“Rebecca.”
He tried to sit up but found himself unable to move.
“Hold still, Captain Overlord,” came the woman’s voice again. “You’re strapped down or you would have bounced all over the place. Highway infrastructure deterioration and all that.”
“Angel?” he turned his head painfully to the side. The motion was restricted and stiff. There was something fitted around his neck.
“Rebecca’s banged up but she’s okay. Well, broken leg, I think. Maybe a concussion. We’re inbound to the hospital and will be there in twenty if the traffic opens some. Frank will meet us there. I was lucky to catch a ride. Not policy you know, but with the world going to shit the plumbers get some perks.”
Savas looked down at his body on the gurney. A few bandages. Ripped clothing. Otherwise, he seemed to have escaped any serious injury. He let himself settle back into the padding of the gurney. He closed his eyes. “What the hell happened?”
“You don’t remember?”
“They hacked the damn car. Nearly killed us. We spun out and crashed.”
“That’s about it,” she said. “You were lucky she steered into a row of construction barriers and attenuators. Course you were going nearly seventy at that point, so it was still a mess.”
“Yeah, that part I don’t remember.”
“Frank and I followed the last known GPS pinging from your car and alerted local emergency responders. We got up here as they were extracting you from the car. A really twisted cage you two were stuck in.”
“Jesus.” He looked toward Lightfoote, her bald and pierced image surreal in the sounds of the siren. “And the worm?”
She smiled. “Well, it was likely not your plan, but that act of crazy on the highway may be a breakthrough.”
“How?”
“The worm in the car’s system — it never got a chance to go into hiding again, to erase itself from memory and go latent. Bang, you cut the power and froze everything in place. We’ve got a crew extracting the computer elements from the Charger. We might get lucky.”
“What does latent mean?” He just wanted to sleep.
“It’s like Herpes.”
“Herpes.”
“Yes. Cold sores come out every now and then. Not from new virus you get exposed to, but from virus hiding out in your cells. The genetic material is dormant, latent. Waiting to be activated. Usually for herpes it’s stress of some kind. For the worm — well, we don’t know all the things that might wake it. But the programmers have established some flags. Apparently investigating Anonymous members like Hanert was one of them.”
“Wake it up?”
“Well, not really wake. It’s not sleeping. That’s just scientific vernacular. For viruses, there are proteins that react to signals or stresses and then go and start making the virus again from the genetic code hiding out in the cells. That’s waking up.”
“Uh-huh.”
“For the worm, the signals are detected by smaller pieces of code floating about, placed there by the initial infection, and they wake up the worm, which then assembles, like the parts of a mature virus particle, from various pieces of code across the net.”
This would have given him a headache on a good day. Now it was torture.
She continued. “Usually, after that, the worm disintegrates, so the active, fully functional copy is lost, and the encrypted genome hides out latent. That’s the problem getting at it. I couldn’t get my hands on anything functional. Until now. Just maybe your automotive catastrophe trapped our little monster in a cage.”
“So you can study it.” His voice was hoarse.
“It’s going to be tricky. As soon as I try to connect a live computer with functioning operating system to the thing, the worm is going to try and go active. Like melting the ice off The Thing. Look out. I’ve got to prevent that, prevent it from taking over whatever system I’m using to study it. And prevent it from erasing itself before I can look inside.”
“Can you?”
Lightfoote stared into space. “I don’t know.” She turned her intense eyes on Savas. “But I’m going to try.”
He was beginning to drift off. He fought the currents dragging him under.
“Lopez, I mean Gabriel and Mary. Have you heard anything?”
Lightfoote shook her head. “They’ve gone dark since we gave them the keys to the databases. My guess is they’re prepping.”
He nodded. “How’s the world doing?”
“A few days of martial law sure has an effect on a town. It’s like some apocalyptic thriller. But no zombies, sadly. The worm’s been quiet since the massacre. Well, quiet is a relative word. It’s still spreading, penetrating more and more systems. No one has a solution to that yet. But so far no direct attacks. No other mischief.”
Her voice seemed to fade. He was staring up a deep well, trying to communicate. “That’s good. That’s good.”
“But I think everyone knows it’s a calm before the next storm. Someone has a grand scheme. Phase one is done. Phase two will be worse, I bet.”
She looked down at Savas, but he was already back under. Her hand found his. “Goodnight, John. Rest up. We’re going to need it.”
29
A lanky adolescent male slouched in a baroque chair, the office around him out of a seventeenth century painting. He sported shoulder length black hair and rumbled denim attire, square prescription sunglasses masking his eyes. Across from him a young woman with a shawl over her bare shoulders scribbled notes and nodded her head. The boy hardly looked at her.
“I will have to submit my evaluation next week, Tony,” she said.
“That’s not my name.”
The woman nodded. “And I will continue to use it as per the juvenile privacy laws. Tony. I will not know your real identity. We protect those under custody.”
“Jesus Christ. How long do we play this game?”
The therapist sighed. “You do want me to write you a good report, I assume? You want to go home?”
“Home? You’ve got to be kidding. Don’t you read the files they send you?”
“Foster home. You ran away from home and your mother is a recovering alcoholic. Yes, I know. I meant, don’t you want out of here?”
The boy completely repositioned his frame in the chair, whipping a leg across the other and folding his arms across his chest.
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll be out very soon no matter what you write. I’ve made sure of it.”
“Hacking the city council’s computers is a serious offense. Hasn’t this experience humbled you at all?”
The boy laughed. “It was an experiment. Not for the hack. That was all too easy. For the effects. Learned a lot about cybercrime investigations and protocol. I’ll follow up on the outside. But I’ve gotten all the data I can from this, so there isn’t much of point in continuing here. And, you know, what I found on their servers was a thousand times worse than anything I’ve done. And they know it. I squirreled it all away where they can’t touch it. They’re not going to fuck with me.”
The woman stopped writing. “I’m worried about you, Tony. You manifest a collection of antisocial behaviors and extreme, nearly delusional idealizations.”
“Don’t forget boundary issues. I think you still show too much cleavage for a doc. Go with the more discrete pushups from Victoria’s. I like small and well-made. You don’t have to look like you have implants, you know.”