It was a maneuver worthy of Dr. Fish, Keely thought with grim satisfaction. The guy's vitals were all over the place. He was stone-home panicked, and Keely couldn't blame him. His fingers hovered over the keyboard while he thought about what he wanted to input. Hell of a great program; the guy probably didn't even realize how great it was. Fast pickup, perfect handling and maneuverability, stopped on a dime and gave you a nickel change, as Sam would have said.
In a small area at the bottom of the screen, the prompt from the program waited, blinking on and off. Keely glanced at the right upper corner of the screen. The guy's vitals were starting to come down a little. Get ready to shoot off the charts again, homeboy. Keely wished he could have seen him, but all he was getting from the woman's pov was a flat fill-in graphic. Your name here. He typed new instructions to the program and waited impatiently while the program inegrated them with its format. It seemed like an hour before he heard the woman's voice again. He turned up the audio.
"Hotwire, I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, but we've been cracked."
"Is it Manny?" he asked. "Or someone higher?"
The program grabbed an answer before Keely could input.
"No ID. All I can say for sure is, it's in-house, but comparing the technique to information from the databases, it's not an official auditor. Not using official protocols."
Keely's fingers danced on the keyboard.
"Ah, okay. Spyhole from the storage." The expression in the woman's voice was flattening. Her simulation was starting to wobble; too much demand. Keely instructed the program to transfer access to the clock-calendar. He'd have a better view of the entire simulation but at the risk of being cut off if the guy moved too fast. There were a few seconds of transfer blackout, and then he was looking down on the alley from an elevated spot on a wall.
Up here, Keely typed, wishing for voice input. A new status line appeared at the top of the screen, telling him the communication was successful and the words were appearing on the wall within the calendar subroutine. The woman dropped the knife, which must have stoned the guy's crows.
"Marly?" he said.
She pointed wordlessly at the wall. Not just a great program, but an obliging one, too, Keely thought, typing as fast as he could.
Now that I have your attention, Number One: I'm on your side.
That status line blinked an OK. Keely waited while the words rolled themselves out. Number Two: This programs a stone-home banger. "Sam?" the guy said. "Is that you?"
Keely felt his stomach drop precipitously. How do you know about Sam? he typed.
"Tell me who you are and what you want," the guy said after the lag, "and I'll tell you how I know Sam."
Keely started to type again and felt the keyboard go briefly dead under his fingers. The program specs at the bottom of the screen were rearranging themselves rapidly. He should have figured; the clock calendar had never been meant for this type of communication. The program probably thought it had a glitch. He redid his own access figures and keyed them to shift along with the clock-calendar specs. That would keep him on-line for a while longer, but when the program's defenses figured it out, there'd be another move to cut him off. He had to go quickly.
No time for chat. Me: busted hacker, work for Div now. You: busted too.
The status line blinked OK and then changed to give him an error count. Keely pressed for a redisplay of the line he had just typed.
No time for chat. Me: busted hacker, work for Disliy2o @2r2 {{#@ irl›.
"God, perfect," Keely muttered. He called up an inventory of notes left in the calendar memory and put it on the other screen.
Wait, he typed. Being jammed. He scrolled through the notes, looking for words he could cut and paste together to make a coherent message. The calendar would be less disposed to jam something out of its own inventory.
"Hello?" called the guy anxiously. "Are you still there?"
Keely sent an affirmative signal, tagging words as quickly as he could out of the chunks rolling up from the bottom of the screen.
"Program interrupt imminent," said the tall woman quietly. "Abort, reboot, ignore?"
"Ignore!" the guy shouted. "Hello? Are you still on-line?"
"Are you sure you want to do that, hotwire? Ignore can cause partial or full system crash. Please reply wire n."
Wire n. Keely glanced at the simulation, confused, and then got it. Y or n, of course. Very obliging program. Maybe he should have stuck with the woman, even if he'd ended up crashing her. The guy had to have copies stashed away-
There. Message composed. He flicked it into the send queue and transmitted.
The status line wavered, started to blink an OK, wavered again. Keely had a last look at the alley before the program spat him out and the screen blanked.
A moment later the status line came back to give him a full OK. Just to double-check, he punched for redisplay, not really expecting to get anything. There was a short delay, and then the message he had cobbled together popped onto the screen.
Deadline ‹ month; Rivera spot you meeting; planning new program; run Personnel run.
He sat back in the chair and let his breath out in a rush. He'd have done a lot better if he'd had more time, but if the guy was as smart as his program, the last phrase should have been pretty damned clear.
17
The overdone Arabian-Nights-type tent, complete with tassled pillows and Persian rugs overlapping each other in calculated disarray, was bit-by-bit perfect. No details had been lost or muddied anywhere. For the first twenty minutes after she'd put on the head-mounted monitor, Sam had kept looking quickly to one side or another, trying to catch blank spots. There weren't any; you could even look out through the partly open tent flap and see mountains, great humps of dark green that reminded her more of the Poconos than the Middle East, veiled by a sparkling mistiness that was too wet to be fog and too light to be rain.
Coaxing that kind of detailed perfection into a simulation required stone-home dedication. Or complete obsession. Sam couldn't decide what she wanted to say to the simulated person sitting across from her-Congratulations, or Get a life.
The simulated person's appearance was most likely pure wish-fulfillment fantasy. It was a composition of subtle and charming androgyny, the long dark hair, the classically sculpted features, the amber eyes so light in color they were luminous, the deep brown skin-definitely not one of the stock compositions you could get from Wear-Ware or some wannabee program. But he-Sam was calling it "he" on no basis other than arbitrary-had to have spent hours mixing palettes. Even the tasteful silks he was wearing were original. The calculation wasn't lost on her.
But then, any hacker this good wouldn't be artless on any level. Which was a little bit funny, since he'd told her his name was Art. (There, she decided, a male name. Like Sam? She started to wonder again.) She hadn't given him a name, not even a phony, and pressing him for information was futile. The only thing she'd gotten out of him after she'd agreed to put on the headmount was how he'd done the trick with Fez's monitor.
He'd made her work for it, though; he wanted banter, and he wanted jokes, and he wanted the hacker news of the world, which he already seemed to know in more detail than she did, before he finally gave it up.
"Just a little rewiring trick with the hardware," he told her at last. "I gave Fez the specs to rig it, with a program dedicated to the screens. So I can pop one whenever I have something to tell him, without waiting for him to come to me."