eyes.
Bretton unfroze the tableau and the people began to die in slow motion, melting into shadows on the sidewalk. Buildings exploded, glass flew, and steel beams buckled and bent. There was no sound.
“You can see the simulation was going okay,” said Bretton.
Jay wondered if the man had kids. Watching the families snuffed out like candles, he felt a sense of helplessness and fear he’d never felt before. A phrase his mom used to say popped into his head. “When you love someone, they become a hostage to fortune.” He understood that now like he never had before. He had a new son.
Clinically, he noted the accuracy of the physics models. They would be the primary focus of the sim, after all. The orange-red mushroom cloud forming after the initial event was beautiful, though, in its way.
Bretton waved his hand again and things slowed down even more. The explosions expanded almost imperceptibly, feathers of flame blooming in stop motion. The 3-D imaging in the room was perfect — crystal-clear and sharp. And suddenly the scene started missing pieces. Tourist bodies disappeared, and then part of the explosion vanished, revealing blue sky. Some of the buildings went away, then the cars, and finally the remaining people and landscape, leaving nothing but darkness.
The HPCMP liaison made a motion and they were back to the moment just after the explosion, frozen again.
Jay got it immediately. The sim was so huge that it had to use the power of more than one supercomputer, each running different pieces. At real-time speed, the effect would have been like a light going off, but in bullet- time, it was visible how each piece of the network had failed — had been switched off by
“Can I see the background AI data?” he asked.
Bretton nodded, a look of quiet approval on his face at the question. Jay had often found it useful to impress people in their own specialties, so he’d done some studies on the background HBM and AI modeling before coming over. The code that appeared to replace the landscape was the inside of the sim model — what made it work, the physics and lighting, the object scripting.
By looking at this information, they could monitor more carefully the impact of the intruding virus.
The lines of code executed rapidly as Bretton took the speed up a notch, rolling upward like parts on a conveyer belt. And then suddenly, they started to change.
“The key modeling factors just went crazy,” said Bretton.
Within seconds errors began bringing down parts of the simulation.
Jay nodded. It was a virus all right. Someone had introduced it into the system, it had waited for the right moment, and then,
Knockout.
The question was, how?
He looked at Bretton.
“I’m stumped,” the man admitted. “I’ve been all over the I/O going back for the last year, and there’s
“Physical memory?” asked Jay. “A disk? Flashmem stick?”
“Locked out without authentication and logging,” Bretton said. “And smuggling one in or out would be… difficult.”
Jay stared at the screens, thinking. There was no other way in. But something had gotten in.
The old Sherlock Holmes adage came to mind. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
There had to be some other way.
All irritation forgotten, Jay sat down and started thinking.
He smiled.
4
Abe Kent stopped at the desk to pick up ammo and headphones. He set his shooting bag down and looked at the man behind the counter.
“Gunny.”
“Colonel. Are you shooting the old Colt today, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Is your ring current, sir?”
Kent smiled. “It is.” Gunny was referring to the smart-gun chips, which had to be reprogrammed and checked every month. Kent didn’t think much of that program. Net Force-issue weapons were all rigged with electronic chips, one in your side arm and the second in a ring, bracelet, or wristwatch. If you used your own piece on duty, you had to have it so wired. Without the ring or watch in close proximity to the weapon, it would not fire.
The colonel knew that was probably a good idea in some circumstances. It would sure be nice if your neighbor’s little six-year-old girl couldn’t cook one off if she came across your pistol in the bedside table. Of course, anybody with a brain wouldn’t have a handgun where a little girl who didn’t know what it was about could come across it. If you had guns in your house, then you needed to make sure everybody who lived there knew the safety rules about them. There weren’t any kids in Kent’s life, but he still kept his old slabside.45 locked in a box when it wasn’t on his person.
Any technology, such as the smart-gun stuff, that added an extra possibility of failure to a pistol when it was in your hand and when you needed it to save your life? Well, that was a bad idea. Even without the smart-gun tech, guns weren’t perfect. Sometimes they just misfired or otherwise malfunctioned due to their mechanical natures.
If you didn’t know how to use the thing safely and couldn’t keep it from falling into the wrong hands, you ought not to be carrying it. No, the only argument he’d ever heard that made even a little sense to him was that these rings would keep somebody from taking your piece off your corpse and using it to shoot at your coworkers. Even that was foolish, though, he thought. If you were dead, somebody made you that way, which meant that not only were they armed, but they were likely to have better weapons than yours, so increasing the chances of yours misfiring just when you needed it to keep them from taking it was just plain stupid.
Kent took the box of ammunition, his hearing protectors, and his gun bag, and went to his assigned lane. There were only a few shooters in the range, most of them using handguns. As he got to his lane, he saw Julio Fernandez in the next one over.
“Captain.”
“Colonel. It’s just Julio now, sir. I’m a civilian. I appreciate that you still let me come in to use the range, though.”
“How is John? I haven’t talked to him for a couple of weeks.”
“He’s fine. I expect you’ve heard about his visit to Commander Thorn.”
“I heard.”
“Going to be a leatherneck again,” Fernandez said.
“So it seems.” Kent didn’t want to go too far down that road right now, so he changed the subject: “You still remember how to shoot that Beretta?”
“Yes, sir. I also remember how last time we shot together, I managed to beat you and that antique.45 of yours real good.”
“Three-hundredths of a second after five screens isn’t what I’d call ‘real good,’ Julio. I think the word you’re looking for is ‘barely.’ ”
