Evil Genius (18 page)

"But—"

"My personal goal is to create a superhacker," Sark went on. "A program that will do all my
hacking for
me."

Com clicked his tongue. For an instant, Cadel thought that the noise had come from Corn's hardware.

"Shut up, Com," said Sark. "Nobody knows
what
Corn's doing. He's lost the power to explain things in human terms."

"But what am I supposed to do?" Cadel demanded. "Just sit here, or what?"

Sark shrugged. His long limbs suddenly rearranged themselves as he dragged his feet off the desk. "You can have a look at your computer," he suggested.

"Which computer?"

"That one." Sark waved his hand. "Over there."

Cadel followed Sark's directions. He stopped in front of a rather elderly piece of equipment, which, Cadel knew, had very little to spare in the way of gigabytes.

"Oh," he said.

"You've got a network card in there, needless to say—most of Axis is linked up. Plus we have our own high-capacity backbone. An OC-48 line. Could be worse. Oh, and there's a supercomputer. In the back room. But you can only use it under supervision. And if you're wondering why it looks like a tank, the whole thing's shielded against Red Signal leaks, you know?" Sark seemed to be losing interest in Cadel; his attention was once more focused on his computer. "There's no sprinkler system in this room, either, by the way. Just halon gas outlets. And it's on a different switch, too. The Virus insisted, because there's so much combustion on this campus—it's like a goddamn blow furnace sometimes. That's why we didn't get soaked early on. In case you were wondering."

Cadel wasn't wondering. Not about the sprinklers, anyway. He
was
wondering why his computer didn't boot up when he turned it on.

After carefully checking the main socket, the power lead, and the keyboard cable, all of which seemed to be fine, he began to punch in a few basic commands. Then he became aware of a muted snicker.

It was coming from Sark. He could tell by the way Sark's hunched shoulders were quivering.

Cadel waited. He sat and stared at Sark's back until the older student glanced around—and caught Cadel's eye.

"Oh!" Sark seemed surprised by his classmate's steady regard, but recovered quickly. "Having problems?" he asked, with the utmost innocence.

"You know I am." Cadel got straight down to business. "So what's the deal?"

Sark seemed to debate something inside his head. Then he shrugged again.

"Second-class honors if you can start up," he explained. "It's one of the Virus's little tricks."

"Is it a test?"

"Don't ask me. Ask the Virus."

With a sigh, Cadel turned back to his computer. The power light was on. The key-lock switch was off. He sat thinking for a while, running through a checklist in his head. He tried a few more unsuccessful commands, pondered for a moment, and tried a few more. Then, with a grunt, he scrambled for the VGA cable.

By the time the Virus entered, some fifteen minutes later, Cadel's machine was humming quite nicely through a series of downloads.

"He did it," Sark announced in a flat voice. It hardly needed saying. The Virus, who was looking sweaty in a bright, short-sleeved shirt, peered over at Cadel.

"Oh," he said.

"It was the monitor," Cadel remarked. "Yes."

"I checked the pinout—"

"Yes, yes." The Virus didn't seem interested. "Well done." Having reached his own desk, he began to remove various objects from his briefcase: the usual box of tissues, a packet of throat pastilles, a bottle of eyedrops, an ergonomic back pillow. "Sark, show the boy his computer, for god's sake," he added testily, and waddled off to refill the humidifier.

"When Doozy first tried, he had the whole box opened up," Sark informed Cadel, with a smirk. "Had the capacitor dismantled, and everything. Thought something was wrong with the switcher supply."

"Who's Doozy?" asked Cadel.

"He's a bloody idiot, that's who he is" was Sark's answer. "Here. This is yours. That other one—it's just a booby trap."

Cadel saw, with relief, that the new computer issued to him was of quite recent vintage, and well supplied with hard drive, RAM, and so forth. He was able to start it without difficulty. When the Virus reentered Hardware Heaven, Cadel put up his hand.

"Excuse me—uh—sir."

