Marlowe and the Spacewoman (35 page)

“I can’t rest until I bring my killer to justice.  I’m just funny that way.”

Nina shrugged, patted him on the shoulder, and went back to looking out the window.  “It’s strange.  Everything I look at ends up being nothing like what it seems.  Dogs run over and chat you up, buildings are made with Styrofoam, houses have personalities.  I’m told parrots are public enemy number one around here, yet the only parrot I’ve seen is yours, and he turns out to be the closest thing to normal I’ve encountered since I walked out of my ship.  And that’s stretching the definition considerably.  I mean, look at the car we’re in!  It can climb buildings!  Sometimes I wonder if I’m unconscious on my ship, still in deep space, and suffering from a lack of oxygen or something.  It would be simpler if this was all a bad dream.”

Marlowe was missing something.  He could sense it on the very edge of his awareness, and it bugged him that he couldn’t quite see it.

“How much longer must I endure these indignities!”  Jebediah had decided to interact with the world again.  “I am NOT insane.  Just because people say I’m crazy doesn’t make it true!  You can’t believe everything you’re told.”

“I know, Father.  It’s OK, nobody believes you’re crazy any more.”

“I have Huggy Bear.  Piping him through now.”

“Huggy Bear, any progress on that virus?”

Huggy Bear’s face popped up in his left eye.  His hair was even oilier and more unkempt that before.  He was perspiring slightly, but had a big smile on his face.

“Marlowe, thank you again for giving me this virus.  It’s fascinating.  Utterly fascinating.  I’m learned how to code things I didn’t even think was possible.  When you find the author, I simply must meet him.  He’s a genius.  A super genius!”

“So you have made progress.”

“Well, of a sort.  I’ve been watching it execute on a virtual PDI in debug mode.  That way I get a line by line view of the action, as it were.  This is a clever virus.  The first time I tried, it detected that the PDI was a virtual PDI and tried to infect the host system!  So I ran a virtual PDI on a virtual PDI to see what-”

“Huggy, as impressive as I’m sure this dialog is about to be, I’m not up to speed on my geek terms.  Just give me the highlights, please.”

“Well, I managed to fool the virus into infecting a virtual PDI and then watched it execute.  There was no way your PDI could have been recovered with anything but the complete wiping of the hardware and a reinstall of an uninfected image.  This thing is thorough.  It was a tough nut to crack, but then it hit me: what if there isn’t one virus, but two, and you need both to start the infection?  Turns out I was pretty close.  You have two components, but they aren’t separate viruses.  The first program is a virus, and it has to be resident on your PDI when the second part, the trigger, is received.  And the trigger in and of itself is harmless, so you’d never think twice about receiving it.”

“What was the trigger?”

“I don’t know exactly.  I found the bit that changes when the trigger is received, and when I flipped that bit, the virus launched.  It could have been a word, an image, a spoken phrase.  The virus apparently takes a checksum of the trigger phrase or file, so I can’t reconstruct the actual trigger.  Maybe if I ran checksums on everything you’ve received in the last day, but that would take quite a bit of time.  And that’s assuming the trigger still exists.  Oh, and Marlowe?”

“Yeah?”

“You may still be infected by the executable part of the virus.  I’m sending over a virus scanner to check your PDI.  There’s no way of knowing when you were infected by the virus.   It could have been lying dormant for years, which would mean it’s in all your backups.”

The download bar superimposed itself over Huggy Bear’s face.  It downloaded very quickly.

“The file he’s sending scans clean,” said House.

“And so did whatever it was that actually infected me,” said Marlowe wryly.  “Ah nuts.  Here goes nothing.”  Marlowe executed the program.  Two seconds later a window popped up.  “Virus not detected,” it said, a little yellow happy face next the to statement winking at him.

“Looks like I’m clean, Huggy.”

“Then you received the infection sometime after the backup you used to restore your PDI.”

“Thanks Huggy, keep digging.”

“I will.”

“Oh, one last question.  How long after receiving the trigger does it take for the virus to execute?”

