Cyberdrome (7 page)

Cloudhopper
leaned in close to Alek and bared his teeth. “If I thought you were responsible
for the attack, I would’ve yanked you out of that damn chair and hauled you
back to headquarters myself.” He stood back up. “Instead, I am politely asking
you questions. Question number two is: how did your program get into our
system?”

Alek realized
that he had nothing to hide and told him about the woman in the coffee shop.

Cloudhopper
circled around Alek, entering the living room. “You didn’t bother to get an
I.D. on her?” he asked while looking at the TV.

“By the time I
discovered her identity, she was gone,” he said as he retrieved the Piggyback
module he found in the coffee shop. “I did find this, however.”

Cloudhopper
turned around and grabbed the module from Alek’s hand. He glanced at it for
only a moment before responding. “This isn’t a lead.”

Alek raised an
eyebrow. “You don’t think it’s odd that someone used a device made by your
company to steal a program that was used against your company?”

Cloudhopper
tossed the module back to Alek. “What I think is odd is that someone would
leave such an easily traceable device behind for you to find,” he said.

“Misdirection,”
Alek said under his breath. Three days after the theft, and Klaxon was still
making him look like an amateur and a fool. He looked back up at the man. “So,
what exactly did my Cyberphage do to your system?”

“It brought in
what appears to be an intelligent retrovirus which altered the primary
instruction set of our supervisor program,” Cloudhopper said, turning back
around to face him.

Alek almost
laughed out loud. “Forgetting for the moment that what you described is
actually impossible, why didn’t you shut down your system and reboot from a
backup? You obviously know computers, so you must know that’s standard procedure
for any massive viral infection.”

Cloudhopper
leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “There were a number of our personnel
hooked into direct neural interface when the attack occurred.”

“So, why don’t
you just unplug them?”

“The infected
supervisor program is holding our people hostage. If we shut down the system,
the hostages will die.”

Alek shook his
head. “You know, I might not have as much experience in this field as some, but
I’m not a complete novice. Everyone knows that you can’t die from pulling out
of a neural interface.”

“Come tell that
to the person in charge,” Cloudhopper said as he glanced toward the door. “She’s
having a meeting at Cyberdrome headquarters in a few hours and you’re invited.”

“You mean in
Nevada? You want me to fly down to Nevada with you? Right this minute?”

“There’s a
private shuttle waiting for us. If it’s money you want, I have been authorized
to pay you for your time.”

“You’re damn
right you’ll pay me,” he said as he headed toward his bedroom. A minute later,
he returned with a small travel bag and rolled toward the front door. “And just
for the record,” he added, “the clock started the moment you entered my house.”

Cloudhopper
reached in a pocket, pulled out a small datapad, and tossed it to Alek. “Read
this. It will bring you up to speed before you meet with the others.”

Alek turned the
credit card-sized device over in his hand. “Tell me something,” he said as
Cloudhopper opened the front door. “Will my father be at this meeting?”

Cloudhopper
turned around. “Oh, didn’t I tell you?” he said as his face twisted into
something resembling a grin. “Your father’s one of the hostages
.”

FOUR

T
he flashing
seatbelt sign and alert tone woke Alek up. He lurched up in his seat, not sure
where he was. He remembered walking somewhere—actually feeling himself standing
upright and moving again. It felt so real—it was irritating to learn that it
was just a dream.

He looked up and
saw Cloudhopper’s face staring at him through the forward curtain. “Landing in
ten minutes,” he said. Before Alek could respond, he ducked his head back
through the curtain.

Fifteen minutes
later, he followed Cloudhopper silently down the stairs from the shuttle and
into another van. It was pitch black outside, but thankfully, his chair negotiated
both the stairs and the van without anyone’s help. As they drove along the
tarmac, he could just make out some of the nearby buildings. Obviously, the
place used to be a military airport.

 “So, this is
Area 51,” he said.

Cloudhopper
sighed. “The Air Force decommissioned and abandoned their test facility several
years ago. It’s now the Groom Lake Industrial Park and is owned and operated by
a number of private companies. One of those companies is Cyberdrome.”

The van turned
off the tarmac and drove toward a small hangar. Alek thought that it seemed too
small to be the headquarters of a company like Cyberdrome, but then realized
that it was just a garage. When the van stopped inside, he steered his
powerchair out of the van and followed Cloudhopper into a waiting elevator.

He felt lighter
as the elevator began dropping. Cloudhopper stood beside him with his hands
behind his back. His demeanor had changed since entering the facility. He
seemed smaller now, more subdued. Gone was the fierce warrior who had broken
into his house demanding answers.

Alek had a few
thousand questions to ask him, but felt hesitant to break the silence. A full
minute later, the elevator door opened to a lobby protected by armed guards.
After having his wrist computer confiscated, he followed Cloudhopper down a
series of long curved hallways to a large circular door that looked a great
deal like a bank vault.

“What is this
place?” Alek finally asked.