"Call me Vee," said the Virus. He threw himself behind his desk with a groan of relief. "What's the problem
now?
"

"Nothing." Cadel hastened to assure him. "I just wanted to know, am I allowed to install my own security?"

The Virus's fat face immediately screwed itself up into a grin. "What—you don't
trust
us?" He giggled.

"Well—"

"By all means, Cadel, do your worst. It won't make any difference. I'll still get in, if I want to."

"Yes, sir—I mean, Vee." Cadel had his doubts about
that.
"So I can download some programs? Right now? I brought them with me."

"Oh, you can do that later," the Virus rejoined. "When I'm not here. Right now, we should try to do something useful, for a change." He coughed, sniffed, then jabbed a fat finger in Corn's direction. "Sark, will you reboot that boy? I don't think he's online."

"Hey! Wysiwyg!" Sark threw a stapler at Com, without eliciting any response. So he leaned over and yanked the plug from Corn's main socket.

Com let out a strangled bellow, and the Virus clicked his fingers. "I'm uploading here, Com, pay attention," he said. "You listening, Sark?"

"Yes."

"All right." The Virus blew his nose, mopped it, and continued. "You've both met Cadel. He's Dr. Darkkon's son. I've mentioned him. I've given you the protocol. Com? Are you processing this?"

Com nodded.

"Fine. Well, Cadel told me at our last meeting that he was interested in hardware—molecular electronics, to be exact." At the sound of Sark's muffled sigh, the Virus giggled. "So I thought, as base work, we might all dust off our synapses and have a fresh look at neural network models. Sark?" (Slyly.) "You got a problem with that?"

"No," Sark mumbled.

"All righty." The Virus fixed his twinkling eyes on Cadel. "I presume you agree with me, Cadel? That this is a good place to kick off?"

"Uh—yeah. Sure."

"Good. Because there's nothing like starting from scratch, I always say. If you can't wire your own neuron outputs, you can't call yourself a computer geek, in my opinion." The Virus bared his pointed teeth at Sark. "Sark's always had a lot of trouble with low-level digital integrated circuit design. You had a hard time getting past your first NAND gate, didn't you, Sark?"

Sark muttered something under his breath.

"Doesn't like to get his hands dirty," the Virus remarked to Cadel. "Believe it or not." He tittered, and Sark threw him a black look. "A lot of my boys here, they can't calculate to save their lives. Throw 'em a recursion equation and they run for cover. Sally was different." The Virus paused for an instant before continuing. "Sally was different, but she had other problems.
Personal
problems. Pity, really.
She
wasn't afraid of hard work."

"Look—are we going to do this or not?" Sark snapped, whereupon the Virus giggled yet again, wiping his eyes.

"Yes, yes, I hear you," he said, and drew from his pocket a tattered slip of paper, well folded, which he waved in Cadel's direction. "So. Cadel. You want to get us started on this?"

Obediently, Cadel rose and plucked the paper from the Virus's hand. Smoothing it out, he saw that it bore a single equation:

"On the left, you've got an input current charging a capacitor
C
_i
to a potential
u
_i
," the Virus drawled. "On the right,
−u
_i
/R
_i
is a leakage current and
I
_i
/R
_i
is an outside input. What else? Sum term is input currents from other neurons. Your
f
_j
(u
_j
)
is the output of an amplifier. Your
T
_ij
/R
_i
are conductances. Oh—and the numbers
R
_i
aren't resistances, just scaling factors."

"Ri-i-ght," said Cadel, his mind working furiously. "So what do I do with this?"

"What you
do
is sit down and knock off a nice, simple layout of a basic electronic circuit for a neural network chip implementation, using that equation," the Virus continued, clearing his sinuses. "Nothing fancy. Just a sketch. Something we can
all
understand. In fact..." With a smile, the Virus surveyed his other two students. "In fact, why doesn't everyone give it a go?"

"Oh, but
Vee
" Sark protested, and Com sagged in his seat.

"No, no." The Virus raised his hand. "Fair's fair. This is good. It'll keep us on our toes. And if you don't like it, you know who to thank."