“Oh, I can’t say for certain, but I’d guess not very long.  I haven’t found any timing mechanism in the virus, and to keep things simple, the trigger is probably just a trigger, without any extra code attached to it.  But there could be a pointer in the virus I’m missing, so I can’t rule out a time delay.”

“If there’s no timer?”

“Then I’d guess a few seconds.  A minute or so tops.”

“Thanks Huggy.  Let me know if you find anything else.”  Marlowe killed the link.  “House, you know what to do?”

“Scan all the backups for the virus to see if we can detect when you were infected?”

“Right on the first guess.”

Huggy Bear’s analysis of the PDI killing virus clearly indicated a very sophisticated program.  Most of the viruses Obedere had sent were, as House put it, obvious.  Even the id box hijacking virus, after a second pass, had been found and disassembled with relative ease.  Clearly not of the same quality as the PDI killer.  It made Marlowe wonder.  He had another thought.

“House, while I was driving to the sewage treatment plant, did any military or police aircraft take off from airfields in the vicinity?”

“I can check with the Ministry of Policing satellite database.”

“Please do.”

The Ministry of Policing maintained a network of satellites hanging over the City, watching and recording every square centimeter and maintaining a stored database of images going back a couple of years.  It had been another of Obedere’s pet projects, ostensibly for use during large events, to gauge crowd sizes, but Obedere had immediately co-opted it for more devious purposes.

“I’ve reviewed satellite images of all airfields within two hundred kilometers of the sewage treatment plant taken in the three hours leading up to the attack, and have detected no flights that flew over you.”

“Stealth aircraft?”

“No stealth aircraft took off during this time frame.  While our level of confidence that my back door into the Ministry of Policing servers has risen dramatically after your intrusion, until we know for sure where the virus that crashed your PDI came from, there will always be some question as to the validity of any data I collect from them.”

“Point taken.”  Marlowe mulled.  If, if, if.  If it was Obedere who had infected his PDI, then all the information gleaned from the Ministry of Policing back door was garbage.  If Obedere hadn’t infected Marlowe’s PDI, then the information was good and they were dealing with another player.  It would have been so much easier if House had detected a stealth plane taking off; not detecting it didn’t rule out the existence of such a flight, so Marlowe would now have to approach the case from two angles.  One assuming Obedere was responsible, one assuming he wasn’t.  

The advanced level of the virus that hit him suggested Obedere wasn’t involved, based on his previous sophomoric attempts.  Unless Obedere had hired a new programmer, which was also possible.  Or the previous attempts were clumsy in order to lure him into a false sense of complacency.  It made his head hurt, thinking about it.

Traffic ground to a halt.  Marlowe was going to have to check the Studebaker’s TrafAvoi algorithm.  It was supposed to check the traffic status reports to avoid this sort of congestion.  A stray glance out the window revealed a familiar sight – the entrance to the alley where he’d first met Toulene, and then where he’d entered the sewers for their assault on the Ministry of Policing headquarters.

“Damn that alley.  It seems like I can’t escape it.  This is the third time I’ve laid eyes on it in the last couple of weeks, and that’s three times too many.”

Marlowe returned his gaze to the rear of the vehicle in front of him, an oversize MuniBus converted for use as a daily commuter.  The unseen driver was in the back, a rising and falling barbell being the only clue to his presence.   Marlowe turned back to the alley entrance.  He began to feel the alley was a nexus of sorts, a whirling vortex that he kept finding himself sucked into like a Ministry of Policing toilet.  With just as pleasant a final destination, no doubt.  He wondered if any of this would have happened if he hadn’t met Toulene there.  It was conceivable that House wouldn’t have come up with the plan to break into the Ministry of Policing, meaning Nina would either be dead or a fugitive, and that would most likely mean Marlowe would be dead or a fugitive too, having failed his brother and opening the door for Obedere to take over the City.  What else would be different if he’d never helped Toulene escape the City, he wondered.

