"Well, what the hell is this thing?" Annie demanded harshly, but her hands were on Roadrunner's shoulders, kneading through bunched muscles that felt like tangled tree roots.
"Uh . . , sort of a virus . . ."
"What?You wrote avirus? You went to the dark side?"
"No, no, no, it's not like that." Roadrunner's mangled fingers were twisting together. "It's not really a virus. Well, it is, but it's not a bad virus. It's a good virus."
Annie dropped her hands from his shoulders. "There are no good viruses. That's why we call them viruses, for God's sake."
"It's not contagious," Harley broke in. "We only direct it to specific sites, and it can't go any farther. All it does is just eat away the guts of the computer we send it to, while the computer doesn't know it's getting eaten. It doesn't replicate, the recipient computer can't send it to anyone else-it's perfect."
"But it destroys computers."
"Boy, does it ever."
Magozzi's eyebrows shot up. Behind him, in the back of the vast room, a lot of other eyebrows were doing the same thing.
"Oh, for God's sake, you guys," Annie chastised them. "Who were you sending this to?"
Roadrunner muttered something unintelligible down at his lap.
"What?"
Harley was staring at the countdown clock, and then at the time bar, shifting back and forth on his worn-down boots. "Oh, for Chris-sake, it's no big deal. We send it to the kiddie-porn sites. Shut down a big one last night."
Annie thought about it for a minute, and then said, "Oh. Cool."
Grace was looking down at the floor, saving up a smile for later. When she looked up again, the time bar was almost entirely filled with blue, and the countdown clock was at twenty-nine minutes.
IN A SUBURB of Detroit, Michigan, a Good Health Dairies truck sat outside the entrance of a vast, sprawling building. Hundreds of people were skirting the truck as they went inside, eyeing it curiously, irritated by the group of playful neighborhood children who were gathered around the truck. They were climbing the running boards, pressing their noses against the window glass, chattering, and squealing in a most inappropriate manner.
The oldest of these children, a boy closing in on eleven years, fixed his gaze inside the truck cab and gestured to a friend. "There's a computer in there," he whispered, tapping his finger against the glass, pointing to the glowing screen that was flashing numbers in bright blue pixels. "That's gotta be worth a bundle."
His friend shaded his eyes and peered inside. "What do you suppose those numbers mean?"
"Hell, I don't know. You want to bust the window and do a grab-and-run?"
His friend looked around at all the people streaming past and the cars still pulling into the lot. "Too many people around. Wait 'til they all get inside."
They both climbed down and sat on the running board to wait, guarding their treasure.
MAGOZZI WAS frantic, watching that goddamned clock count down second by second. Finally, the last slice of blue ticked into the time bar, filling it completely, and he couldn't stand it any longer. He broke the promise he had made to himself to stay silent and out of the way. "Is that it? Is it finished? Is it over?"
Harley glanced quickly in his direction and registered a little surprise to see him there. The computer screen had been his total focus for so long that he hadn't noticed anything going on around him. None of them had. "It's loaded."
Roadrunner's fingers suddenly started flying over the keys. Grace and Annie were leaning over his shoulders, watching the text appear on the screen as Roadrunner typed.
Magozzi nodded rapidly. "Great. That's great. It's loaded. Now you execute, right?" He jumped when Grace reached back and touched his hand.
"Not yet, Magozzi. If we execute now, we destroy this computer, and this computer is the only way we have to talk to the trucks."
Magozzi tried to make sense of it, his mouth open like a fish, gasping for air. "I don't get it, goddamnit, I don't get it."
Harley took pity on him. "We're just piggybacking the virus through this computer to the trucks, Magozzi. Get it? Those truck computers are already set up to accept data from the host computer and no place else. We're just sending them a package from Mama. So we download the program here without executing, have this computer send it on to the trucks, then send the execution command."
"And what thefuck does that do?" Magozzi demanded, and Harley actually smiled at him.
"It destroys the truck computers, and that, my friend, destroys the detonate command."
Magozzi finally took a breath. "Okay, okay. I get it. So how long does it take?"
"Roadrunner just finished sending the virus program to the trucks. Another five minutes at least to execute, maybe a little longer."
Magozzi's eyes were glued to the computer screen, watching the countdown clock. "Christ, man, we've only got twelve minutes left."
"Yeah, I know. It's going to be tight. . , oh, Jesus." Harley was gaping at the screen.
Magozzi had to force himself to look. The monitor had gone black, and big, red letters were flashing in the center:
DETONATION SEQUENCE INITIATED DETONATION SEQUENCE INITIATED
No one around the computer station moved. They just stared at the monitor, hanging on the meaning of red letters in the black box. Magozzi wanted to ask something stupid, like, What the hell does that mean? but he knew damn well what it meant, and he couldn't move his mouth, anyway. What really scared him was when Road-runner's hands started shaking visibly.
"Fuck a duck!"Harley shouted, bulldozing closer to Roadrunner, shoving his face at the screen.
The people gathered in the back of the room-Knudsen, the suits, the HAZMAT squads-all moved en masse to get closer, then froze when they were within sight of the screen.
"What's that mean?" Knudsen breathed, his face a deathly white.
Roadrunner didn't even look to see who had asked the question. "They must have rigged the detonation sequence to upload at a specific time in the countdown. It initiated when we were still executing the virus, and because the truck computers can't upload more than one program at a time, they kicked one off."
"Which one?" Gino whispered.
"Hard to say. Normally, they'd take them in order, which means they'd keep executing the virus and kick the detonation command, but if that were happening, that message shouldn't be there."
Grace closed her eyes. "The detonation sequence was a priority. If I'd set this up, I would have put an automatic override on it, so it kicked everything else off."
"Yeah. Me, too." Roadrunner's voice was shaking almost uncontrollably.
At that moment, Magozzi felt something let go in his head, then his neck, his shoulders, all the way down to his gut. A strange sense of serenity followed. He thought it was probably a lot like what terminal patients felt when they acknowledged their impending death, relaxed their resistance, and let it walk in. A thousand people somewhere had less than five minutes to live, and there wasn't a goddamned thing they could do about it. So you just shut down, let it go. Roadrunner was still talking, but Magozzi caught only the last part.
". . , so the only hope we've got is that part of the virus got through, and that it will corrupt the computer enough to keep the detonation sequence from finishing . . ."
Suddenly, "DETONATION SEQUENCE INITIATED" disappeared from the screen, and a new message took its place:"DOWNLOAD COMPLETE."
"Which download?!" Magozzi shouted. "The virus or the detonation code?"
Roadrunner's lips were sealed against a held breath. He raised a shaky, deformed finger toward the countdown clock in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen. The numbers had frozen at just under two minutes.