Cybernation nf-6 Read online

  She had to call Alex! He had to hear this, this child was a prodigy, a genius!

  She hurried to the phone, picked it up, and punched in Alex’s number.

  But naturally, the phone wasn’t working.

  Okay, fine, she’d tell him when he got home. Meanwhile, she could bundle the baby up, put him in the stroller, and go for a nice long walk. It was chilly out, but at least the sun was shining, no rain in the forecast. Some fresh air would do them both good.

  “Want to go for a walk, sweet babboo?”

  He understood her, and she was sure he nodded, a little bit. Of course. He was a prodigy, after all, wasn’t he? The smartest, prettiest, best baby in the world. Without a doubt — none at all.

  2

  Madrid, Spain

  Summer 1868

  The summer’s day was scorching in Madrid, time for siesta.

  Jay Gridley sat in the shade of a wide awning at a sidewalk café, sipping warm red table wine, waving flies away from the dirty checkered tablecloth, and watching a sleeping dog under a nearby table twitch as it dreamed its mysterious canine dreams.

  Isabella II, eldest daughter of Ferdinand VII, still sat upon the Bourbon throne on this hot day, but her rule, balanced precariously as it had always been on a high wire, was finally about to come to an end. Isabella had sporadic popular support, she changed her cabinet as often as she changed her underwear, and the lumpy stew of monarchists, moderates, progressives, and radical unionists in late 19th-century Spain was about to come once again to a roiling boil. Her military politicians, the generals Ramón María Narváez and Leopoldo O’Donnell, were both dead by now. Led by Serrano y Domínguez, the Duque de La Torre, who had run things before Isabella’s ascension, and Juan Prim y Prats, the prime minister, Isabella was about to be booted out of the country in the Revolution of 1868. She would flee to Paris, where she would stay until her son, Alfonso XII, eventually ascended the Spanish throne some six years later, but even then her influence upon him was to be minimal. She would, however, outlive the leaders of the revolt against her by long margins. Prim would be assassinated a mere two years after the revolution, and while Serrano lived until 1885, Isabella lasted until 1904.

  Living long enough to spit on your enemy’s grave was a certain kind of revenge.

  Jay sipped his not-too-bad wine and grinned. Well, what was the point of creating a VR scenario if you couldn’t make it sing and dance and do tricks like you wanted it to do? Being a history buff could be a lot of fun, if you let it.

  In the Real World, Jay sat in his office at Net Force HQ, part of the almost four-hundred-acre FBI compound at Quantico, plugged into full wirelessware haptics, including top-of-the-line optics, otics, reekers, droolers, and the brand-new version of spray-on WeatherMesh, which could be set and controlled by your computer to plus-or-minus one degree Fahrenheit, and none of the Madrid afternoon was the least bit real. But it looked, sounded, tasted, smelled, and felt real — close enough for government work, anyway.

  Sure, you could still input everything into a computer with a keyboard or voxax, or read words scrolling up a holoprojic screen if you wanted to, but with VR software as good as it was, why would anybody do that if they didn’t have to? When you could get the same information you needed and be entertained at the same time, why wouldn’t you, unless you were short on imagination?

  A short, balding man wearing a clean but out-of-date summer suit strolled toward Jay, mopping his florid face with a handkerchief he pulled from one jacket sleeve.

  “Señor Gridley?” His name came out as “Greed-lee.”

  “Sí.”

  “Por favor, Señor, I have a message for you.”

  Jay nodded. He indicated the chair across from him. “Have some wine, Señor…?”

  “Montoya. Jaime Montoya. Muchas gracias.”

  The little man sat. A waiter appeared with a glass, plunked it down, and sauntered away. Montoya poured himself a glass of the wine, took a long sip, then sighed.

  “Ah, good. Hot today.”

  “Mucho,” Jay said.

  The man removed a folded parchment from his jacket. The yellowish document was sealed with a dollop of orange wax, imprinted with the signet of a local marquis. Jay expressed his thanks as he took the parchment, thumbed the seal open, and unfolded the document.

