Xenoform (27 page)

‘It’s been twenty minutes, Doctor,’ said the soldier, taking him by the elbow. Rushden, knowing his new place, left the ward and went to see what had become of his office.

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‘
Can we stop it?’

‘Not as yet, no. It has proven impervious to every attack and back-hack we have fired at it. We have an army of avatars at work on it, but every time they corner it in some system it just dissolves away and appears somewhere else. We can’t pin it down – we’ve never seen anything like it. We’re talking a different league from any of our bleeding-edge tech.’

‘Who made it?’

The smaller man shook his head. His face was well-worn, heavy in the jowls despite his leanness. He looked as if something major was slowly cooking inside him somewhere – maybe a fat, juicy cancer or heart disorder – something expensive to fix, at any rate. ‘How anyone could have
made
it is beyond me. The government, maybe? One of our tech-crime worms tells us that it could have originated in the storage system of a company called Cyberlife Research and Development, but frankly it could be a false trail. The worm has never been too reliable – he’s a drug addict. Really, who knows?’ His voice contained just the faintest hint of resignation.

‘And who are Cyberlife Research and Development?’

‘You’ll like this.’ The smaller man leaned forwards across the perspex curve of the strategy director’s desk with a data spot on one outstretched fingertip.

‘Fuck that, just tell me,’ grunted the director. ‘I’m not a bloody computer, man.’ He was hugely built, a bulbous-necked bullfrog of a man with a poison ice gun built into one bared forearm, relic of his days on the front line. He swatted at a pair of spyflies that were flying a flickering synchronised display around his head. They easily evaded the swipe and buzzed off into a corner of the room where they were safely out of reach.

The smaller man flinched slightly and a look of irritation darted across his face, like a hunted animal fleeing into a hedgerow, and was gone, replaced again by a carefully-cultivated neutral expression. ‘Yes, Sir,’ he said in a level voice. The spot disappeared again into some hiding place about his person. He sat back, composing himself as best he could beneath the wilting stare of the director. ‘We cooked up a charge and got hold of a warrant to raid their computers an hour ago. There’s nothing there. And when I say nothing, I mean there
are
no computers. Cyberlife R and D cannot be found on the net. Either it never existed or somebody scrubbed the lot. As for finding an actual premises...’ He spread his hands, palms up, illustrating how little his search had uncovered.

‘So your damned worm made the whole thing up then! Get him into a cell!’

‘It is certainly possible, but I really doubt he’s that inventive. And the net address he gave us for this Cyberlife is certainly near the apparent epicentre of the disturbance.’

‘So Cyberlife was a front company for whoever is behind this damn thing?’

‘We don’t know. But whoever was behind Cyberlife is gone now. There are no files held by the tax office pertaining to any workers. If they ever were there then a cover up of this magnitude, which must have required hacking into banks, government bodies, private corporations...that’s quite a piece of electronic machination in itself. My worm tells us that the director was a man or woman by the name of Alcubierre, but we find no government records pertaining to that name. We’re trawling masses of spyfly data to search for any visual record of the company, but much of it is corrupted, unusable. We don’t know if the rogue element did it or someone from Cyberlife but it’s certainly unprecedented. We have people still searching for employee records but so far we can’t trace a single person who ever worked for them.’

‘And you think Cyberlife itself may be a front? A false trail? Hell of a length to go to.’

‘It’s possible that someone else made this thing, founded Cyberlife as an elaborate front, yes, developed the rogue element off-site, laid a false trail to Cyberlife, then packed up their real operation, dissolved the front company and vanished, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs leading to nowhere much at all. Kind of the physical equivalent of a proxy server.’

‘Fuck it, then – we’re busy enough without chasing ghosts.’ His heavy face was waxy beneath an unhealthy sheen of sweat. The two men looked as if their bodies were locked in a desperate race towards death. They were unaware that some junior officers actually had bets on the outcome.

The smaller man smoothed his suit with a gesture that the director found unbearably fussy and continued. ‘Currently we need all the resources we have just to wrest control back from this thing.’

‘
What in hell do you mean
wrest control back
? I thought we were trying to contain the spread.’

‘It’s not looking that easy any more, I’m afraid, sir. Large corporations are working out what’s happening for themselves, dumping vast amounts of tech stock, pulling out of financing deals, setting a domino effect in motion. The rogue element itself has had a hand in here and there, doctoring financial records of major companies, tampering with banks. It’s getting bolder.’ He looked to the director for acknowledgement. The director’s face was sullen, angry, maybe even frightened. ‘The stock market is going to crash massively and the world market with it. We can’t keep it hush for long.’

