Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (51 page)

"Nothing works today!" I snapped. My cell phone was an inert lump in my jeans pocket. A day without texting was . . . unnatural. "Why are you in such a good mood?"

A shrug: It doesn't affect me. "What have you heard about the outages?"

My psych prof commuted from Athens, Georgia, outside the dead zone. She'd listened to radio news for most of her inbound drive, and the class had peppered her with questions. I summarized. "A really nasty virus on the loose. Destructive. Best guess is it's been dormant, below the radar, for months. Today it's popped up everywhere, especially widespread in the Carolinas. We're back in the Dark Ages."

Gesturing at the shelves, Marc laughed. "Not quite. We have plenty of books."

Then Seth came through the door, huffing a bit. He was middle aged and heavyset, and the day was hot. "Be of good cheer, gentlemen. Stuff is coming back up. The Exxon station can pump gas again. You just need to pay with cash."

Gas pumps, if only standalone. The traffic light outside the store had stopped flashing and now showed green. Maybe the world hadn't ended, merely been struck stupid. Why was my friend and coworker so indifferent? "A return to normal would be a good thing, Marc."

Marc shrugged again and returned to shelving mysteries.

* * *

A newspaper came the next morning. The virus taunted us from every front-page story.

While Mom read, grimacing at her coffee, I channel surfed. Cable was back—and it wasn't only basic. Suddenly, we had premium service.
Everyone
had premium service. Yesterday's malware attack had trashed the cable company's customer records. I would enjoy the free HBO while it lasted. Internet access remained out.

It wasn't just the cable company. Customer records all over had been scrambled. Like cable channels, things that could be offered to everyone came quickly back online. But credit cards, toll-road transponders, pagers—services involving individual accounts . . . those were hobbled or remained offline. In the CNN screen crawler an endless line of companies forecast their returns to service. I began to have hope when my cell came to life, limited to local calling.

With one foot out the door, an alert on the local-access channel stopped me in my tracks. The Feds had declared the outages a terrorist incident. The National Guard had been called up to seal the area.

Hadley Township sat near the southern end of the quarantine zone. Outside the bookstore, Humvees rumbled up and down the street. Choppers flew over a couple times.

Marc wasn't around despite what the posted work schedule indicated. I asked Seth about that, and he shrugged.

Another Humvee rolled past the store. "This makes no sense," I said. "How will soldiers catch a hacker?"

"No," Seth answered. "It makes perfect sense—from
their
point of view."

Their
. For a mere syllable, it carried a lot of feeling. I remember staring.

Seth said, "The National Guard can't be after the hacker, though I wouldn't doubt there's a promotion in it for anyone who somehow stumbles across him . . . or her. I'm guessing the Guard is here to keep everyone
in
."

I noticed the hesitation before "or her," but chalked it up to the odds. Most hackers were male. I had a more basic question. "Keep everyone in? Why? We haven't done anything."

The bookstore subscribed to the morning paper, another facet of Seth's fierce loyalty to the printed word. Still, I don't think I'd ever seen him use it for anything but packing material.

Today Seth was glued to the
Gazette
. He tapped an article syndicated from the Associated Press. "Have you seen how the bug spread? Through point-of-sale systems. Not just any POS system. Ones that work with toll-road transponders. Electronic key fobs. No-swipe credit cards."

Antiquarian leanings are only to be expected in the owner of a used-book store. Compared to Seth, my mother was a high-tech wizard. A cell phone was nothing short of miraculous to the boss. Why the sudden interest?

"Mr. Seth Miller? My name is Jones. I'm a federal agent."

A stranger stood in the open door, wearing a black suit despite the summer heat. He flipped open a leather badge wallet; Seth (and I, discreetly, from a distance—I had good eyes back then) dutifully examined it. Homeland Security Bureau, HSB, what the wags called Homeland BS.

A Fed in the flesh didn't make me feel waggish.

"Can I see a warrant?" Seth asked.

Agent Jones smiled humorlessly. "No need. Just tell me if you've seen someone."

