The Alien Years (54 page)

She had not said anything all this time. Her implacable stony stillness began to get to him. To puncture it Andy said, “Tell me one thing, at least. That guy who wrecked me in Pershing Square: who was he?”

“He wasn’t anybody,” she said.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“He isn’t a who. He’s a what. An it. An android, a mobile anti-pardoner unit, plugged right into the big Entity mainframe in Santa Monica. Something new that we have going around town looking for people like you.”

“Oh,” Andy said, stunned, as if she had kicked him. “Oh.”

“The report is that you gave it one hell of a workout.”

“It gave me one too. Turned my brain half to mush.”

“There was no way you could have beaten it. You were trying to drink the sea through a straw. For a while it looked like you were really going to do it, too. You’re one goddamned ace of a hacker, you know that? Yes, of course you do. Of course.”

“Why do you work for them?” Andy asked.

She shrugged. “Everybody works for them, one way or another. Except people like you, I guess. Why shouldn’t we? It’s their world, isn’t it?”

“It didn’t used to be.”

“A lot of things didn’t used to be. What does that matter now? And it’s not such a bad job. At least I’m not out there on the wall. Or being sent off for TTD.”

“No,” he said. “It’s probably not so bad. If you don’t mind working in a room with such a high ceiling. Is that what’s going to happen to me? Sent off for TTD?”

“Don’t be stupid. You’re too valuable.”

“To whom?”

“The network always needs upgrading. You know it better than anyone alive, even from the outside. You’ll work for us.”

“You think I’m going to turn borgmann?” Andy said, astonished.

“It beats TTD.”

She couldn’t possibly be serious, he thought. This was some game she was playing with him. They would be fools to trust him in any kind of responsible position. And even bigger fools to give him any kind of access to their net.

“Well?” she said, when he remained silent. “Is it a deal, Mickey?”

He was silent a little while longer. She
was
serious, he realized. Handing him the keys to the kingdom. Well, well, well. They must have their reasons, he supposed.
He’d
be the fool, if he said no.

He said, “I’ll do it, yes. On one condition.”

She whistled. “You really have balls, don’t you?”

“Let me have a rematch with that android of yours. I need to check something out. And afterward we can discuss what kind of work I’d be best suited for here. Okay?”

“You aren’t in any position to lay down conditions, you know.”

“Sure I am. What I do with computers is a unique art. You can’t make me do it against my will. You can’t make me do anything against my will.”

She thought about that. “What good is a rematch?”

“Nobody ever beat me before. I want a second try.”

“You know it’ll be worse for you than before.”

“Let me find that out.”

“But what’s the point?”

“Get me your android and I’ll show you the point,” Andy said.

It surprised him tremendously that she would go along with it. But she did. Maybe it was curiosity, maybe it was something else, but she patched herself into the computer net and got off some orders, and pretty soon they brought in the android he had encountered in the park, or maybe another one that had the same bland face, the same general nondescript gray appearance. It looked him over pleasantly, without the slightest sign of interest.

Someone came in and took the security lock off Andy’s wrists and fastened his ankles together with it, and left again. Tessa gave the android its instructions and it held out its wrist to him and they made contact. And Andy jumped right in.

He was raw and wobbly and pretty damned battered, still, but he knew what he needed to do and he knew he had to do it fast. The thing was to ignore the android completely—it was just a
terminal
, it was just a
unit
—and go for what lay behind it. He would offer no implant-to-implant access this time. No little one-on-one courtesies at all. Quickly he bypassed the android’s own identity program, which was clever but shallow. Moving intuitively and instantaneously, because he knew that he was finished if he stopped to spell things out for himself, he leaped right over it while the android was still setting up its combinations, piercing its borgmann interface and diving underneath it before the android could do anything to stop him. That took him instantly from the unit level to the mainframe level, which was a machine of unthinkably enormous capacity, and as he arrived he gave the monster a hearty handshake.

There was a real thrill in that.

For the first time Andy understood, truly understood, what old Borgmann had achieved by building the interface that linked human biochips to Entity mainframes. All that power, all those zillions of megabytes squatting there, and he was plugged right into it. He felt like a mouse hitchhiking on the back of an elephant, but that was all right. He might be only a mouse but that mouse was getting a tremendous ride. Quickly he found the android’s data chain and tied a bow-knot in it to keep it from coming after him. Then, hanging on tight, he let himself go soaring along on the hurricane winds of that colossal machine for the sheer fun of the ride.

And as he soared he ripped out chunks of its memory by the double handful and tossed them to the breeze.

Why not? What did he have to lose?

The mainframe didn’t even notice for a good tenth of a second. That was how big it was. There was Andy, tearing great blocks of data out of its gut, joyously ripping and rending. And it didn’t even know it, because even the most magnificent computer ever assembled is nevertheless stuck with the necessity of operating at the speed of light, and when the best you can do is 186,000 miles a second it can take quite a while for the alarm to travel the full distance down all your neural channels. That thing was
huge.
Andy realized that it was wrong to think of himself as a mouse riding on an elephant. Amoeba piggybacking on a brontosaurus, was more like it.

But of course the guardian circuitry did cut in eventually. Alarms went off, internal gates came clanging down, all sensitive areas were sealed away, and Andy was shrugged off with the greatest of ease. There was no sense staying around waiting to get trapped in there, so he pulled himself free.

The android, he saw, had crumpled to the carpet. It was nothing but an empty husk now.

Lights were flashing on the office wall.

Tessa looked at him, appalled. “What did you
do?”

“I beat your android,” he said. “It wasn’t all that hard, once I knew the scoop.”