‘We should go public? There will be bank runs, panic. We could make a crash happen just by saying it. It isn’t my decision, that’s one for the government.’

‘It will be the decision of whoever leaks it first, sir. I predict,’ he said with a punchable hint of smugness, ‘that somebody will do so in the next twenty-four hours, and recommend that it would be better if we said it first. The crash is already beginning.’

‘Noted,’ grunted the director.

‘
And, sir...It is
only
the beginning.’

‘I agree,’ said the director, but his expression was distant. His huge, meaty hands picked up an antique fountain pen from the desk and began to roll it between their surprisingly nimble fingers.

‘And what of our other problem? This Genetic Degenerative Disorder?’

Briefly, the smaller man’s attention flicked to the glass wall separating the office from the computer room outside. An air of increased urgency was developing out there amidst the swarms of huddling technicians.

‘Oh yes, our other little problem.’ He sighed deeply and continued, ‘Everyone we have spoken to in the body modification industry claims to have no knowledge of the origins of the green...’ He trailed off. ‘Er...’

‘Greenshit, I believe people are calling it on the streets.’

‘
Um, yes, Sir. None of them knows where the
greenshit
is coming from. Our own labs are evaluating several cases in the bio-segregation units. The parasitic organs resist analysis. It’s as if they’re deliberately engineered to self-destruct under x-ray or physical dissection. Kills the subject, of course. Some people are theorising that somebody has hacked the nanovats, some sort of computer terrorist who’s re-coded the DNA of grown tissues. But every vat we have looked at seems to function normally. That is to say, they produce normal tissues when examined. My money is on some sort of black market release that was badly coded and has somehow entered the legitimate shops. Now it’s going wrong they claim to have no knowledge of it. We may have to turn some of them over, see if they’re withholding anything.’

‘Hmm,’ growled the director. He was grinding his teeth together and the squeaking, crunching noise made the smaller man shudder.

‘This greenshit is too problematic, too intelligently designed to be an accident. If some terrorist is doing this to people we have to find them and burn them at the stake.’

‘Given,’ said the director. The pen stopped rolling, pointed straight at the smaller man like a gun. ‘Strip those vats to the molecular level, full analysis of all materials, complete reverse-engineering of all software. Find every part on the logs and bring me a list of everyone walking around with a mod that came from one of them. Trace those people and bring them in. If we can’t take them all in our labs, then commandeer a hospital ward, fully bio-seal it and bring me a complete genetic analysis of every subject. Start preparing warrant requests for some of the big shops – HGR, BlueGene, Spiral Sciences.’

‘Sir, we can’t legally commandeer a hospital ward without a court judgement, a judgement we are not going to get because the hospitals are already at bursting point. Farstar Militia stormed Niles Arlen Hospital and ejected all non-GDD cases earlier today and it looks like the government are going to send the army in to take it back. We would never get away with it.’

‘
Farstar
? Aren’t they a deep-space exploration corp? What the hell are they doing seizing a hospital? Why have I not heard of this?’

‘I don’t know, sir. There are some very cloak-and-dagger goings-on at the moment. But suffice to say that we cannot seize a hospital – it could prove a divisive issue between our own administration and that of the government and right now we can’t afford to be stepping on the army’s toes. All the hospitals are overburdened. The GDD is making a lot of people sick. Nobody has died yet, but they say it’s only a matter of time. Whatever this illness really is, it seems to cause psychosis in its early stages, a degenerative physical malady after that. They do not–’ There was a sudden eruption of chaos in the computer room, people pushing each other out of the way of terminals, tripping over each other’s hi-flo cables. Both men turned to look.

‘The fuck is happening out there?’ grumbled the director. He heaved himself to his feet, his belly pendulous and vast. Somebody began hammering on the office door. The director shot a venomous look at the smaller man, as if whatever might be behind this intrusion had already been attributed to him in the director’s mind. The smaller man actually retreated slightly into his chair, completely unaware that he was doing so. The director did notice and this satisfied him slightly. He turned to where the young computer technician was banging on the glass frantically, mouthing words silently at the soundproofed door. Mentally, he swung the door open. The young woman burst into the room.

‘Sir, sir, it’s Air Traffic Control on the priority line, we tried to put you straight through, but your personal link is off, it’s–’ She began to stammer, gasping out part-words like little coughs. The director watched her struggle with grim and patient detachment. She looked as if she was beginning to hyperventilate. ‘It’s, they say, it’s...’

‘Yes, Miss Vestovich?’ he prompted.