Getting Back (3 page)

Daniel ignored the comment, stacking sugar tablets into a castle wall. Someday he wanted to defend a real castle.

Sanford came through the line and slid into a seat opposite. "The gorgon won again," he judged.

"I don't care what that old biddy thinks." Dyson sipped his Mongo, wincing at its taste. They said it was an acquired habit.

"It ain't what she thinks, it's what she can do. She called maintenance to do some midday cleaning."

"So?"

"Your wastebasket is empty now."

The catapult! "Shit. I thought she hadn't noticed it."

"When are you going to learn, Dyson? Go along to get along."

"I try to get along. It's not my fault everyone but me is crazy." He sipped again. It was possible he was the only real human being on earth, he'd theorized, and everyone else was a participant in an elaborate hoax to fool him, for unknown but no doubt evil and nefarious reasons. This could explain why everyone else seemed to tolerate a bureaucracy that drove him crazy. "The catapult actually worked rather well, I thought. The problem was the payload."

Sanford resisted any temptation to congratulate his engineering. "Sanity is the most democratic of definitions, my friend," his workmate counseled. "The majority gets to decide what's normal. Odd man out is the one who gets labeled insane."

Dyson pointed to his brain. "Maybe I'm just ahead of my time. The mark of genius."

Sanford laughed. "I'll put that on your urn registry. 'He was right after all.' I'm sure it will be a great comfort when you're dead."

"Or behind. Maybe I was born two hundred years too late."

"Judging from your office political skills, I'd say you were born yesterday."

Daniel's smile was rueful. "Mona, I'm gonna," he promised softly.

"You still have a chance. I just saw her in Telecom. No doubt word has gotten around and given you an excuse to talk to her. 'I built an engine of destruction and crossed the horrible Harriet Lundeen just for you.' What woman could resist?"

Daniel sighed. "Just about every female I've met since third grade." He stood. "Still, ours is not to wonder why, right old chap?"

"Aye! Ours is but to mate and die!"

"Remember the Alamo!"

"Don't fire until she rolls her eyes!"

"Into the breach, my friends!"

"Hey. Don't talk dirty."

Mona Pietri was struggling with the Telecom console. New features had been added that theoretically doubled its speed and realistically multiplied the ways in which it could possibly malfunction by a factor of five. The snarl of error messages gave Dyson a chance to introduce himself and demonstrate male prowess, though in truth he didn't know much more about the console than Mona did. Still, he bluffed his way through to a "ready" promise on the view screen by hammering on the machine's buttons. She granted him a look of approval, giving no hint she knew she'd been the target of romantic bombardment less than an hour before.

"I don't know why it has to be so complicated," she pouted. Instantly, he was in love.

"Microcore's purchasing agents make three times as much money as we do buying this junk and then depend on us to document the need to upgrade it," he explained. "If we ever mastered our equipment, their usefulness would be over. It's designed to torment."

She looked uncertain. "I don't think the corporation really intends that."

"Oh, but they do. Microcore is a pyramid built on a program of ever-increasing complication. 'We make things hard so you can take it easy,' but of course it never gets easier at all. Microcore snarls, so it can cut its own Gordian knot."

"Its what?"

Maybe he could impress her with trivia. "Gordium was an ancient city. The chariot of its founder was tied to a post by a knot so complex that legend promised it could only be untied by the future conqueror of Asia. Alexander the Great came to the place, considered a moment, and then cut the knot with his sword."

She nodded hesitantly.

"He fulfilled the prophecy, you see. Just like Microcore fulfills the promise on its box that this software will cut the knot created by its last box. Of course our sword ties a new knot to replace the old to ensure a market for next year's release. It's the way of the modern world."

"It's your job."

"Our job. 'Microcore, where reinventing the need for our existence is a way of life.' " He grinned. "It's vapid, but it feeds us."

Mona looked uncomfortable. "I don't think you should be so negative," she decided. "I don't think it helps the group."

Miscalculation! "I'm not negative. Just honest. Candid."

"I don't think you believe in what we're doing."

