few of the packets were silver, and the rest of ’em were white … but the ones that had turned silver were the system drivers. Everything else is the other files and programs on this machine.”
“A virus?” I asked, and I heard him grunt. “But you said your antigen program hadn’t discovered any-”
“Nothing it could detect,” he said. “But even that’s been absorbed by this sucker … and believe me, Scud is the best virus hunter-killer you can find.”
I shook my head. That was a mistake; the cyberspatial construct swam back and forth before me. I clutched the armrests with my hands, fighting a brief spell of vertigo. “I don’t get it,” I said after the cube was dead-center in front of me again. “If this program’s still working, then it must not have been taken over yet …”
“Oh, no,” Jah replied. “ProVirtual-the program we’re using now-was one of the first to go, and that’s the weird thing. Everything the virus has taken over still works as it did before. It’s just … well, here, let me show you. Back away from the matrix, willya?”
It took me a second to understand what he was asking me to do. Then I tentatively raised my hand again and pointed to a bit of blank space above the cube. At once, I zoomed to a higher orbit above the matrix; it diminished slightly in size, but I could still see the entire thing.
“I’m booting up an old game I erased from memory a couple of months ago,” he said. “It’s called MarzBot … pretty stupid once you got it figured out … anyway, I’m taking the master disk and throwing it into the floppy drive, not the hard drive. Now watch this …”
Off to one side, I saw a small isolated packet appear off to one side of the matrix, as if it was a displaced cream-colored electron. For a second, nothing happened …
And then something happened.
Almost quicker than the eye could follow, a bridge extended itself outward from the cube: a string of silver packets, following a weightless pattern that, during its zigzagging motion, vaguely resembled the L-shaped movement a knight takes upon a chessboard. Before I could take a breath, the bridge had connected with the isolated packet of information containing MarzBot. There was the briefest moment while the packet still remained off-white.
Then it turned silver.
Then it was sucked straight into the cube as the bridge collapsed in upon itself, reeling in the packet like a fisherman towing in a trout that had taken the bait. Within a second, the MarzBot packet was gone …
And the cube was slightly larger.
“Goddamn,” I said. “How did you do that?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Jah said quietly. “The computer did it by itself. I haven’t touched the keyboard since I slipped MarzBot into the floppy port and hit the ENTER key. The virus reached out to the program, broke through its copy-protect subroutine, accessed its source code, and absorbed the game … all in the time it took for us to watch.”
I pulled off the HMD, shook off the aftereffects of VR decompression, and stared at the monitor. The image of the matrix cube on the computer screen was much flatter now, less lifelike than what I had seen in cyberspace … yet it was no less threatening.
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
“Fuckin’ A, man.” Jah was staring at me, his eyes wide with fear. “This thing is the balls. I don’t know what you found, but it’s no ordinary virus. It can’t be detected, it can’t be fought off, but it takes over anything that even gets close to it.”
He pointed at the screen. “I’ve tried everything I could throw at it,” he said, his voice filled with both anger and awe. “Other antigens, Norton Tesseract, Lotus Opus … shit, even a shareware disk containing a virus that someone once gave me as a gag … and it swamps every program I’ve given it.”
Jah shook his head in wonderment. “Whatever it is, it’s one hungry son of a bitch. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was-”
The antique Mickey Mouse phone on his desk buzzed, interrupting his train of thought. Jah swore under his breath as he bent backward to pick it up; he listened for a moment, then cupped a hand over the receiver.
“It’s Dad,” he said. “He wants you to come upstairs right away … says that he just got a call from someone who wants to talk to you.”
I was still staring at the monitor, watching as the last few packets in the matrix went from white to silver. “Is it important?” I murmured, not wanting to distract myself with a call from some yahoo. It’s not very often you get to look the devil straight in the eye. Jah asked his father if it was urgent, then he cupped the receiver again.
“He says it came from someone named Beryl Hinckley,” Jah said. “She wants to meet you an hour from now.”
16
The midday lunch rush in Clayton was just beginning as I climbed out of the rickshaw cab I had caught at MetroLink station and paid off the driver. The kid folded the money I gave him and shoved it into his fanny pack without so much as a word, then pulled out into the four-lane traffic of Central Avenue, playing a quick game of chicken with a streetcar as they rounded the corner of Forsyth together.
Long before St. Louis’s county and municipal governments had merged, Clayton had been a small metropolis in its own right, a prosperous “edge city” just west of Forest Park. Now it had become St. Louis’s uptown business district, its high-rise office buildings constituting a second skyline several miles from the riverfront. Compared to downtown, though, most of the damage suffered by Clayton during the quake had been cleaned up months ago, thanks in no small part to federal relief money. A few small offices had been condemned, a couple of side streets were still impassable, but otherwise it was now hard to tell whether this side of town had been affected at all by New Madrid.
No wonder. Clayton had always looked like a little piece of Los Angeles, disassembled from Beverly Hills and airlifted, brick by pink granite brick, to greater St. Louis. Yet I had never much cared for this part of the city. Despite its sleek postmodern veneer, Clayton was still a ghetto: ten square blocks of overpaid tax accountants, corporate lawyers, and executive vice presidents, an arrogant Disneyland for the aging yupsters and young MBAs who strutted down the sidewalks, each heading for his or her next opportunity to score big bucks. Although ERA troopers were invisible during the day, they were always out in force at night to keep Squat City refugees from taking up residence in the alleys and doorways of the social gentry who called Clayton home. Fall from grace, though, and you fall hard; some of those refugees probably used to live here, too.
The weather had turned bad; the blue skies of early morning had given way to pale gray clouds as a late April cold front began to move in from the west. Offices were letting out for lunch hour as I made my way down Central Avenue’s crowded sidewalk to Le Café François, about halfway down the block from the county courthouse.
It was your typical business-lunch bistro, already packed with salesmen and secretaries, and it took me a couple of moments before I spotted her. Beryl Hinckley was seated in a secluded booth at the back of the restaurant, nursing a cup of cappuccino as she furtively watched the door. Upon spotting me, she gave no overt sign of recognition other than to nod her head slightly; I cut my way through the dining room and slid into the booth across the table from her.
“Hi,” I said. “Long time, no see.”
“You’re late,” she said coldly. “If you’d been any longer getting here, I would have left.”
I shrugged. “If you wanted a reporter, you should have asked for one who owns a car.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she said calmly. “This will have to be quick. When we’re through here, you’re going to walk me down the block to the courthouse, where I’m going to find a judge and request that he place me in protective custody.”
“What?” Had she told me instead that she planned to throw herself off the Martin Luther King Bridge, she