  Sure, he could have downloaded this file to his system and scanned it. And sure, if he needed hard copy, that would be courtesy of the office printer, on so-so grade ink-jet paper and not parchment, but what the hell — if you couldn’t have fun, why bother?

  It was what he had come to find, but a quick read told him it wouldn’t do him much good. The hackers who had attacked the net servers were too good to leave an obvious trail he could follow. The marquis could not point him in the right direction, lo siento.

  Oh, well, how big a surprise was that? The shock would have been if somebody good enough to rascal their way into major computer nodes had left obvious clues to back-track.

  “Personal call override” came a warm and sultry voice. “Saji on line one.”

  Jay cancelled the VR scenario with a finger-weave in the sensor grid and told his phone to put the call through. It came across in visual, so he could see her sitting in the kitchen at home. She was, as always, beautiful.

  “Hey, babe,” he said.

  “Hi, Jay. Have you once more made the world safe for democracy?”

  “If you count Republicans, safe enough. What’s up?”

  Saji — Sojan Rinpoche, his fiancée and the world’s most beautiful and bright woman — said, “My mother needs my help picking out the bridesmaids’ dresses.”

  “And I can help you do this how?”

  “Not at all, wiseguy. I was just calling to let you know I was going to look at bridal magazines with her.”

  “In Phoenix?”

  “No. She’s visiting my aunt Shelly in Baltimore. I’m going to take the train up for the day.”

  “You’re gonna ride the train to Baltimore? Are you crazy? The local is full of perverts and weirdos! Why don’t you just do it in VR on the net?”

  “Because it isn’t the same for my mother, she wants to sit next to me on the couch, and I’m trying to connect with her on this. You want her to like you, don’t you?”

  “Well, sure. But — what’s this got to do with liking me?”

  “You want me to tell her you said I couldn’t go see her?”

  “I didn’t say that. And it wouldn’t do me any good if I did say it, would it?”

  “No. Besides, I used to take the train to see my aunt every time I came to Washington, three or four times a year. Nobody ever bothered me.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t have to like it. I’m just telling you as a courtesy, idiot-mine. I don’t recall either of us planning on putting anything about ‘obey’ into our vows.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t mean to come off as some kind of authoritarian jerk here or anything, sweetie—”

  “Oh, I don’t think of you as authoritarian at all, Jay.” She batted her eyes at him theatrically and gave him a big, fake smile.

  “You’re a Buddhist, you can’t convince your mother that VR and RW are essentially the same?”

  “They aren’t, and you know it. We’ve had this discussion before.”

  He grinned. Yes, they had. Several times, and a couple of those were after mad and passionate lovemaking.

  “I’ll be back before it gets late, and I’ll have my com. I’ll call you when I leave for home.”

  He nodded at her. “Okay. It’s just that I worry.”

  “I know. It’s sweet. Don’t do it anymore. I’m a big girl; I can take care of myself.”

  “Not so big.”

  She laughed. “I love you. See you later.”

  Jay nodded, and said, “Love you, too.”

  She disconnected and his screen went blank.

  Given that she had hitchhiked across most of Southeast Asia when she was seventeen — onc
e fending off a gang of bandits who wanted to steal her backpack — and ended up in a temple in Tibet where she stayed for three months, Saji could indeed take care of herself. Riding a train to Baltimore and back shouldn’t present much of a problem. Although he felt that since they were getting married, that should become his job, taking care of her.

  He wondered if most guys felt that way about their bride-to-be.

  Well. He could watch her anyway. When you were Smokin’ Jay Gridley, the fastest computer cowboy at Net Force, tapping into the surveillance cams on the trains that ran the corridor between D.C. and Baltimore was nothing. He could do that one-handed, with a head cold and a hangover. Saji didn’t ever need to know, and if something happened, Jay could have the transit cops there in an instant.

  On the Bon Chance

  Jackson Keller went to the main computer complex. There were only eight programmers and netweavers here, aside from himself, but they were certainly among the top twenty or thirty such people worldwide. Bernardo Verichi from Italy, Derek Stanton and William Hoppe from the U.S., Ian Thomas from Australia, Ben Mbutu from South Africa, Michael Reilly, the Irishman, Jean Stern the Israeli, Rich Rynar, the Swede. There were a few better, but the ones without vision didn’t interest him. Keller’s people had to be good, but as important as that was, they also had to be believers.