Cloudhopper
turned toward him. “This is the headquarters of Cyberdrome,” he said dryly.

“I know, but it
feels like I’m inside a spaceship. Is it just a coincidence that you work
inside a buried spaceship at Area 51?”

Cloudhopper
touched a pad on the door and it began to split open down the middle.
“Architectural design isn’t in my job description,” he said, then turned and
passed through the open doorway.

Alek sighed as
he followed him into a large circular room with a two-story high domed ceiling.
In the middle of the room, a meter-wide glass tube filled with what looked like
fuzzy green water ran from the floor to the ceiling.

“Wait here,”
Cloudhopper ordered as he walked past the tower and passed through another circular
door on the far side of the room. When the door closed behind him, Alek took a
moment to study the green tower.

“I take it
you’ve never seen a Fluidal Computer before,” a tall kid said as he approached
from the side.

Alek’s mouth
fell open. “Fluidal? As in fluid memory? As in DNA-based liquid memory?”

“That’s it,” the
teenager said, then added, “I’m Freddie, by the way.” He reached out his hand.

Alek shook it.
“I’m Alek.”

Freddie’s eyes
widened “Holy crap! You’re Alek Grey!”

“The last time I
checked,” Alek said. “How do you know my name?”

“You created the
Cyberphage,” the boy blurted out. His grin had spread from ear to ear. “I’m a cryptologist
here. My team decoded your Phage and found out who built it.” He looked
suddenly embarrassed. “I’m sorry I got you into trouble.”

Alek shrugged.
“I got myself into this mess,” he admitted, “and it’s not exactly the first
time.” He glanced around the room. “So this is the heart of your company’s
digital think tank, isn’t it? You’ve got a bunch of A.I. programs living in
Earth-based simulations coming up with technological innovations for you.”

 “Actually, it’s
not A.I.,” Freddie said, pointing up to the Fluidal computer. “We are growing
the world’s most advanced ALife in there.”

“You mean
Artificial Life, right? You use genetic algorithms to grow and evolve all of
your programs—even the human simulations?”

“Of course,”
Freddie said. “Classic Artificial Intelligence is a dead end—at least as far as
creating something that can closely mimic a human’s thought processes. ALife is
the real deal now in our field.”

Alek looked back
up at the green tower. “So that entire thing’s filled with liquid memory? It’s
huge!”

“Biggest in the
world.”

 “Well, now I
understand why your facility’s so far underground. From what I’ve read,
DNA-based memory can’t handle any sort of vibrations or even slight temperature
changes.”

“It’s unstable
in other ways as well,” Freddie replied under his breath.

 “That’s right.
It’s also biochemically unstable,” Alek said. “From what I remember, you have
to program all of the global variables for your simulations when the DNA
strands are initially formed. Then if you accidentally break even a minor one
of those rules, it starts a cascade failure and the whole thing crashes.” He
looked at Freddie. “That’s why everyone stopped using liquid memory years ago.
So, how did you solve that problem?”

Just then, a
door on the far wall opened and Cloudhopper motioned for Alek to join him.

Freddie put on a
fake smile and reached out to shake Alek’s hand. Before he turned away, he whispered,
“Who said we solved it?”

As Freddie
walked away, Alek stared at him for a moment before rolling his powerchair over
to join Cloudhopper. Whatever Freddie was hinting at could wait, and probably
didn’t concern him anyway. His job was to determine what happened to his Phage,
deny any wrongdoing, and get back to his life as soon as possible.

As he passed
through the open door, he noticed a plaque on the wall that said “Cartography.”
Inside he found a room filled with three holographic display tables. A large
gridded sphere floated over the central table. Cloudhopper walked to the side
of the floating sphere and stood next to a middle-aged woman with silver hair.
A younger woman sat at a console next to them—Alek did a double take when he
realized that it was Maya.

Her hair was
longer than back in college, cut in a sort of layered style. She also looked a
little thinner than he remembered, and in great shape. She had obviously kept
up her swimming regimen after college.

The silver
haired woman reached out her hand as he approached. “Mr. Grey, my name is
Rebecca Leconte. I’m the Chief Administrator of Cyberdrome.” She gestured
toward Maya. “I believe you already know your father’s assistant, Dr. Rivero.”

“I guess that I
shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “My father always liked you.”

“We don’t have
time for this, Rebecca,” Maya said, ignoring his statement. She glanced at him
briefly but then looked back at a display on her console.

Leconte frowned
at Maya, and then turned her attention back to Alek. “As Maya pointed out, we
do, in fact, have very little time. Can I assume that you have read the datapad
that Mr. Cloudhopper gave you?”

Alek nodded his
head. “I understand that your supervisor program’s being controlled by a computer
virus, and that you think my Cyberphage brought it in. I can assure you that
didn’t happen.”

“How can you be
so sure?” Cloudhopper asked. “Your program was designed to transport other programs.
It could’ve been filled up with any number of items by the woman who took it.”