Strange Flesh (49 page)

A couple hours later, I’m left with a company of uglied-up humans, some scary children, a couple clones of famous dictators and serial killers, and monsters of various persuasions, including five renditions of the devil himself. Overrepresented in the top ten of these are what I’d call “freaks of nature.” A six-legged Chernobyl horse fetus, an African albino covered with human bite marks, a repulsive sex troll, and a two-headed crow.

I think Billy would rep as something more fearsome than a carrion bird, but there’s something about this one’s dual black heads and beady crimson eyes that imparts a feeling of menace. Not to mention that its creator has given it a gigantic schlong, which is surely nonstandard equipment for any creature dependent on aerodynamics. Still, I’m about to dispel it when I pause over its handle, A_Ross_Fowles.

I’d initially dismissed “Fowles” as the dumbest possible self-referential name, but the key attribute isn’t that the little monster’s a bird, but rather that it has two heads. Of course, bicephalic birds have been common symbols throughout world history, used by everyone from the ancient Egyptians to the modern Masons. But I’ve encountered one of these more recently.

Where was it?

I mentally rehearse everywhere I’ve been over the past weeks. Finally it dawns on me that since I’m looking at something in NOD, it’s not where
I’ve
been, it’s where
Jacques
has been. And he’s spent time almost exclusively in one place: the Château de Silling. And a two-headed bird, really an eagle but rendered to look more like a crow, is the first thing you see upon entering. The Sade family crest carved in stone over the castle’s gate.

That insight solves the name for me: A_Ross_Fowles reads as Eros Fouls, a natural choice for a man who in real life renamed himself “Coitus Defiles.”

But in finding Billy’s digital embodiment, I’ve only uncovered another corpse. My crow’s account was closed two days before he disappeared.
I suppose even the dumbest fugitive would abandon his usual online haunts. Or at least he’d use a new avatar.

I can’t quite believe that Billy has dropped NOD cold turkey. Since he’s forced to keep a low profile while on the lam, what better place to express himself than a virtual world where he’s securely armored in a plastic identity?

Beyond that, I’ve been berating myself that I didn’t think of this search strategy before now, but in fairness I’m not sure I could have. I didn’t understand until I really got into NOD how attached people become to their virtual world of choice. While players may try on identities like so many party dresses, they often think of the
place
as a sacred homeland. That’s why I’d bet my whole stack that Billy is still logging on.

I spend a long time browsing the profiles of A_Ross_Fowles’s buddy list. I see that Billy, disagreeable enough in real life, when unburdened of basic social constraints in NOD, becomes intolerable. Almost devoid of “real” avs, his list is populated by corporate mascots and sex workers. More interesting is the series of “friends” that he’s made but who have then revoked friendly status within a couple weeks of meeting him. This wall of shame is complemented by an extraordinary number of venues that have banned him, including Fran’s Fecal Funhouse.

What could one possibly do to get kicked out of there?

Despite all this information, he’s been savvy enough to obliterate any direct trail between his old and new avs. So I face the daunting prospect of having to seek out his new identity in the sea of almost ten million active NODlings.

At least his mutant crow has given me a police sketch to use in my manhunt.

He probably came to life within a week before or after Billy went off the grid. This alone will filter out nearly all of the avs but still leaves me with something on the order of sixty thousand. A couple more filters include avs who have visited servers with
Savant
’s former IP address, NODlings with more than three location bans, and finally people who are registered in any of NOD’s developer programs. Sadly, these criteria still yield an army of 7,461 possibilities. Doable, but not on my time-frame. I drum my desk, mulling how to proceed.

I’m resigning myself to just getting on with it when I remember an innovative data-mining package one of the Red Rook librarians was
flogging a while back. I find the old email and download the test version of CogneTech’s Cut_0.87 data-slicing tool kit.

Once I get it installed and eating from the NOD data trough, the software lets me put in all kinds of free-form search information, including all my previous filters. The algorithm offers to consult the internet to gather data helpful in forming “metaconnections,” whatever those might be.

Cut ponders for twenty minutes while I shower. When the software’s window resumes focus, I’m presented with a ranked list of avatar handles that it thinks I’ll most enjoy meeting.

The results are both amazing and depressing. While I’m nearly floored by the eerie intelligence of the software’s choices, I can see immediately that the first results aren’t going to be Billy. The top prospect, Tad_A_ LaPhille, lists his real name, and he’s a former PiMP classmate of Billy and Gina’s. The second is a minor player in the Jackanapes’ circle. The third is the av of their dead friend Trevor Rothstein.

After a couple more misses, I find Lillie_Hitchcock, who is unique among Cut’s selections in that she’s so pedestrian: the off-the-shelf Barbie av of a complete noob with the default T-shirt-and-khaki-pants outfit that everyone ditches immediately upon rezzing in. Her player has only replaced the T-shirt’s texture with a set of wide red, white, and blue stripes.

I’m disposed to disregard her, since Billy designs avatars with exacting craft. But what keeps me interested is that I can’t tell why Cut selected her in the first place. I flip to the dialogue that explains an item’s ranking, and it tells me that her placement was based on a high relevance score for the av’s textures to the search term “double eagle.” I inspect Lillie for tattoos or anything about her that refers to birds. There’s nothing, so I impatiently check the links for an explanation.