  Skill without direction, without purpose, was wasted.

  It was too bad he couldn’t approach Jay Gridley. Jay was the best he’d ever known, as good in school as Keller himself had been, maybe even better. They’d been friends then, trailblazers on the web, adventurers in cyberspace. But Jay had gone over to the dark side, become a Net Force op. One of the enemy. A man whose vision now stopped at the end of his nose. He fought to preserve the status quo, he lived in a tower of decay.

  What a waste of a great talent.

  Well. He had made his choice, Jay. Now he’d have to suffer the consequences. The train was leaving the station — no, the rocket ship was lifting for the stars, that was better — and Jay hadn’t booked passage. He would be left behind. Sad.

  CyberNation was going to become reality, that Keller never doubted. How long it might take, exactly how and when it would come to pass, well, those were not things he could predict with certainty, but the end was a foregone conclusion. This was the information age, the time when knowledge and accessibility to it were the two most important things in the world. That genie wasn’t going back into the bottle, not ever. The world was going to undergo a change like nothing it had ever seen in all its history.

  Jackson Keller was the best of the best, and he was leading the way to change.

  One of the netweavers, Rynar, had just pulled his sensory gear off and was stretching when he saw Keller come in.

  “Jackson,” he said. “How are we?”

  Keller smiled. It was a running joke — Cyber-Nationalists often spoke in collective terms.

  “Why don’t you tell me?” Keller said. “What is the status on Attack Beta?”

  “Going quicker than we’d hoped,” Rynar said. “ZopeMax programming is one hundred and nine percent of goal. DHTML and GoggleEye Object Links are six by six.”

  “How is Willie’s Ourobourus?”

  “Well, the python is choking on its tail a bit, but he says he’ll have it fixed in a day or two.”

  Keller nodded. “Excellent. Anything new I should know?”

  “Well, Net Force is after us. Perhaps we should be quaking in our shoes?”

  They both chuckled.

  “Do they have anything?”

  “No. They don’t have a clue. Don’t know who they are chasing, where to look, how we did it. I think you give your old friend Gridley too much credit, Jackson.”

  “Maybe. But he’s pulled down some other big players who didn’t give him enough credit. Better safe than sorry.”

  “I hear you. We’ll keep shifting the cover.”

  Keller nodded again. He headed for his own workstation. There was much to be done yet. Best he get to it.

  Net Force Shooting Range Quantico, Virginia

  John Howard had already put half a box of ammo through his revolver waiting for Julio. It was the first time he’d been to the range in at least a month, and he felt a little rusty. He was used to stopping by once or twice a week, and since he’d been gone, making the drive from town seemed like a real chore sometimes. Just for fun, he’d been shooting 9mm. His Phillips & Rodgers K-frame revolver was unique among wheelguns, in that it would load and shoot dozens of different calibers, ranging from.380 auto to.357 Magnum, this made possible by a clever spring device built into the cylinder’s rod housing. You had to adjust the sights if you wanted to do precision work when you changed calibers — the flat-shooting nines went to a different point of aim than.38 Special wadcutters or.357 hollowpoints did — but at combat distance, it didn’t matter all that much. A couple of centimeters one way or the other, it didn’t make any tactical difference.

  He’d reset his command ring before starting — he was inactive, but still technically on call — so he was good for another thirty days before they changed the codes. So far, the smart-gun technology the FBI mandated for all its small arms had not failed any of Net Force’s operatives, though there were supposedly a couple of incidents at the FBI Academy range with Glocks where there were failures to fire. Howard didn’t know if that was due to the computer-operated smart tech, or the Tupperware Glocks, but he hoped it was the latter. What you did not want was for your weapon to turn into a paperweight when the bad guys started shooting at you.

  And, while he worried about that, so far at least eight or nine regular FBI agents had lost their handguns in fights and the smart guns had saved them from being shot by their own weapons. If you weren’t wearing the control device, either a ring or a watch, the guns using them simply would not go bang. Made keeping a piece at home in a drawer at night safer, too. While Howard’s son was trained to shoot, and well past that age where he might accidentally blast himself or some playmate, a lot of federal employees who carried guns as part of their daily wear had small children at home.

