek faced
Cloudhopper. “If your team fails, you’ll all be trapped like the others.” He
turned to Maya. “You’ll be trapped.”

“Then we all
need to make sure they do not fail,” Leconte said.

“Well, it sounds
like you have this all worked out.” Alek said turning back to face the others.
“So why am I here?”

“Cyberdrome has
an aggressive firewall,” Maya replied, sounding much less hostile toward him.
“It’s the only thing not affected by the diagnostic, and we are pretty sure it
won’t allow our deletion routines to pass through.”

“I don’t
follow,” Alek said.

“I was told that
breaking into secure systems is your specialty, Mr. Grey,” Leconte added. “We
would like your help breaking into ours.”

He was about to
say that
preventing
people from breaking into systems is his specialty
when the solution came to him. “You know, I think I already have exactly what
you need.”

“Don’t hold us
in suspense,” Leconte said. “What have you got?”

“I designed a
program recently to protect my personal work. I call it a Swarm. To put it
simply, it separates programs into millions of pieces, which I call ‘bees,’
then scatters them randomly across the net. When I want to access any of my programs,
I simply activate a Queen program, which recalls the swarm and reassembles the
chunks of raw code back into working programs.”

“How can this
help us?” Leconte asked.

“If we swarm the
deletion routines, the bees should be able to pass safely through your firewall
because they will look like harmless chunks of random numbers. Once through, I
can send in the Queen program to reassemble the routines.”

“This Queen
program of yours has to be more than random numbers,” Cloudhopper said. “Are
you sure it can make it through the firewall?”

“It’s simply a
list of addresses along with a builder module,” Alek said. “Your firewall will
scan it and see that it poses no threat by itself. There should be no problem.”

Leconte stared
at him for several seconds before speaking. “How does this sound, Maya? Can
this really work?”

“I know that
Alek is just like his father,” she said with a slight smile. “He’s the best at
what he does. I think his plan’s worth trying.”

Just then, an
alarm went off. “What now,” Leconte said as she looked off to one side,
obviously reading something on her contacts. Her face suddenly lit up. “Maya
and Alek, please come with me.”

She turned to
leave but Maya grabbed her arm and stopped her. “What’s wrong, Rebecca?”

Leconte turned
and smiled at her. “Nothing’s wrong, my dear. In fact, it’s quite good news.
One of the hostages is coming out of interface.” She looked at Alek. “It’s your
father.”

o     o     o

Alek followed
Maya and Leconte down the hall to an elevator that took them down one level to
a heavily guarded lobby. Judging by the circular shape, Alek guessed that they
were back in the center of the building, directly below the computer center.
After the guards cleared them, they entered a cylindrical glass elevator and
began descending again.

A moment later,
they dropped into another circular room. Through the glass walls, Alek could
see that this room was about the same size as the lobby and had six doors
equally spaced along the walls. Instead of stopping, they passed through the
floor and entered another room exactly like the one above. The elevator slowed
to a stop, and the doors slid open.

A blast of cold
air hit Alek in the face. He was about to mention it, but noticed that neither
Maya nor Leconte seemed bothered by the temperature change. As he followed Maya
toward one of the doors on the outer wall, he saw the reason for the cool
temperature. The floor surrounding the elevator was actually a raised walkway
that floated over a pool of some sort of liquid coolant. Something on this
level was running hot.

The door ahead
of them opened and a young woman with brown hair stepped through, almost running
into Leconte.

“Ms. Aston,”
Leconte said, stepping aside to let the young woman pass. She wore the same
uniform as Cloudhopper, although she filled hers out much better.

“Lorena,” Maya
called out as the woman breezed past her.

“No time, Maya,”
she called out without slowing down. “Have to get this data to Roy, ASAP. You
know how he is.” Alek watched her jump into the elevator just as the door
closed.

“Who was that?”
he asked.

“Lorena Aston,”
Maya said. “She’s a friend of mine. One of the few I have here, actually.”

“What does she
do?” he asked, still staring at the elevator.

“She’s one of
our best systems engineers,” Maya said over his shoulder. “You two probably
have a lot in common. Too bad that she doesn’t like men, though.”

He turned back
toward her. “So, you two are friends, huh?” he asked with a smirk.

She raised an
eyebrow. “Jealous?” She turned and walked through the door before he could answer.

Alek followed
her into what was obviously an interface room, with seven oval-shaped pods lining
the outer wall. One of the pods on the far left side had someone inside, as
evident by the glowing display screen above it. Some sort of bio-neural
readout, he realized, showing a cutaway view of a human body. The display
showed a heart beating in the chest, blood flowing through veins and arteries,
and flashes of colored light in the area of the brain.