SPYWARE BOOK (20 page)

“What’cha looking for, Nog my man?” Ray asked him casually.

The effect was electric. Nog straightened from a large box of cords and computer parts. He half-whirled, half-fell as he turned to face Ray. Junk flew from his gloved fingers. A ribbon cable dangled from his left hand like a scrap of uneaten spaghetti.

“Oh shit,” breathed Nog. “You almost gave me a heart attack Vance, you asshole.”

“That makes twice in one week,” acknowledged Ray.

“You should just get the fuck out of here while you can, man,” said Nog, breathing hard.

“What are you doing here?”

“Look, you stupid mother—” here, Nog halted. He seemed to notice the gun for the first time. Ray had loosened up his cop stance and now held it nonchalantly.

“Oh, hey man,” stammered Nog. He shuffled back a step and almost fell into a stack Vogue magazines as high as his waist. “I didn’t do Brenda, man. That’s not why I’m here.”

“Let me ask you again, Nog,” said Ray earnestly. He let his fingers work at the grip of the gun while he spoke. “Why are you here?”

“I’m just looking for—stuff.”

Ray took two steps forward. He watched the other’s reaction as Nog noticed the bloodstains that ran down his neck from his head wound. “What kind of stuff?”

Nog worked his tongue nervously. “Stuff like, ah—disks and chips.”

“Incriminating stuff?” asked Ray, he nodded, taking Nog’s shrug as evidence enough. “So why would it be here? Was Brenda in on all this then?”

Nog snorted. “Of course not,” he snapped.

“No, no, of course not. She was no hacker,” said Ray, “In fact, she hated your kind, didn’t she? The festering spiders out there on the web. The ones that dream up ways to lure teens to bus stations and vandalize the honest work of others.”

“You going to shoot me or what, Vance?” asked Nog.

“You have more balls than you know, asking that question,” said Ray.

Nog opened his mouth. His ancient braces glinted, but he shut up again, saying nothing.

“Good. All I want to hear from you is answers. Let’s see now, you came here to find evidence. The evidence must incriminate you, or you wouldn’t bother to leave your lair. Besides which, I’ve never seen you work so hard in your life. With me so far?”

Nog wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his yellow glove. He nodded and glanced out the front window again. “We have to get out of here, Vance,” he said.

“All I can think of is the source code of the virus, something linking you to it. Am I on the right track?”

“Yeah, you’re a regular no-shit-Sherlock, man. I couldn’t find it, and I’ve been at it all night. We have to get out of here now though, man.”

“Why’s that?”

Nog pointed out the window. Ray sighted along the rubber finger. He saw a small black plastic box. It sat outside the window in the branches of a small liquid amber tree. On the top of it, a red light blinked.

“What the heck is that?”

“A cop-detector,” explained Nog. “It detects radio emissions on the cop bandwidths. Any car that transmits inside of a half-mile is picked up.”

“So, you’re telling me that the cops are coming.”

“Bingo,” said Nog, heading for the side door he had forced.

“I’m coming with you,” said Ray.

“What if I don’t want company?” asked Nog.

“Then I’ll have to blow your guts out.”

“In that case,” said Nog with a snort, “be my guest.”

. . . 31 Hours and Counting . . .

Spurlock was exhausted by the time he finished burying the van. The PVC pipe stuck up about two feet above the mound of sandy earth. It looked like some kind of drainage system for the orchard, however, not like the tip of a tomb. As an afterthought, he shoved a half-eaten bag of cheetos down the hole. The bag stuck part way down, but he followed it up with his water bottle and the weight of it forced both of them down. He laughed, then called down the tube to the kid.

“Don’t eat and drink everything at once, kid! Otherwise you’ll be eating the vinyl off the car seats before I get back here with another little snack for you.”

“Mister,” he heard faintly come up the tube. Spurlock raised his eyebrows, the kid had rarely spoken. “Don’t leave me! It’s dark down here!”