Never before have I been so possessed of a desire to kiss a piece of software, my work with the Dancers notwithstanding. And what is the valuable nugget it sifted from a flood of worthless internet nonsense?

The Russian flag. Not the pernicious crimson hammer and sickle. The broad white, blue, and red stripes of the new Russia, which first lived as a flag of the Russian Empire. The other flag in use around that time was yellow, imprinted with a black double eagle from the Romanovs’ coat of arms. Nearly identical to the one on the Sade family crest.

Knowing I have my man, I ask Google to unravel her name. Billy’s skipped the usual verbal trickery, opting instead for just an obscure reference. “Lillie” and “Hitchcock” are the first two names of the philanthropist who commissioned the famous landmark that looks over the city of San Francisco. Her last name: Coit.

And this av is not only live, but I see she’s logged in recently.

I wrap up by inserting a routine in NOD’s database scripts that will message me any time Lillie_Hitchcock logs in. So the next time Billy enters NOD, I’ll be waiting for him.

I check in with my Red Rook colleagues regarding their suppression efforts. Billy’s database had recently propagated enough to stay live for over five hours before they were able to disable the servers, and I sense a growing pessimism among the team. Meanwhile, Eeyore forwards me an entry from the NOD forums describing the Silling firestorm and the poster’s subsequent exploration of the dungeon. He details in vehement terms his feeling of betrayal at seeing his hard drive mirrored online and expresses his desire to, appropriately enough, torture Billy to death.

There are nearly a hundred responses, mostly in the same torches-and-pitchforks vein. Though one complains that he found out his daughter’s pediatrician had gone pretty far along in the Course of Fever, and he laments the downed server due to the loss of his ability to check his zip code for “shit-eating Sade-freak pedophiles.”

The controversy has already been picked up by a couple of the nimbler tech blogs. Blue_Bella renders this verdict: “Such a breach of privacy, some have called it the
Unmasking
, is frightening to closeted exxxplorers, but it could be for the best if it exposes how much we all like this stuff but just refuse to talk about it.”

Slashdot
is running an article quoting anonymous porn sources saying traffic to their sites has fallen off a cliff. Meanwhile, drive-formatting freeware hosts are currently offline due to unheard-of traffic spikes.

HoseDown
has an item headlined:

Netphomaniacs scurry in the glare of sudden sunlight.

Soon I suspect they’ll begin to sizzle.

L
illie_Hitchcock logs in at four
PM
the next afternoon.

A short query to the NOD central server gives me what we’ve been after for over a month now: an honest IP address for Billy Randall.

I’m tempted to send this straight to McClaren’s team and go buy myself a bottle of small-batch. But from long experience, I know that I need a solid physical address, or else there’s a good chance that they’ll wind up SWATing a midtown Starbucks.

I treat the situation gently. A light scan shows his machine is as tight as one might expect from someone with Billy’s technical skills. Of course, I’ve already planned an attack. His Achilles’ heel is that he’ll have the NOD developer’s kit installed on his machine, and I’ve had plenty of opportunity to assay it for flaws.

There aren’t many, but I did find a trapdoor buried in their testing tools. A poorly designed function allows one to load outdated versions for some of the program’s components. These contain errors that let me order his current NOD session to silently run any program I might specify. Even if Billy were watching closely, it just looks like NOD has started another of its many processes. But in reality, I’ve sliced a fatal hole in his system by uploading a tiny RAT designed to mimic a common security application.

Now I have to be circumspect. Not wanting to risk tipping him off, I decide to lie back. In the meantime, I write up a triumphant status report to McClaren and hope that getting into Billy’s machine will suffice to prevent Blake from firing me tomorrow.

I wait until four
AM
Monday morning to risk firing up my Trojan. I start by creating myself a shadow admin account. After that, I install a program that lets me discreetly spy on his sessions. Then I start copying down his hard drive. I browse through the software he uses: all the Apple media shit, Eclipse . . .

Oh, what’s this?

He’s running his own remote-access app called Mesmer, which lets you control your desktop from any smartphone.

Billy’s phone, that’s what I’d really like to crack.

Instrumenting someone’s cell used to be a huge pain in the ass. But now that your phone is really a fully functional computer, it’s become a perfect surveillance platform. With one program I can listen to your calls, download your texts and email, grab your Facebook password, turn on the mic to listen to your live conversations, take pictures or video, and, most importantly, learn your location from the built-in GPS receivers.

I find several devious hacks in the Red Rook exploits database and rig Billy’s system to execute one of them the next time he syncs his phone.

Before signing off, I start his webcam for a quick peep. I’d love the opportunity to spy on Billy at home. But all I can see is an unfocused view out of a large bank of windows, the city lights forming an amorphous constellation.

I set up a script to have the camera wake up periodically, record a couple frames to an external server, and alert me if there’s any motion in the images. Then I log off and start poring over my copy of Billy’s hard drive. I see immediately that it won’t give him up. He’s thoroughly stealthed his system. I can hope that by watching his live sessions with it, I’ll catch him in a mistake, though that will be chancy and time-consuming—and I suspect Blake won’t be satisfied with any kind of long-term digital stakeout.