"Look." He considered what to say. "I'm just trying to analyze our market role clearly and find some humor from poking fun. I don't really object. I just look for opportunities to show… initiative."

She brightened at that. "Initiate consensus!" she recited approvingly, remembering the corporate slogan. "Plan time for spontaneity! Discipline toward freedom!"

He looked at her with disappointment. "You've been listening to the walls, I see."

She nodded. "I've memorized them all. Maybe you should too, Daniel. I think you'd be happier if you better understood why we're all here."

Alone again. That evening, Daniel lay back in the viewing chair of his cramped studio apartment and cruised his video wall. He'd been putting off an upgrade and the chips that drove it were a little cheesy- he hated the planned obsolescence that forced him to keep up- but it still managed to generate convincing three-dimensional imagery in colors brighter than real life. Sound rippled around the corners of his small room like a brook around a boulder, splashing him. "Welcome, Daniel," a female voice greeted in a whisper. "Have you invested in your future today?"

He began to net-surf, skimming across a downloaded rush of tropical beaches, mist-shrouded mountain peaks, and adrenaline-jolting thrill rides. A dinosaur roared, an elephant trumpeted, and Napoleonic cavalry thundered into a smoky valley, his chair rocking slightly with the drum of the hooves. Women more impossibly beautiful than any he'd ever actually seen beckoned alluringly. "At Turner-Murdoch-Disney," an avatar-guide purred, "we promise the best in fantasy entertainment! Experience utter danger without the risk of real injury, exquisite sex without commitment or disease! Any time, any place, for any reason: as always, your securi-lock keeps your fantasies as private as your own mind! So come dream with us, with the aid of the finest actors and writers and technicians in the world…"

Yet nothing caught his fancy. He clicked restlessly, the usual vividness seeming flat and artificial. "Click 1-800-Companion," a program tempted, "because friendship can be bought…"

That one mocked him. Mona, I'm gonna… call 1-800? Pretty pathetic, Dyson, he lectured himself. My life spent in video half-lives more interesting than my own. Click, click, click, flick, flick, flick. Reality, then! The news was of rare, remote disaster that confirmed his own safety. The market twitched to tremors too faint to feel. Commentators excitedly recorded the linkages and breakups of celebrities he could never hope to meet. Economic indicators were up-everyone can win, all the time- but then they were always up under United Corporations. Or about to go up, or taking a breather after a sprint of upness. He skimmed like a skipping rock over the bloated bandwidth, numb from the predictability of it. Newer, better, faster. The more insistent the promise, the more his own world seemed to remain unchanged. There were fads, of course: quick, insistent, and forgotten until economically recycled by nostalgia and irony. His closets were filled with the detritus of fads. All closets were. All fads were global now.

He clicked and tapped, following the links his hacker pal Fitzroy had taught him. The web had grown so vast it was fundamentally unexplorable, unpoliced. Its sites outnumbered the population of the planet. It had become a gargantuan network of electronic rooms, corridors, passageways, and barriers: endless, tangled, secretive, and dreamlike. As deep and unknowable now as the human mind, a haunt of inner fantasy and murky rebellion. A descent to its cyber underground was like falling down a rabbit hole.

Had he found them or had they found him?

They'd come to him first, he remembered, but probably only after being alerted to his discontent by his e-mail whinings or his grousing to some co-worker who already belonged. It was hip to not take United Corporations seriously. So popping up on his wall out of nowhere one evening had come a single word that intrigued him:

Disbelieve.

Then an Internet address into a laborious maze with just enough irreverence to be tantalizing. There was a shadow net under the official net, he knew, a Hades of the skeptical and the unhappy. Its coding was breakable, to be sure, but it took the authorities time to find and break. The illicit nature of it was thrilling. But finally he'd come to some electronic doors that barred further descent.

Keep Out.

He cracked some code, made some end runs, guessed some riddles, and received a few half-baked conspiracy theories for his trouble. He was still too straight, bogged in the cyber underground's tar: the corporate drone, the hacker who couldn't quite hack it.