“I heard an alarm. The emergency lights went on. You damaged the main computer!”

“Not really. Not in any significant way. That would have been very hard, staying in there long enough to do anything important. I just gave it a little tickle. It was surprised, seeing me get access in there, that’s all.”

“No. I think you really damaged it.”

“Come on, Tessa. Now why would I want to do that?”

She didn’t look amused. “The question ought to be why you haven’t done it already. Why you haven’t gone in there somehow and crashed the hell out of their programs.”

“You actually think I could do something like that?”

She studied him. “I think maybe you could, yes.”

“Well, maybe so. Or maybe not. I doubt it, myself. But I’m not a crusader, you know, Tessa. I like my life the way it is. I move around, I do as I please. It’s a quiet life. I don’t lead uprisings. I don’t like to be out there on the firing line. When I need to gimmick things, I gimmick them just enough, and no more. And the Entities don’t even know I exist. If I were to stick my finger in their eye, they’d cut my finger off. So I haven’t done it.”

“But now you might,” she said.

He began to get uncomfortable. “I don’t follow you.”

“You don’t like risk. You don’t like being conspicuous. You keep yourself out of sight and all that, and don’t start trouble just for the sake of making trouble. Fine. But if we take your freedom away, if we tie you down here in L.A. and put you to work, you’d strike back one way or another, wouldn’t you? Sure you would. You’d go right in there, and you’d figure out a way to cover your tracks so the machine didn’t know you were there. And you’d gimmick things but good. You’d do a ton of damage.” She was silent for a time. “Yes,” she said. “You really would. You’d do such a job on their computer that they might have to scrap it and start all over again. I see it now, that you have the capability and that you could be put in a position where you’d be willing to use it. And so you’d screw everything up for all of us, wouldn’t you?”

“What?”

“If we let you anywhere near the Entity Net, you’d make such a mess of it that they’d feel obliged to do some sort of punitive strike to get back at us, and everybody in LACON would get fired, at the very least. Sent out for TTD, more likely.”

She was overestimating him, Andy saw. The machine was too well defended for anyone, even him, to damage it that way. If he got back inside he could make a little mess here and there, sure, a mouse-mess, but he wouldn’t be able to hide from the guardian circuitry long enough to achieve anything important.

Let her think so, though. Being overestimated is a hell of a lot better than being underestimated.

“I’m not going to give you the chance,” she said. “Because I’m not crazy. I understand you now, Mickey. It isn’t safe to fool around with you. Whenever anybody does, you take your little revenge, and you don’t give a damn what you bring down on anyone else’s head. We’d all suffer, but you wouldn’t care. No. Uh-uh, Mickey. My life isn’t so terrible that I need you to turn it upside down for me. You’ve already done it to me once. I don’t need it again.”

She was looking at him steadily. All the anger seemed to be gone from her and there was only contempt left.

But he was still a prisoner in this place with his ankles fastened together, and she still had total jurisdiction over him. He said nothing and waited to see what would happen next. She studied him for a moment without speaking.

Then she said something completely unexpected. “Tell me, can you go in there again and gimmick things so that there’s no record of your arrest today?”

Andy couldn’t hide his surprise. “Are you really serious about that?”

“I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t. Can you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I suppose I could.”

“Do it, then. I’ll give you exactly sixty seconds to do whatever it is you have to do, and God help you if you do anything else while you’re in there, anything harmful. This is your dossier, here. Get rid of it.” She handed him a printout. “And once you’ve wiped out your record, get yourself going, fast. Out of here, away from Los Angeles. And don’t come back.”

“You’re actually going to let me go?”

“I actually and sincerely am.” She made an impatient gesture, a shoo-fly gesture.

He wasn’t able to believe it. Was there some catch? He couldn’t see one. She genuinely appeared to be releasing him, just to get him out of her sight, evidently, before he could cause any trouble here that ultimately would come down on her own head.

He was so astounded that he felt he had to make some corresponding gesture, some kind of repayment, and suddenly a torrent of inane words came gushing from him. “Look, Tessa, I just want to say—all that stuff about how guilty I’ve felt, how much I’ve regretted the thing I did to you back then—it was true. Every word of it.” It sounded foolish even to him.

“I’m sure that it all was,” she said dryly. The gray eyes rested mercilessly on him for a long moment, shriveling him down to an ash. “Okay, Mickey. Spare me any further crap. Do your gimmicking and edit yourself out of the arrest records and then I want you to start moving. Out of the building. Out of the city. Okay? Do it now, and do it real quick.”

Andy hunted around for something else to say. Anything. Couldn’t find a thing.

Quit while you’re ahead, he thought.

She gave him her wrist and he did the interface with her. As his implant access touched hers she shuddered a little. It wasn’t much of a shudder, but he noticed it. She hadn’t forgiven him for anything. She just wanted him gone.

He went in and found the John Doe arrest entry right away and got rid of it, and then, since he still had about twenty seconds left, he picked her I.D. number off his dossier and searched out her civil service file and promoted her up two grades and doubled her pay. His own outburst of sentimentality flabbergasted him. But it was a nice gesture, Andy thought. And he never could tell when their paths might cross again someday.

He cleaned up his traces and exited the program.

“All right,” he said. “It’s done.”

“Fine,” she said, and rang for her cop squad. “This is the wrong man,” she told them. “Clean him up and send him on his way.”

One of the LACONs muttered an apology, more or less, for the case of mistaken identity, and they showed him out of the building and turned him loose on Figueroa Street. It was early afternoon. There were clouds overhead, and the air was cool with the kind of easy coolness that was typical of a Los Angeles winter day.