But — Mayli was far too clever a woman to stand by blissfully ignorant. She would wonder, and if she was going to be more than a bedmate, he needed for her to understand why he wanted her. How important he must think she was to
And in truth, Wu
If it all came off the way Wu planned, it would be a thing of major importance, and the secret was Wu’s alone. There would be more than a little satisfaction in telling somebody, in putting them in awe of his genius. She would certainly be impressed. She was worldly enough to appreciate the magnitude of it.
Was it a foolish leap into unknown waters? Wu thought he had a pretty good idea of Mayli’s basic character. She was, like him, pragmatic. She served her own interests first, doing whatever was necessary to obtain her own desires. She was skilled. And, of course, she was beautiful, smart, and ambitious. If she knew what Wu knew, who on earth would be a better match?
Betraying him would gain her nothing, and linking with him, the possibility of the world at her feet? A shrewd woman would look at her choices, realize there was little risk, and go with the flow. Mayli was not a Taoist per se, but she was smart enough not to try to swim against the current of a huge river.
The shower cut off — it had been a selling point when Wu had rented this apartment, the water’s pressure was great, and a long, hot, needle spray possible. A cloud of vapor wafted from the bathroom as Mayli slid the shower’s curtain open and stepped out. She stood framed in the doorway, slick and gorgeous, and turned to smile at him as she reached for a towel. She knew she was beautiful, and she knew men liked looking at her.
Wu felt his interest stirring as he watched her dry off.
She glanced at him. “Ah,” she said. “It appears I may have to shower again.”
He smiled. “It is possible,” he said. “Come here and let us see if that is the case.”
They could always talk later, he thought.
The Dyson sphere had come up empty. It was discouraging, but Jay wasn’t going to lie down and die, so he shifted his search.
First, he sneaked into one of the black-ops systems nobody was supposed to know about — but, of course, Jay Gridley wasn’t just anybody. He had heard they had a very nasty program running that kept track of all kinds of e-mail it wasn’t supposed to keep track of, and this was his first chance to take a look at it. You never knew but that some idiot might think he was secure when he wasn’t and say something stupid, like, “Hey, didja see how I screwed up the military’s VR war games?”
Jay didn’t really believe his prey could possibly be that foolish, but stranger things had happened. People said things when they didn’t know they were being watched that they would never say if they thought somebody was peeking over their shoulder.
He went in, popped the firewall and encrypted password open, and looked around. He didn’t see anything useful. He left. This was a top-level system, supposedly bullet-proof, but that was a joke against a man of Jay’s caliber.
He smiled at the metaphor.
Then it was back to CyberNation. Maybe something new there.
Jay stared at the hole in the fence, a small, irregular-shaped blank space in one of the planks making up the stockade wall in the small abandoned mining town. This was where players came to pan for gold, and the idea was that the local streams and rivers had played out, but that there was still at least one bonanza claim waiting to be found here, one missed by earlier panners.
Something was not right about that hole in the wall.
Of course a lot of things seemed odd here. Little things — the details in the programming, the quality of sensory input. It wasn’t bad — most people wouldn’t ever notice it — but most people weren’t Jay Gridley. However, as Jay was a guest, he had to stick fairly close to their existing VR scenario.
Another attack had hit CyberNation recently, this time an on-line SCA enclave. The SCA was the Society for Creative Anachronism, a group that enjoyed harking back to the good old days, and pretending that they were knights and ladies in medieval times. In the RW, they spent much time cooking authentic foods and beating the daylights out of each other with padded swords and sticks.
In VR, their battles and lifestyles could go farther, including interaction with elves, unicorns, and other creatures from myth. Which meant that when the combined elf/unicorn attack had come, it had completely shocked the SCA members. Particularly when the avatars used by the hackers had proceeded to perform acts with each other that pretty much negated the whole had-to-be-a-virgin-to-ride-a-unicorn thing.
The attack had then escalated into violence as the attackers engaged some of the SCA members in combat, proving yet again that in video games the computer always wins.
Apparently it hadn’t all been bad, however. Although the peaceful elf-loving contingent had pulled out of VR in shock, the more physical SCA warrior-types had actually expanded its membership.
Jay had backtracked the troop of attackers to this small hole. They had apparently entered the CyberNation system here, and then taken what resources they needed to expand their numbers before the attack.
But there was really something wrong with that hole.
He tabbed his visual input control and instantly he was in full Raptorvision. He ran his new glasses at low rez most of the time, because at high rez he found he sometimes had to reinterpret details that seemed too blocky or fuzzy when sharpened. Which meant that going to high rez was kind of like putting on X-ray glasses. Kind of.
The scene before him shifted. He could still see the hole, only now there were faint gridlike lines around it.
Someone had hidden the network details on the incursion space.
Jay extended his forefinger and a small probe shot out. He slid it around the now visible hairline crack surrounding the hole, separating the code that wrote the patch from the VR code that made the hole.
The patch slid off into his hand, and Jay popped it into the satchel strapped over his shoulder, a small VR analyzer.
This could be good news — he hadn’t found anything like this before. If this virus had been programmed to cover its tracks, there might be something interesting about this access node that would give him more information about how it worked.
The analyzer chimed and a code window opened up at eye level. He scanned it and frowned.
It was a patch designed to conceal part of their network interface. He’d been given access to their system, all right — but they hadn’t wanted him to see everything, so they’d tried to cut off from the bits they didn’t want him to know about.
What, did they think he was that stupid? Didn’t they have a clue who they were dealing with here?
He scanned the woods nearby. If you knew where and how to look, it wasn’t that hard to find…
There it was — a programming back door, concealed as an old tree stump. Easy to hide if you weren’t looking for it, because it was an integral part of the environment, not anything added, like the hole.
Well, he’d pop the lock on it, and show these CyberNation jerks what a real VR coder could do. Once he was in there, he’d give himself all kinds of access—
Something had gotten caught in Jay’s snare. Ah.
His anger forgotten for the moment, Jay ran back the way he had come. As he had traversed the woods, backtracking the attack, he’d laid traps for code remnants that might still be around. It happened sometimes. A virus mutated and didn’t reach full functionality, left a bit of itself running around in the bushes, as it were.
It was one thing to see the traces of where an attack had come from, but to see a still-working example was far better.
He jumped a small creek, running hard, bare feet lightly treading the earth, long black braids flying behind him. He reached down and drew the tomahawk from his belt.
Just because he was in a medieval forest didn’t mean he had to
