The next customer was Little Mr. Invisible, the sort of man no one would ever notice in a crowd, gray on gray, thinning hair, mild bland apologetic smile. But his eyes had a shine. He and Andy struck up a conversation and very quickly they were jockeying around trying to find out things about each other. He told Andy he was from the Silver Lake neighborhood. That conveyed very little to Andy. Said that he had come down here to see someone at the big LACON building on Figueroa Street. All right: probably an appeals case. Andy smelled a deal.
Then the gray little man wanted to know where Andy was from—Santa Monica? West L.A.? Andy wondered if people had a different kind of accent on that side of town. “I’m a traveling man,” he said. “Hate to stay in one place.” True enough. “Came in from Utah last night. Wyoming before that.” Not true, either one. “Maybe on to New York, next.”
The little man looked at Andy as though he had said he was planning a voyage to Jupiter.
He knew now, though, that Andy had wall-transit clearance, or else that he had some way of getting it when he wanted it, or at least was willing to claim openly that he did. Which was as good as Andy’s advertising that he was something special. That was what the little man was looking to find out, obviously.
In no time at all they were down to basics.
The little gray man said that he had drawn a new labor ticket, six years at the salt-field reclamation site out back of Mono Lake. Bad news, bad, bad, bad. People died like mayflies out there, Andy had heard. What he wanted, naturally, was a transfer to something softer, like Operations & Maintenance, and it had to be within the walls, preferably in one of the districts out by the ocean where the air was cool and clear.
“Sure,” Andy said. “I can do that.”
Andy quoted him a price and the little man accepted without a quiver.
“Let’s have your wrist,” Andy said.
The little man held out his right hand, palm upward. His implant access was a pale yellow plaque, mounted in the usual place but rounder than the standard kind and of a slightly smoother texture. Andy didn’t see any great significance in that. As he had done so many times before, he put his own arm over the other’s, wrist to wrist, access to access.
Their biocomputers made contact.
The moment that they did, the little man came at him like a storm, and instantly Andy knew, from the strength of the signal that was hitting him, that he was up against something special and very possibly in trouble; that he had been hustled, in fact. This colorless little man hadn’t been trying to buy a pardon at all. What he had been looking for, Andy realized, was a data duel. Mr. Macho behind the bland smile, out to show the new boy in town a few of his tricks.
It was a long, long time since Andy had ever been involved in something like this. Dueling was adolescent stuff. But back in Andy’s dueling days no hacker had ever mastered him in a one-on-one anywhere. Not a one, ever. Nor was this one going to. Andy felt sorry for him, but not very much.
He shot Andy a bunch of fast stuff, cryptic but easy, just by way of finding out Andy’s parameters. Andy caught it and stored it and laid an interrupt on him and took over the dialog. His turn to do the testing, now. He wanted the other man to begin to see who he was fooling around with.
But just as Andy began to execute, the other man put an interrupt on him. That was a new experience. Andy stared at him with some respect.
Usually any hacker anywhere would recognize Andy’s signal in the first thirty seconds, and that would be enough to finish the interchange. He would know that there was no point in continuing. But this one either hadn’t been able to identify Andy or just didn’t care, and so he had come right back with his interrupt. Andy found that amazing. The stuff the little man began laying on Andy next was pretty amazing too.
He went right to work, energetically trying to scramble Andy’s architecture. Reams of stuff came flying at Andy up in the heavy megabyte zone.
—jspike. dbltag. nslice. dzcnt.
Andy gave it right back, twice as hard.
—maxfrq. minpau. spktot. jspike.
But the other hacker didn’t mind at all.
—maxdz. spktim. falter, nslice.
—frqsum. eburst.
—iburst.
—prebst.
—nobrst.
Mexican standoff. The gray little man was still smiling. Not even a trace of sweat on his forehead. There was something eerie about him, Andy thought, something new and strange.
This is some kind of borgmann hacker, he realized suddenly. Working for the Entities, roving the city, looking to make trouble for freelancers like me.
Good as the man was, and he was plenty good, Andy despised him for that. There was just enough Carmichael blood in his veins for Andy to know which side he was on in the Entity-human struggle. A borgmann—now, that was something truly disgusting. Using your hacking skills to help them—no. No. A filthy business. Andy wanted to short him. He wanted to burn him out. He had never hated anyone so much in his life.
But Andy couldn’t do a thing with him.
That baffled him. He was the Data King, he was the Megabyte Monster. All these years he had gone floating back and forth across a world in chains, blithely riding the data stream, picking every lock he came across. And now this nobody was tying him in knots. Whatever Andy gave him, he parried; and what came back from him was getting increasingly bizarre. The little man was working with an algorithm Andy had never seen before and was having major trouble solving. After a little while he couldn’t even figure out what was being done to him, let alone what he was going to do to cancel it. It was getting so he could barely execute. The little man was forcing him inexorably toward a wetware crash.
“Who the fuck are you?” Andy yelled, furious.
The little man laughed in Andy’s face.
And kept pouring it on. He was threatening the integrity of Andy’s implant, going at him down on the microcosmic level, attacking the molecules themselves. Fiddling around with electron shells, reversing charges and mucking up valences, clogging his gates, turning his circuits to soup. The computer that had been implanted in Andy’s body was nothing but a lot of organic chemistry, after all. So was his brain. If he kept this up the biocomputer would go, and the brain to which it was linked would follow.
This wasn’t a sporting contest. This was murder.
Andy reached for the reserves, throwing up all the defensive blockages he could invent. Things he had never had to use in his life; but they were there when he needed them, and they did slow his opponent down. For a moment he was able to halt the onslaught and even push the other man back a little, giving himself the breathing space to set up a few offensive combinations of his own. But before he could get them running, the little man shut Andy down once more and started to drive him toward crashville all over again. The guy was unbelievable.
Andy blocked him. He came back again. Andy hit him hard and the little man threw the punch into some other neural channel altogether and it went fizzling away.
Andy hit him again, harder. Again his thrust was blocked.
Then the little man hit Andy with a force that was far beyond anything he had used before, enough to send him reeling and staggering. Andy was about three nanoseconds from the edge of the abyss when he managed, but by no more than a whisker and a half, to pull himself back.
Groggily, he began to set up a new combination. But even as he did it, he was reading the tone of the other man’s data, and what Andy was getting was absolute cool confidence. The little man was waiting for him. He was ready for anything Andy could throw. He was in that realm of utter certainty that lies beyond mere self-confidence.
What it was coming down to was this, Andy saw. He was able to keep the little man from ruining him, but only just barely, and he wasn’t able to lay a glove on him at all. And the little man seemed to have infinite resources behind him. Andy didn’t worry him. The fellow was tireless. He didn’t appear to degrade at all. He just took all Andy could give and kept throwing new stuff at him, coming at him from six sides at once.