Virtual Vandals

life. As it was, he found himself staring at a neon-white wall.

Okay, Matt thought. Obviously I’m supposed to do something. But what?

Cat hadn’t given him a password. Unless…

He extended the virtual hand that held Cat’s earring/doohickey. The fist sank into the wall — and so did Matt.

A moment later, he found himself in a veeyar — a perfectly flat landscape patterned like a checkerboard, vanishing off into the distance. Fluffy clouds passed overhead, and in between, weird twisted constructs floated in midair.

Interesting, Matt thought, looking around. Lots of money went into this. He recognized one of the flying constructs as a compressed version of a very expensive virtual game. But the veeyar didn’t show much in the way of programming genius. Matt’s own veeyar had more personally coded touches. Most important, there was one serious lack. Caitlin Corrigan was nowhere to be seen.

Matt was just about to pull out when the girl suddenly appeared. This was a Caitlin he’d never seen before. She wore shorts and a T-shirt. Her blond hair was disheveled, held back by a terry-cloth band, and her face was sweaty.

“I was in the gym when the beeper went off,” Caitlin began. Then she halted as she took in Matt’s proxy figure. “Well,” she said. “You’re seeing me at my worst. The least you could do is drop that stupid proxy and let me know who you are.”

“I’m touched that you didn’t proxy up when you knew I was here,” Matt replied. “But I had to work to track you down, and it’s only fair that you work a little to find me.”

“Who are you?” Cat burst out. “Why are you popping up around me?”

“I’m interested in you…and your friends…and what the four of you did in Camden Yards.”

Caitlin’s face went white. “I–I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she stammered.

“Caitlin, Caitlin, you might like to proxy up as actresses, but you’re no actress yourself. Your face just gave you away.”

Caitlin bit her lip, and Matt went on. “Hey, I’m not here to arrest you. I’m a kid, not a cop. You saw what I could do at Lara’s party. But what you guys can do — I’m way impressed. I’d like to meet the masters, that’s all.”

Cat Corrigan looked at him in silence for a long moment. Then she gave a jerky nod. “All right. I’ll see what I can do. Hang here. I’ve got to talk to the others first.”

She vanished, leaving Matt alone in her big rich kid’s playground. He walked around, playing tourist, checking out the floating constructs. They were all various expensive programs, big programs, cleverly compressed for instant use.

Biggest bunch of icons I ever saw, Matt thought, a little disappointed. The whole veeyar was just a standard setup, pricey, but lacking any sense of personal involvement. Cat hadn’t tried to customize it to her own personality at all.

She must be almost computer-illiterate, Matt thought. How did she get involved with the virtual vandals at all?

He became sharply aware that time was passing. What was Caitlin doing? Had she decided to freshen up before contacting her friends? Or maybe she’d bailed out to warn them, and they were trying to decide what to do with him. Could they be trying to trace his path back through the Net? Maybe they were working to trap him in here!

Matt was on the verge of breaking contact when Caitlin returned to the veeyar. She was trying to clamp a blank expression on her face, but Matt could tell she was unhappy.

“They’ll talk to you, but not here.” Cat held out an icon in her hand — a little black skull.

Great, Matt thought. But he’d come too far to be scared off now. Silently, he reached out to take Caitlin’s hand.

It was a short hop through the Net, quick and confusing. That was probably done on purpose, Matt figured, to make it harder for me to track them down.

They lurched wildly through several Net sites, then came to rest in an empty virtual room. The walls were so white, they almost hurt Matt’s eyes.

But he wasn’t paying any attention to the walls.

He was busy checking out the three proxies who stood waiting for them. They were a weird collection. The hulking, gleaming Mr. Jewels was there. So was the six-foot frog. They were accompanied by a figure that looked like an animated drawing of a cowboy.

“Mr. Dillinger, Mr. Beatty, and Dr. Crippen, I presume,” Matt said, determined not to show any fear.

“Yuh know, podnuh, you been stickin’ your nose in places you really shouldn’t have ought,” the cowboy said in the thickest Wild West accent Matt had ever heard. “Somebody ought have learned you that’s dangerous.”

Right then, Matt noticed that there was the barest hesitation between the cowboy’s words and the movements of his lips.

But there was no slowness at all as the cowboy whipped out his cartoon pistol and pointed it at Matt’s head.

“I aim to give you a good lesson,” the cowboy said.

Chapter 6

Matt had seen manholes that were smaller than the muzzle of the cartoon pistol in front of his face.

“Okay, Tex, you’ve got my attention,” he said, still determined not to give in to the fear spurting along his nerves.

These people know how to hand out pain in virtual situations, a terrified little voice chattered in the back of his head. What would it feel like to get hit by a bullet from that hand-cannon?

The giant frog suddenly changed shape, too, transforming into a rakish-looking young nobleman from hundreds of years ago. Long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and skintight pale-leather trousers covered his legs. He wore a ruffled silk shirt — and the smile on his handsome features was as razor-sharp as the yard-long sword he aimed at Matt’s throat.

And, of course, Mr. Jewels didn’t need a weapon. He just loomed behind the other two, clenching gleaming fists, each as large as Matt’s head.

“I really have to hand it to you guys,” Matt told the threatening threesome — and the worried-looking girl. “You’re good…really good. At first, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing when I heard the reports about what happened in Baltimore. Then I checked out every frame of holo-imagery shot at the game, and ran a Net search to see if anything else like this had ever happened in the Washington area.”

“So how did that lead you to her — and us?” Mr. Jewels wanted to know. His gemlike eyes held an ugly glitter as he looked over at Caitlin.

“You guys can still hide behind your masks,” Caitlin’s voice was bitter as she turned to her fellow vandals. “And we can be just as sure that he couldn’t track me through the Net. He’s got to be somebody from my school who caught on to me in the real world. So you don’t have to worry,” she sneered. “We haven’t met out in the flesh since we began this stuff!”

Mr. Jewels looked ready to slug the girl, and Matt tensed his muscles, ready for a hopeless defense. But the cartoon cowboy gestured the gleaming titan back with his oversized six-gun. “Hold on there, ya big galoot. We’re workin’ from the other end of the rope right now.”

Once again, Matt noticed the fractional hesitation between moving lips and Western-holo speech. If that’s the Idiom Savant program, it’s working even slower than David said it would, Matt thought. Unless…it’s not just changing English into that silly lingo, but a completely different language!

But there wasn’t time to get into that right now. He had to convince this bunch of spoiled rich kids that he could be useful — and amusing.