Spurlock looked down the tube into the earth. He could see nothing. It was indeed as dark as the devil’s own eyeball down there.

Spurlock hawked a big one and fired it down the pipe. He couldn’t tell if the kid caught it in the face or not, but he hoped so. “See now, you don’t want to be calling up this pipe, boy. You never know what might come down to get you. Snakes would love this pipe, if they hear you. So, you just keep quiet until I bring you more food. If you’re real good, I might even let you out. If you’re not, I’ll cover up this last hole and you’ll suffocate down there in the dark. Now, shut up.”

With that, he walked back toward the road. There was still plenty of business to be done today.

#

Nog had plenty of snacks in his white Lincoln Town Car and Ray was so hungry that he couldn’t help himself. He felt vaguely ill to eat from the same bags of corn chips and boxes of cellophane-wrapped cakes that Nog had been pawing. Listening to Nog wasn’t helping his stomach, either.

“Where to?” asked Nog.

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, you’ve got the gun, Vance.”

“Right,” said Vance, feeling dazed. So much had happened today. He ate another chip, trying to think. “Let’s get out of here before the cops come. Just drive, Nog.”

Nog did a wide sweeping U-turn to get out of the dead-end circle. The big white car heeled over like a boat. The thought of Moby Dick, the great white whale, came unbidden to Ray’s mind. Kids on bikes scattered before their wake. Nog stomped on the pedal and they rolled quickly and quietly away from Brenda’s.

“I guess I can tell you some stuff, since you seem so convinced that I created this beauty,” said Nog, driving the car out of the neighborhood. “The virus is really a sophisticated piece of software. I can’t say that I completely understand what it’s doing now myself.”

“What do you mean?” mumbled Ray around his chips. He snorted quietly to himself; here was another nerd, telling him how cool a nerdy program was. They didn’t have many people to brag to, so he had always been a prime target during his office hours. He wondered vaguely what was happening to his students. Had they found a substitute for him?He hoped it wasn’t Waterson. The guy had his heart in the right place, but he couldn’t teach. He felt an odd pang of guilt for abandoning his classes.

“The virus is a real piece of work,” continued Nog, warming to his topic. “I always get a chuckle out of the news flashes—I’ve started watching CNN since your last visit—I love how they call it:
adaptable.
They have no clue.”

“Uh-huh.”Ray barely listened. Much of his attention was devoted to feeding his face and watching for cops. He wished there was something to drink. The only thing in sight was Nog’s sun-warmed, half-empty can of diet soda. He wasn’t
that
thirsty.

“A lot of the ideas in it come from your teachings, Vance. Particularly in the study of neural networks.”

Ray frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“Neural nets, my man. That’s what this virus is built from.”

Ray looked at him in surprise. Neural nets were software imitations of the human mind. They were currently a hot area of research in the artificial intelligence field, but few practical applications had yet been found. They were often found to be too large and complex for most projects. “They said the virus was big, but not that big.”

Nog nodded proudly. “I worked hard to shrink the neural nodes. They are both general problem-solvers and yet specialized to their task. But, that’s not the best part.”

Ray waited. Nog finally had his full attention.

Nog basked in it. “The worm is a fully-function learning system. It copies itself with both logical and random mutations. And it shares data on successful mutations with others of its kind, sort of cross-breeding.”

Ray thought about that for a moment. “That is some piece of software.”

“It’s more than that, Vance. It’s
alive
.”

“It’s just a bunch of bits set a certain way, Nog,” replied Ray. “It’s not going to pass the Turing test.”The Turing test, first described by Alan Turing in the fifties, defined a test which no computer had yet passed. Turing argued that if one could hold a conversation with a computer in another room and couldn’t tell its responses from those of a human, one had to admit it showed some degree of intelligence.

“No, no,” said Nog, “You miss my point. I didn’t say it was intelligent, Vance, I said it was
alive
.”