A bird dropping exploded on the windshield, and the car’s wipers angrily swept back and forth to clean it.  The avian splatter triggered a realization for Marlowe.  He made a leap, and the pieces suddenly fell neatly into place.  Marlowe felt terrible fear.  Real, bone-chilling fear.  The assassination, the hunt for Tray and the trap that waited there, the abortive attempt on their lives in the sewage tank, it all made sense now if he was right.

“House, pipe in my favorite music.”

“Lately, I’ve gotten into the habit of just assuming all our conversations should be encrypted.”

“House, do you have that list of addresses Tray gave me, for his wives and kids?”

“Yes.”

“Have you checked any of them out yet?”

“It seemed a low priority, given the circumstances.  Oh, very interesting.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“None of the addresses are legitimate.”

Nina broke in.  “Why would Tray give you bad addresses?”

“Why indeed,” muttered Marlowe, suspicion cementing into certainty.

“Ah, very interesting.”

“Yes, House?”

“I’ve finished scanning the PDI backups for the virus.”

“My turn to guess.  All the backups came up clean until after I met with Tray at the recon parlor.”

“Correct.  Evidently Tray infected you.  The bogus addresses he sent you suggests the virus is embedded in that transmission.”

Marlowe felt a fleeting surge of queasiness in his stomach before the nano probes neutralized it.  He looked in the rear view mirror at his father, who was drumming his fingers on the back of Marlowe’s headrest while smiling at Nina.  A large shadow behind them in traffic caught Marlowe’s eye.  A City garbage truck, presumably driving its appointed rounds.  Though it seemed a bit late in the day for that.

“House,” subvocalized Marlowe, so Jebediah couldn’t hear him, “a question about father’s PDI.”

“Yes?” asked House.

“Are the audio and video feeds on his PDI still disabled?”

“Yes.  As I said before, I didn’t think it prudent to offer the City Municipal Hospital for the Criminally Deranged a live feed into everything dad saw and heard.  Did you want me to reactivate them?”

Marlowe resisted the urge to shake his head violently.  “No, no, leave them off.”

“Very well.”

Marlowe studied the part of the City they were in.  No construction, so the noise levels weren’t too bad.  It all depended on how much attention was being paid to his incoming audio stream.  A gamble, but with the sudden insight he’d had, Marlowe couldn’t afford not to take the chance.  In the rear view mirror, the garbage truck was still behind them.  Perhaps the heavy traffic was a blessing.  He turned to Nina.  “This traffic is driving me nuts.  We could walk faster.  In fact, I think the exercise would do us good.”

“I don’t know about that-” started Jebediah.

“Car, stop and drop us off.  Try to keep up with us, though, in case we decide to get back in.”

“Now just a second, my feet hurt!” said Jebediah.

“Everyone out,” said Marlowe as the car paused next to the sidewalk.  “As you always told me growing up, father, a little pain never hurt anyone.  Builds character, I believe you used to say.”

Nina looked at Marlowe quizzically; Jebediah glared.  But both got out.

They were in a major retail sector of the City.  The Studebaker had dropped them off in front of a Bucky Brew and then forced its way back into the sluggish traffic.  Marlowe was careful to stare straight ahead as he walked, keeping Nina and Jebediah behind him.

“Not a word from you two, I need to think.”

“Now just one moment, boy,” sputtered Jebediah.

Marlowe, looking momentarily up at the roof of the copy store they were now passing, raised his fingers to his lips.  “Not a word, I need to think.”  Then he muted his audio feed.

Here’s hoping the sudden drop in background noise doesn’t stand out too much, thought Marlowe.  Still staring straight ahead, hoping to create the illusion of a silent, conversation-free walk, Marlowe addressed his companions.  “Sorry about that.  I’ve muted my audio stream.  I don’t want House to hear what I have to say.”

“Keeping secrets from House?  That strikes me as a bad idea,” said Jebediah.  “And what about my audio feed?”

“Disabled when you first came home, to prevent the good doctors at the City Municipal Hospital for the Criminally Insane figuring out where you are.”