  Well. It wasn’t really his problem at the moment, was it? He was on “extended leave,” which was probably a prelude to full retirement. Somebody else’s worry, now.

  Here finally came Julio. Howard nodded at him. “Lieutenant.”

  “General. Sorry I’m late. Your godson.”

  “How is little Hoo?”

  “Oh, he is fine. It’s Joanna and I who are tearing our hair out. How come you didn’t tell me what would happen when he got seriously mobile? One second you’re standing there trying to take a leak and he’s in the doorway, the next, he’s in the kitchen pulling stuff out of the cabinets. It’s like he can teleport — zip, and he’s gone!”

  “You have to kidproof the place, Julio. Get those little latches that install inside doors and drawers, plug all the electrical outlets, put everything you value high enough so he can’t reach it.”

  “Right. We thought we had done that. Yesterday, he climbed up onto a chair, leaned over, and punched the power control on the DVD player half a dozen times before I could grab him. He’s turned into this little tornado that destroys everything in his path. We clean the house top to bottom, spic-and-span, and five minutes later, there are toys, books, food, clothes, you name it, piled a foot deep everywhere. I’ve been picking peanut butter out of my running shoe soles for a week.”

  Howard chuckled.

  “It’s a conspiracy, isn’t it? Those of you who have had children deliberately kept the knowledge from those of us who didn’t, right?”

  Howard laughed louder. “Of course. If people knew how much trouble they’d be, they’d never have kids, and the race would die off. Soon as you figure this out, you get a call from the Parent Police, and you have to take the secrecy oath.”

  “Once I would have thought that was funny. Now, I halfway believe it.”

  “You going to shoot, or are you going to bitch?”


  “Well, sir, bitching is more fun, and probably I’m better at it, since I’m getting more practice doing that than shooting. The little brat is a full-time job. I get to sleep maybe two hours uninterrupted a night.”

  “Life is hard.”

  “Like you would know? How is retirement, General? You been gone a while now, you sure you still remember how to shoot? The bullet comes out of that end, right there.”

  “Tell you what, Julio, I could leave this handgun on a shelf for ten years and still be able to outshoot you. I’ll spot you the first attacker, just so I don’t take advantage of a tired and bleary old man such as yourself.”

  “Keep your charity. I’ll shoot your ass off half-asleep and with one eye closed.”

  “Not with that beat-up old Beretta of yours, you won’t. I’ll even let you use your cheating laser grips.”

  “I don’t need those to beat an armchair, nap-taking commander such as you, General Howard, sir.”

  Both men laughed.

  Gunny came on the intercom. “I hate to interrupt your waste of good ammunition, General Howard, sir, but you have a com.”

  “Tell them to call back later.”

  “It’s Commander Michaels, sir.”

  Howard looked at Julio, and his old friend smiled — butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

  “You knew he was going to call me, didn’t you?”

  “I’m sure I have no idea what the general is talking about.”

  “He’s going to ask me to come back, isn’t he?”

  “What — I’m a mind reader now?”

  Howard shook his head. He went to take the call.

  3

  In the Air over the Central Atlantic Ocean

  Roberto Santos prowled up and down the aisles of the private jet, a stretch 737 rigged with all the comforts needed to keep a bunch of corporate fat cats happy. No gym, but at least a couple of flat spots wide enough to lie down and stretch out. That was good, ’cause sitting for a long time on a plane trip could cause blood clots in your legs. Santos had an aunt who died that way. She was taking a trip from Rio to London, and she’d been jammed into one of those little seats between two other people for like eighteen or twenty hours. Only time she had gotten up was to go pee, and then only a couple times, ’cause she didn’t want to cause the guy sitting on the aisle any problems. For being so nice, Aunt Maria had gotten a blood clot that had cramped her leg so bad she’d started screaming. They were a thousand kilometers away from anywhere, and by the time they landed, the clot had broken loose and gone to her heart or lungs or something, and she’d been dead ten minutes before they got her off the plane.