Springboard

He had enjoyed a stimulating conversation with Imam Jaseem Yusof at the China Mosque, and with the Chinese-speaking teacher at the Sino, Haji Chan Ho. All who dwelled in Islam were connected; those who had made the journey to Mecca even more so.

He was on his way to meet the software seller the Canadian had steered him to, an American by the name of Petrie, at a restaurant not far from the Mall. Well, not far for Chang, who was used to walking a mile or three to get where he wanted to go back home.

So far, this had been a most interesting trip, most interesting. Jay Gridley, though somewhat preoccupied by his son’s illness, had been very forthcoming about many of his procedures. More so than Chang had expected. Of course, the workers in the trenches did not always share the security concerns of their overlords — computer people spoke a language the way that musicians did, and their common interests bonded them. Already, he had learned more than he thought possible. Techniques he could take back home and apply immediately to his own systems. They were so rich, the Americans, and they didn’t realize just how much they had. They took so much for granted. Gear that he would have given an arm for, they shrugged off and threw away as outmoded. Amazing.

With any luck, this man Petrie would be able to fill some major gaps in Chang’s arsenal. Many of the cutting- edge technologies were proscribed — they simply could not be exported. However, the trade status between China and the United States was, at the moment at least, good, and there were some programs and hardware available now that had not been even in the recent past. Chang did not have an unlimited budget, but a few thousand dollars here would go a long way to help things.

And there was always the possibility of under-the-table deals, for programs that were technically not available, but for which there was no real reason to keep them so. The U.S., like China, had its lists of things forbidden. Often, though, the items put upon these had little or no reason to be there, they were but part of a wide swath that had not been examined against reality.

There was a downloadable anti-viral program, for instance, that was not even as good as the ones Chang already had, that was unavailable simply because of the style of encryption in it. This encryption had been part of Chinese software applications for more than a year, and yet it was still on the list. Nobody had gotten around to updating things, and as soon as they did, this would be changed.

Well. He would do what he could. He was already farther ahead of the game; anything from here on would be a bonus.

The Gridley-Bretton Dyson Sphere (Formerly the Omega Stellar System)

The Long Spiral Arm of the Military Galaxy

Jay reached out and turned the Dyson sphere, rotating it with arms that spanned the inner orbits of a solar system, searching every square inch of the sphere’s quadrillions of square miles looking for the hole from which unauthorized data was coming and going.

It was VR to the max — a distillation of an abstract concept, consciousness magnified to new levels. Yet for all that he was godlike in his omniscience here, he felt more human than ever before.

The image of Mark in the hospital bed with an IV’s stainless-steel needle plugged into his tiny arm kept coming back to him, reminding him how easily joy could be taken from his life.

Sure, the doctor all but said that he would be fine, that Mark’s seizures were just a reaction to the fever he’d had, and he had let the boy go home, but Jay had felt the icy specter of death brush past, coming not for him, but one of his.

Maybe everything was fine today, but — what about tomorrow?

He no longer lived in a world that felt under his control, where he could write off misfortune to himself as experience earned.

Come on, Gridley, focus.

This VR scenario, possibly the most complicated in which he had ever been involved, demanded a very high level of concentration.

He and Bretton had gone back to basics looking for the leak in the military’s computer network. The formula was simple: Pick a VR metaphor, structure it to your strengths, and run it.

It had taken them a while to come up with it. The dataspace used for simulating multiple nuclear explosions in the full-world sim that Bretton had programmed was so huge that finding a relevant metaphor was a challenge in itself.

But then Jay had remembered a science-fiction book he’d read that described a Dyson sphere. First postulated by Freeman Dyson in the middle of the last century, a Dyson sphere was a huge and hollow globe, constructed of the star’s planets, crushed into cosmic cement and somehow glued together. Such a shell then surrounded the sun, to capture all of its radiant energy.

Dyson had proposed the construct as the ultimate answer for the energy needs of an ever-expanding civilizations — a monstrous bubble that would catch everything the star emitted, wasting nothing. It would be useful for millions of years, and by the time the star went nova and burned out, a race sufficiently advanced to have built the sphere in the first place could probably figure out a way to move to a more hospitable neighborhood.

Such a sphere would necessarily be very, very large.

So he and Bretton had remapped the dataspace of all the known infected military computers as a Dyson sphere, locating themselves outside it, looking for the break in the wall that had let the virus inside. Their model wasn’t a long-time scan, that wasn’t possible with the machineries at their command. What they had built represented but two or three seconds that they had calculated when the virus must have been released into the system. They hoped.

The Chinese guy Chang would love this — too bad they couldn’t show it to him, but the military was a little touchy about allowing foreigners this deep into their heart and brain.

That’s just the way it goes…

Focus, Jay!

By checking the entire surface of the sphere during that period, they would examine every possible place their leak could be, and would therefore find it.

In theory, at least. Eventually.

The second part of developing the scenario was tailoring it to their strengths. Jay was an expert at looking for system weaknesses. If anyone could figure out where the break was, it was him. The only problem was that it could take years, even in an accelerated time frame, to search the sphere.

The solution, they figured, would require both of them.

Bretton, the military VR jock, was a master of AI programming. In his warfare simulations, he created large- scale interactions of software systems to represent the entire world at war. His complex systems interacted at both a macro and a micro level, representing a repeatable reality.

In this case, Bretton had created a huge army of robots. Each one was over a mile long, with thousands of magnetic millipedelike legs. Each was loaded with full spectrum sensors that could read every kind of radiation, chemical, sound, and texture that mankind had ever encountered. Millions and millions of these snakelike creations crawled across the sphere, sampling, testing, looking.

Bretton had made them, but the robots were under Jay’s control.

Jay’s normal VR sensors had been rerouted through the robots, each machine giving him data, millions of points of information combining into his senses.

He hung in space, an immense figure, the sphere appearing to him about the size of a large beach ball. He reached out and rotated it, running his hands over its surface, feeling for imperfections, looking for the place that wasn’t like the other places, the spot that was weaker.

As he did so, huge arrays of robots fanned out on the sphere covering every spot that his fingers touched, using their sensitive legs to send information to his tactile sensors. He felt a uniform pattern on the sphere, a pattern that fit with the geodesic nature of the construct.

Every location that his fingers passed changed color after it had been scanned, a bright red that seemed to seep from his nails like blood. The marker helped track his progress and would let him know when he’d completed this stage of the search.

He closed his eyes to focus on the tactile sensors — and for a moment he saw Mark in the hospital bed. He remembered standing there with Saji after the doctor had finally come. Mark had been asleep by this point, far more relaxed than his parents.

Oh, my God, Jay, I was so scared, he remembered Saji saying, and the squeeze of