Another tiresome giggle. As Cadel shuffled back to his desk, he intercepted a poisonous glance from Sark and wondered if Thaddeus's message had found its way back to the Virus's students.

Did they know that Cadel was off-limits?

Cadel profoundly hoped so.

"So how was it?" Dr. Darkkon wanted to know.

Cadel rubbed his eyes. He was very weary. After four hours in Hardware Heaven, he had rushed straight to Thaddeus's office for his usual appointment. The Piggotts had given him money for a cab.

"It was fine," he murmured. "The Virus was great."

"Ah yes." Dr. Darkkon nodded, so that his face disappeared from the screen for an instant. "Vee's a talented man. I thought you might find him interesting."

"Was he—did he have anything to do with my computer phone?" Cadel asked, and his father grinned.

"What
do you
think?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe—the early stages?"

"Maybe." Dr. Darkkon didn't seem eager to elaborate. He made a show of retching at the screen, which was floating in the bottom of his toilet bowl. His tongue looked like a blind, puffy, gray eel darting out of a hole. "What were the other students like?"

Cadel grimaced. Thaddeus leaned forward.

"Surely Vee's weren't disappointing?" he pressed. "I've heard some good things about them."

"Oh sure." Cadel shrugged. "
They
were all right."

"Some of the first-year intake is decidedly experimental," Thaddeus admitted. "Gazo Kovacs, the twins, Clive Slaughter—they're a gamble, I must confess."

"They're
dumb,
" said Cadel, flatly.

"Well, yes. But that doesn't mean they won't be useful."

"We can't all be as clever as you, son," Dr. Darkkon wheezed. "I hope you found it stimulating, though?"

Cadel nodded. He
had
found it stimulating. Almost too stimulating. He was exhausted—and confused. The Axis Institute, though interesting, had also been ... odd. Skewed. Off-kilter. Cadel sensed that he was failing to grasp it fully; it was like an alternative universe, constructed according to a different set of natural laws that he was unable to define.

"What's all that stuff in your bag?" Thaddeus asked.

"Embezzlement texts, mostly."

"What did you think of Brendan?"

"I don't know." Cadel tried to sort out his impressions. "We didn't talk much."

"What about Deal?"

"He was cross. Because of the sprinklers."

"Ah, yes." Thaddeus made a face. "It's hard. We'll have to fine-tune that emergency system."

"Uh, Dad?" said Cadel. He didn't know quite how to phrase his next question. "Do you—I mean, why do you think I should do embezzlement?"

Dr. Darkkon, who had been glancing over his shoulder, turned back to the screen and narrowed his pale froggy eyes.

"Why?" he echoed. "Why not? Do you have a problem with it, Cadel?"

"Oh no." Cadel retreated. "Not really."

"Because if you have a problem with it, then perhaps that's reason enough for you to be doing it. There's no gain to be had from an easy ride."

"Cadel," said Thaddeus. He waited until Cadel was looking at him before continuing. "Brendan isn't giving you any trouble, is he?"

Though the psychologist's tone was casual, Cadel's heart skipped a beat.

"Oh, no!" he exclaimed. "No, nothing like that!"

"Are you sure?"

"Yes!" Cadel had the feeling that if Thaddeus got the wrong idea about Brendan, Luther Lasco might soon be recounting another case study to his first-year class. Brendan didn't deserve anything so drastic. "I was just wondering why I'm doing embezzlement instead of—I don't know, explosives or something. That's all."

"Explosives are for grunts," said Thaddeus. "You know what your father thinks about bombs, Cadel."

"Money," Dr. Darkkon added, "is important. If you don't understand money, Cadel, you're at the mercy of your accountants. And they'll either rip you off or you'll have to hire
other
accountants to keep them honest. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about."

"Money can be very interesting," Thaddeus concluded, watching Cadel closely. "Some people find it the most fascinating thing in the world: the ebb and flow, the ups and downs. It's a system like any other."