Seth stiffened. "Who?"

Jones offered a folded sheet of paper. The fold covered everything but the headshot of a young man in dress shirt and tie.

Could that be
Marc
in the photo? I tried to picture my friend with a trim mustache and short hair, without glasses or the John Deere cap.

"Don't know him," Seth said.

Jones didn't ask me. I looked young for my age and happened to be holding a graphic novel. He probably mistook me for a customer.

The grainy image Jones next offered Seth was probably from a security camera. I recognized the Hadley Exxon. And the man at the air pump in that photo, inflating the front tire of his bike? It was Marc, no question.

"That's the same guy?" Seth asked. "Sure, I know him. That's Marc Kimball."

"An employee of yours, I'm told," Jones prompted.

"Not really. He's done odd jobs for me."

My head was spinning, the least reason for which was Seth's dissembling. I supposed he lied to avoid trouble about failing to report wages. What could the Feds want with Marc?

Jones took back the photo. "I'd like to speak with him."

"Shouldn't you be doing something about the outage?" I blurted. I couldn't help myself.

Jones silenced me with a hard stare, then turned back to Seth. "Mr. Miller, do you know where I might find Kimball?"

Seth shook his head. "Sorry. What's he done, anyway?"

"I'd like to speak with him," Jones repeated, handing Seth an embossed business card. "If you see or hear from Kimball, let me know."

What could Marc have done to merit the Feds' attention amid this chaos?

Hadley's lone Internet café© was across the business district. That made it a short walk away. They got Internet service by satellite, not cable, so I headed over on the hope they had connectivity.

They did. I clicked the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives link on the Homeland BS website. From the middle of the list Marc's picture stared back at me.

I had one answer, at least. Kimball
was
an alias.

* * *

Every couple of weeks, Marc and I went stargazing in the county forest preserve in the hills west of town. In hindsight, I didn't know how often
he
went. There were always six-packs hidden in the stream, nicely chilled, anchored by water-smoothed rocks. I was sufficiently enamored with access to his beer stash, me being still a few months under age and Mom being strict about such things, that I didn't wonder what else Marc kept in the woods.

We'd head out right after dinner, the going being easier before sundown. We'd shoot the breeze while we waited for dark. Thinking back, it's clear Marc steered the conversation away from himself. That didn't take great conversational skills—I was pretty shallow back then.

Sometimes we'd kick around the same topics as at work. Discussing books and movies and music unavoidably touches on politics. Benjamin Disraeli once said, "A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head." I was a lot closer to sixteen than sixty, and not shy with my opinion that the country was going to hell in a hand basket. It's easy to pontificate when you have no interest in getting involved.

Marc kept his own counsel. I chose to read into his silence that he also had misgivings.

But mostly we spoke of dreams. Mine involved making a difference—"Those who do not learn from history," et cetera—by shaping young minds. If Marc saw irony, given my callow youth, he kept it to himself.

His dreams involved space. Once darkness fell, he would point out the International Space Station streaking across the sky, or the Apollo landing sites, or whatever planets were in view. He would talk about the robots creeping across Mars, about the spacecraft exploring the outer planets, and about all we might learn by dispatching robots to Europa and Enceladus.

Even history majors had heard of Europa, if only that it was one of the moons of Jupiter discovered by Galileo. Enceladus was new to me. I learned it was a frozen moon, perhaps with a liquid water ocean beneath its icy surface, perhaps with
life
within its oceans, orbiting distant ringed Saturn.

Beneath twinkling stars Marc spoke with a wistfulness I didn't understand. Surely someone with Marc's computer skills could find employment closer to the space program than Seth's Secondhand Books. NASA Huntsville was an easy day's drive from here. He deflected my questions with self-deprecating remarks until even I gathered he was changing the subject.

Marc being on the lam would explain a lot.

I tried to imagine my friend as somehow the cause of this madness. Why would he do such a thing? On the most-wanted list, the name beneath Marc's picture was Zachary Boyer. Googling that name only confused me further.

What master terrorist keeps a blog?

