Lloyd was still looking at his display.
“Uruisamoglu hasn’t exactly been hiding his light under a bushel,” he said. “He’s kind of an IT superstar. I did a search on his name and came up with over a hundred thousand hits.” He gestured toward his display. “He’s an MIT graduate. He’s only twenty-six. He goes to a lot of conventions, gives a lot of speeches. I’ve got the text for a lot of this stuff here.”
“Any of it in English?” Lincoln asked.
“Most of it, in fact.”
“Anything political? Anything to indicate whether or not he supports the junta?”
Lloyd shook his head.
“Not so far,” he said. “But of course he reverse-engineered the Zap for them.”
“It might have been just a job he was paid to do,” Lincoln said. “He might just be a mercenary-which is good, from our point of view.” He looked up. “Just keep looking,” Lincoln said. “We need to know how to approach him.”
He turned to Ismet.
“Ideally,” he said, “I’d like to get a special ops team to just grab him and drag him to whatever American military bases are still in the ’Stans. But it may take too long to put a snatch team together.” He looked at Ismet. “So you’ll have to go in and make the approach.”
Dagmar’s heart gave a lurch.
At least, she thought, Ismet wouldn’t be going into the street fighting in Turkey.
“What are we trying to get him to do?” Ismet asked.
“The fact that he signed his work,” Lincoln said, “suggests that he compiled it himself, using his own personal compiler and algorithm. And the sort of people who compile programs themselves and then stick their own badge on them are very likely the sort of people who might well leave a back door into the program-they don’t code it into a program, because someone might notice; they add the back door when compiling it.”
“Ah.” Ismet nodded. “So I make contact, I get him to alter the Zap-”
“Putting a gun to his head if necessary,” Lincoln said.
Ismet shook his head. “It won’t work,” he said. “I’ll use the gun if I have to, but the fact is that I’m a journalist. He’ll know within ten seconds whether I have the knowledge to follow his work-and then he’ll make an idiot out of me. How am I going to know if he’s doing what I tell him to? Whether I have the gun or not, Slash is the one who will have the advantage.”
Lincoln turned somber. He looked over the others, as if numbering them in his head.
“I’ll go in,” Lloyd said. “I speak Turkish. I’ve shot a pistol once or twice.”
Lincoln looked at him for a moment, then shook his head.
U.S. citizen, Dagmar thought. Lincoln can’t put him in danger. Not without special permission, anyway.
Lincoln rose. “I’ll get busy talking to the good folks in Virginia,” he said. “I want the rest of you to prep for your encounter with Slash. He’s got a lot of speeches and so forth online-read them; try to figure what it is he wants. Try to work out what we can offer him, or pretend to offer him.” He gave the room a lowering look.
“We just may have to seduce the bastard,” he said. “You figure out what to say, how to say it.”
Seduce someone called Slash Berzerker, Dagmar thought. How hard can that be?
LadyDayFan says:
Assuming that this Uruisamoglu is in fact our Slash Berzerker, and assuming that he answers any of our emails, we should put our heads together and work out what questions we’re going to ask him. Should we ask him about Harry right off the bat?
Vikram says:
BTW, have you heard that the Internet is down in New York? I just heard the report here in Bengaluru.
Hippolyte says:
The whole Internet? Doesn’t seem very likely.
Corporal Carrot says:
I just checked the news crawl on CNN. They also report that New York is down.
Hippolyte says:
ReVerb is New York based. Are you still here, ReVerb?
Corporal Carrot says:
ReVerb? (ReVerb, reverb, reverb…)
Big echo in here.
LadyDayFan says:
Yeah. Big hollow echo.
I think we’ve lost the Apple.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FROM: Rahim
The following proxy sites are still unblocked. Please let any friends in Turkey know this.
86.101.185.112:8080
86.101.185.109:8080
69.92.182.124:2100
128.112.139.28:3124
198.144.36.172:5555
“ ’Round Midnight” brought Dagmar up from sleep. She flailed awake, arms flying, then knocked her handheld off the bedstand and then had to look under the bed for it.
She located the phone by its glowing screen and grabbed it. She brushed dust from the display, looked blearily at the glowing numbers, and saw Uzbekistan’s country code.
Her heart crashed to a sudden surge of adrenaline. She pressed Send.
“This is-” She coughed. “This is Briana.”
“Hello.” A light, young voice. “You left a message for me to call you. This is Nimet Uruisamoglu.”
His voice lilted the unlikely-sounding name, made it almost melodic.
“I’m very pleased to reach you,” Dagmar said. She swung her legs out of bed, planted bare feet on the floor. She rose naked and went to the closet for a robe.
“I work for an American IT company,” Dagmar said. “We were very impressed by a talk you gave in Germany a couple years ago.”
“Which one?” Slash sounded pleased and upbeat.
Dagmar found her robe and got one arm in but couldn’t manage the second arm without taking the phone from her ear.
“Ah-” she said, momentarily distracted. “That would be ‘Toward the Creation of Neural-Based Communications Systems.’ ”
Ismet appeared-he’d been in the kitchen brewing coffee-and he used one hand to hold the phone to Dagmar’s ear while using the other to guide her arm into the empty sleeve. She shrugged on the robe and gave Ismet a grateful look.
“I’m very pleased that you remember that talk,” Slash said.
Dagmar had studied Slash’s speeches through online transcripts and chosen the one that seemed the most heartfelt. The speech had been nearly utopian-Slash had envisioned the Internet carrying not simply verbal or written communication, but information about emotional states, transmitted in a kind of holographic form by brain-scanning hardware.
Once people were able to understand one another’s true feelings, Slash had suggested, it would lead to greater peace among peoples, possibly the abolition of war itself.
Dagmar, for her own part, had little interest in being able to read the emotions of those she met on the Internet. She knew there were monsters in the human psyche. She had enough creatures lurching about in her own brain, and she preferred to keep them private: she didn’t want to broadcast hallucinations of Indonesian rioters or Maffya triggermen to everyone she met, and she very much preferred not to encounter their own needy, ever-hungry Creatures from the Id.
When people found out what others were really like, she thought, there would be more wars than peace treaties.
“We found the ideas visionary,” Dagmar said. “And I’m pleased to tell you that we may be in a situation to bring your ideas into being.”
“But the talk-” Slash stammered a bit. “It was what you call blue-sky. A kind of thought experiment.”
“Thanks to our proprietary hardware,” Dagmar said, “your vision is a lot closer to reality than you might think.”
There was a pause for Slash to digest this.
It was not, she knew, implausible. There were already scanners that could read the areas of the brain that processed speech, so that the scanner would be able to “hear” the words the subject was listening to or be able to print the words the subject was thinking. Processing more complex brain signals such as emotions, she thought, was only a matter of time.