Ray was silent for a moment. “So, this thing makes copies of itself with variations in the copies?”

“Yes, logical mutations that stem from what it has learned. They vary greatly, too. I have no idea anymore what the virus has become. It mutates very quickly. Out on the open net, with a thousand conditions, it has turned into a thousand different viruses doing a thousand different things.”

“How many different moves does it know how to make? I mean, is it created to destroy data, hardware, what? What’s its trick?”

“You aren’t getting it, Vance.  The thing is rewriting itself, adapting. I have no idea what it might do. There is one main trick that remains to be seen. What other moves might it make? Who knows? Whatever works best.”

“You mean the thing evolves, experiments?”

“Yes, the same way that organic microbes do,” Nog beamed. “Actually, I modeled it after HIV. That biological monster is particularly hard to cure, because the outer coating of the virus resembles sugar, which is food for cells. It is really hard to teach our cells not feed themselves. My virus is like that, it pretends to be valid data from a valid source.”

“Spoofing,” said Ray, providing the term used for computer programs that tried to trick their way past firewalls.

“Right. But better spoofing than you’ve ever seen. The new computer accepts it and zap, it is infected. Just like HIV, mine has many strains and it mutates so fast that people might never figure out how to stop it. One copy might try to erase hard disks and copy itself using e-mail. Another might use VPN to other servers. Another might try to hide, lying dormant on disks everywhere until a certain time or date. Whichever works the best, that one will make more copies than the others. Some of the new copies will have mutations, which continues the cycle.”

“What if it chooses a bad strategy?” asked Ray, feeling a bit sick. Had he helped create this thing by teaching Nog the basics?

“That happens all the time. You ever see one of those nature-shows, where about a thousand baby shrimp explode out of their eggs at once? All the fish come and feast on them, but a few get by. Defective ones and unlucky ones die off, but many live.”

Ray nodded, overwhelmed. “Only the fittest survive.”

“Exactly.”

A flash of anger hit Ray. His head injury throbbed and his frustration reached a sudden flashpoint. He pointed Ingles’ pistol at Nog. “What’s to keep me from taking you right to the cops, Nog? Why shouldn’t I give us both up and let them grill you until you spill your fat guts on this virus?”

“Only one thing, Vance,” said Nog.

Ray sighed. Justin. Nog knew he couldn’t give up yet. Things had gotten crazy, but he felt that he was close, and he still had to try.

“Okay,” he said. “Just tell me why you were trying to dig up evidence at Brenda’s.”

Nog shrugged. “I didn’t want the same thing to happen to me that happened to you. That Santa-bastard planted something there to incriminate me as well. That’s his way.”

“You mean Ingles?”

Nog glanced at him. “So that
was
you listening in on No Carrier.”

Ray allowed himself a grim smile. At least he had done something right.

“Yeah, well, in later communications that you must have missed, Santa indicated that he was going to screw me too.”

“It did seem like a crazy way to try to make a million bucks.”

“You know, I don’t think that ever was his real motivation,” said Nog. “He had something else in mind.”

“Do you think he just wanted to burn the net? Is he paranoid? Does the net watches him while he sleeps?”

“Maybe,” said Nog, “he uses the net all the time, but he doesn’t seem to value it.”

“Well, whatever it is, I need to talk to Santa privately.”

“Yeah well, I guess this is the end of the line, then,” said Nog. He slowed the car on a country road and pulled over to the dirt shoulder.

Ray looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“Look around, Vance. This is the back of Ingle’s place. You didn’t want me to drive you right up to the door, did you?”

Ray eyed the surrounding army of black-trunked almond trees. Far down one of the rows, he thought to see a house of white clapboards. Ingles owned a large ranch out here, it must have covered around a hundred-plus acres, mostly of trees. He recalled having been out here years ago for a faculty mixer. Sarah hadn’t come with him that day, he suddenly remembered. He had to wonder now if she had a special reason to not want to go to Ingles house.