Sipping overpriced coffee, I skimmed screen after screen of blog entries. My mind's tongue kept tripping over the acronym RFID until I began treating it as a word: are-fid. Radio-frequency identification.

I knew little more about RFIDs than what the plain words behind the acronym suggested, but Marc/Zachary went on and on about them. Jamming them. Spoofing them. Removing them. Comments and linksback to his blog postings suggested he had a large following.

Oh yes: The blog freely offered that Homeland Security was after him.

I had done nothing wrong, but guilt came easily. I
could
have told Agent Jones I knew Marc Kimball. Hell, I knew where Marc lived. So why had I said nothing? Following Seth's lead, in part. Maybe a little of my inaction stemmed from an irrelevant memory: In
The Fugitive
, Richard Kimball was innocent.

I knew so much more now.

The virus wreaking havoc had lain dormant for months, and the Carolinas were the epicenter of this attack. Marc had appeared here in Hadley, South Carolina, a few months ago. Marc knew computers—and his fugitive alter ego was wanted for cyberterrorism.

And still I dithered.

Maybe I just couldn't believe Marc was the criminal type. I sure as hell didn't see him as a terrorist, cyber– or otherwise.

No one in the café paid me any attention, my silent surfing no competition for the argument that raged at the counter. Despite myself, I couldn't tune it out. I listened in growing dismay.

The National Guard wasn't merely stopping people at the nearby state border. You couldn't cross, no matter how upstanding a citizen you were, without a government-issued photo ID and an up-close and personal scan of yourself and your vehicle. Many people refused.

RFIDs? From Zachary's blog, the tags were hidden in clothing labels, toll-road transponders, car tires. . . . RFIDs felt like part of the puzzle, but there had to be more.

My booth gave me a view of the street outside the café. Across the road Jones stood speaking with two elderly passersby. Looking uneasy, they studied a paper in Jones' hand, presumably with Marc's picture. It was only a matter of time until Jones found someone who would point him toward Marc. Zachary.

I
had
to know how Marc was involved.

I cleared the web browser's history file, cookies, and cache before slipping out the café's back door.

The Southern Hospitality Inne was old and rundown, with a Bates Motel feel about it. The locals mostly referred to the place as the Southern Comfort, after a weakness of the owner. It was Hadley's lodging of last resort, where half vacant meant booming business.

That day, the Southern Hospitality's parking lot was oddly full. Most of the cars bore out-of-state plates. People milled around in the lot, and the motel's tiny office was jammed.

I ambled past, catching snippets of conversation. The Guard had turned these people back at the highway out of town. There was more talk about scanning as a condition of passage.

Some of the strangers were mad as hell. More were scared. No one admitted to having seen it, but several claimed to have talked to someone who knew someone who had heard from someone else . . .

Could the Guard be shooting people for trying to sneak past a roadblock? That was
insane
and yet somehow eerily believable. "Enemy combatant" was all too elastic a term. Call someone an enemy combatant and due process went out the window.

(Rumors of border shootings persist to this day, ever unconfirmed. I can finally find out the truth. It's a scary prospect.)

I studied the map tacked to the town Welcome sign, on the state highway just past the motel. National Guard checkpoints were prominently marked. Leaving my car in town had been a good decision. I figured a route around them and kept walking.

An hour later I knelt by a familiar stream, fishing in the cool waters for a brew.

"I could use another," Marc called. He perched on a boulder beside the mouth of a small cave. From where he sat you could see half the sprawling forest preserve by day and half the starry sky by night. I wondered if we'd ever stargaze here again.

We clinked cans, drinking in companionable silence until the words burst out of me. "Are you him? Did you do it?"

He thrust out his hand. "Zachary Boyer. Zach to my friends."

"I wasn't followed," I said. I was mad at him for past deception, and mad at myself for ignoring the implied question.

Of
course
he was my friend. He was practically the brother I'd never had. I had shared my hopes and dreams with him. I was young and self-absorbed enough to believe that entitled me to know everything, as though my banal ambitions merited him putting his liberty at risk.