Frustrated, he called Fitzroy.

"What the hell do you want that garbage for?" the ex-cop had growled from his video wall. Fitzroy hacked code for a living now, making three times the money he'd earned policing it. He'd found Daniel floundering on the web once, offered some free advice, and then regularly milked him of money for one insistent need or another. "It's just a bunch of loonies. Rumors as news. Losers."

"They're different."

"So is a rehab ward for the morally impaired. You want to spend a month there?"

"Come on, Fitzroy, can you get me in or not?"

"I can get you started. Then you have to play along with their paranoia while they suck on your bank account. It's a scam, Dyson."

"I'm bored. I've heard rumors about these guys. They question things."

"Ask 'em how many answers they've got." But he sold Daniel enough passwords and puzzle solutions to get him in.

Daniel found himself in a gothic mansion of paranoia, an odd net-world of conspiracy theories, web-porn, unproven sex scandals, dark fantasy, irreverent satire, pseudo-science, alien abductions, and rambling political discourse. Garbage, Fitzroy had predicted. People who preferred to believe the bizarre over the mundane no matter how improbable. Links were constantly disrupted by authorities trying to police the net of trash and new cells opened up as fast as old ones evaporated. Postings were made by characters calling themselves Swamp Fox and Robin Hood. It was a game.

So Daniel surfed after his failure with Mona Pietri because he was more thrilled at being there- at being in- than with any information he was finding. "If everyone wins, how do we feel what it means to lose?" pleaded a posting this evening. "If this is heaven, where is hell?"

"Level 31," Daniel offered lightly, typing. "A Microcore help menu."

"Who is Satan?"

"Harriet Lundeen." Maybe someone would pick up the name and she'd flicker through a hundred conspiracy theories. The gorgon, unmasked. He laughed to himself.

"What if you could really fight evil, Daniel?"

He stopped at that. Who was this cowled figure looming on his screen who knew his name? You never used your real name in the cyber underground. He explored under the sobriquet Gordo, taken from an action toy he kept on his desk. Gordo Firecracker, nemesis of evil.

"How do you know my name?"

"I am a would-be friend."

Daniel paused. He was suspicious of would-be friends. He knew there were informants, spies, and censors who cruised the web, occasionally making an embarrassing arrest. Still, he was curious.

"Who are you?"

"I am Spartacus. I am Robespierre. I am Thomas Paine and Vladimir Lenin and Vercingetorix and Crazy Horse. We exist, Daniel. We oppose. The cyber underground is more than a toy. The world has gone into a coma and we want to wake it up."

He hesitated at that. There was an unspoken line between satire and treason, and this kind of stuff was subversive. Illegal. But kind of cool too. That's what he wanted to do, wake up. How secure was the encryption on this site?

"Are you brave enough to help?"

Yeah, you chicken, Dyson?

"Are you intelligent enough to care?"

Care about what? That was the problem, wasn't it, that no one cared about anything anymore. "Help with what?" he typed.

"Do you know what a truth cookie is?"

Ah. Software vandalism. "I've heard of them." A prank virus or a sophomoric Trojan Horse. Saboteurs slipped them into web products sometimes, like Microcore's. You ran the application and some illicit message popped up. Dumb stuff, mostly. Jokes, digs at the rich and famous, or kooky theories of oppression and malfeasance. Water cooler talk. But they worked like a kind of underground newspaper, the opposition's version of reality. The whole practice was more annoying than threatening to United Corporations. There were electronic screens to weed the junk out, and employees suspected of inserting a truth cookie or reading too many of them sometimes wound up being given an "opportunities transfer" to a lower level. Dangerous as hell, really, to play with this stuff. And fun to sneak looks at it.

"We need your help, Daniel. The world needs a truth cookie in your product. The world needs to wake up. We can make it safe, very safe. All of this is encrypted. Your electronic tracks erased. It's risk-free, if you trust us."

Trust who? Daniel felt a flush of tension. "I don't have the expertise." How could he slip a cookie into something like the Meeting Minder? It had to be impossible.

"We'll teach you."