The rabbit pulled out a sewing needle. Its thread was a series of words: LIGHT. SPIRIT. FARAZAD. SAMJI. The rabbit threw the needle like a dart, then watched as it punched its way in and out of the files, piercing each one and drawing the word-thread through it. When it had finished, two smaller file icons hung on the thread between the words. Like the larger files, each was coded with a color bar. The rabbit pulled what looked like a highlighting stylus out of its seemingly bottomless pocket and drew the tip over the bar code of the first file. The blocks of color turned into letters: PROJECT PERSONNEL.
The rabbit looked at Carla. “Upload?” it asked.
Carla nodded.
The rabbit tucked the file into its pocket. Then it used the stylus on the second file. More words appeared: LUCIFER PROJECT.
“Uplo-?”
A sudden flash of white light obliterated everything. Carla had the sensation of tumbling crazily in space. There was nothing to grab onto, no reference points. The entire Matrix and all of its graphic constructs had been instantly obliterated. She spun wildly out of control, knot of icy fear in her stomach. She was falling, drowning in a sea of featureless white, burning in an invisible white flame…
It ended as suddenly as it had begun. Carla was slumped over in her chair in the research department. Beside her, Corwin held the end of the datacord that he’d yanked out of the jack in her temple. His face was an ashen color, and had lost all of its usual cocky expression.
Both of them were breathing hard. For a moment, Carla was frightened that the intrusion countermeasure they’d run into had used a biofeedback loop to accelerate their heart rates out of control. She glanced up at the clock on the wall. Only ten seconds had elapsed since they’d entered the Matrix. It seemed like a lifetime.
“What the frag was that?” she asked. “Some kind ice?”
Corwin shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “It shut down everything in the sector-not just us.”
“Do you think it was-“
“Jus’ a sec,” Corwin cut her off. “I gotta check something.”
He jacked back into the deck and hunched over it, eyes unfocused. As the seconds ticked past, Carla saw his fingers tense once, then relax. Then his mouth dropped open and his breathing quickened. His eyes jerked back and forth rapidly, as if he were rapidly scanning text. Just as Carla was wondering if she should do something, he blinked and pulled the cable from his temple.
“Wow,” he said.
“What?” Carla was bristling with impatience. “What is it?”
“Whatever wiped us wasn’t ice,” Corwin said thoughtfully. “It was more like a virus. I edged back into the Mitsuhama mainframe, just to scan what was rezzin’ there. When I tried to access the research lab files again, guess what I found?”
Carla shrugged. She couldn’t even guess.
“Nada. Zilch. Static. A whole lotta nothing. The datastore for that sector is utterly clean, completely wiped. There wasn’t a single graphics pixel, not a single byte of data. And none of the programs were functional. That system is toasted. Gonzo.”
He paused. “Know what it reminded me of?” he asked.
Carla nodded. This time, she could guess. “The databanks at the U. of W’s School of Theology?”
“Yup. Exactamundo. Same effect exactly.”
“What about the files you uploaded?” Carla asked. “Did you manage to save them?”
Corwin tapped a button on his deck. With a soft whir, a datachip slid out of a slot in the side. “I got the personnel file,” he answered. “But the second file was erased, along with the rest of the lab data. The deck didn’t even have time to upload its name code.”
Carla cursed silently to herself. She’d been so close.
But at least she had a tiny piece of the puzzle now. She had a personnel file that should contain the names of the mages who’d worked on the project with Farazad. The information in their dossiers might give her some leverage during the interviews she hoped to conduct with them. And she also had what had to be the name of the research project: Lucifer.
It was a curious name for what Carla had assumed was a weapons research project. Lucifer was a Latin word that translated as “bringer of light.” It was also the name of the angel who was cast out of heaven and fell to earth in the form of lightning. That part certainly fit. According to the ork girl’s description of the spirit, it had looked like lightning as it launched itself into the heavens away from the body of the wage mage. One big bright flash of light…
She suddenly realized that her previous assumptions had been all wrong. Mitsuhama hadn’t been experimenting with spirits in order to use them as weapons. She’d let the fact that the spirit had killed the mage lull her into that crude conclusion. Instead, the research project had involved computers-Mitsuhama’s chief industry-all along.
Carla could feel her heart pounding in her chest. “Corwin,” she asked softly. “Is it possible for a spirit enter the Matrix?”
The ork shook his head. “No way. The Matrix is an artificial reality, nothing more than a series of computer-generated simsense impressions, while magic is inherently associated with living organisms. The two are completely incompatible; that’s why mages have such trouble with simsense. Regardless of what it’s actually made of, a spirit is a living creature And nothing living can enter the Matrix.”
“1 thought we just did.”
“Nope. What we did was download sensory data from the Matrix directly into our brains, through these He tapped the datajack in his temple while still watching the screen of the diagnostic unit. “We weren’t actually ‘inside’ the Matrix-we just perceived it as if we were. We were actually downloading coded pulses of photons, which our datalinks translated into signals our brains could understand and interpret. Whenever I seemed to he manipulating an icon. I was actually executing a command, uploading the information that would do the job. My neural synapses fired, and the thought was translated by my datalink into a coded burst of light that activated the program in my deck.” He paused, looked up for a moment at Carla. “You scan all that?”
“Huh-huh. But what if the spirit had a physical body that was composed of light?” Carla asked. “Couldn’t it enter the Matrix like any other beam of light, through a fiber-optic cable?”
The decker paused for a second, then shrugged “Maybe for a millisecond or two. It would just blast through at three hundred thousand klicks per second and be out again.”
“What would it look like?”
“Like a flash of…” Corwin looked up, his eyes wide. “So that’s what we saw,” he whispered softly. “Mega cool.” His deck lay ignored in his lap. He leaned forward, and the foam of the recliner squeaked slightly as it contoured itself to his new position.
“A creature composed of light would be one fragger of a virus,” he said, thinking out loud. “It wouldn’t be affected by any intrusion countermeasures, since they’re set up to attack the deck or the decker. It would be nearly impossible to detect, because it wouldn’t interfere with the other data transmissions. Light doesn’t interfere with itself unless the two beams are exactly in phase-that’s why a fiber-optic cable can carry thousands of commands and transmissions simultaneously. One more pulse of light down the tube wouldn’t affect it a bit. And it wouldn’t hurt the hardware-at least, I don’t think so. But there is one thing he spirit would do-it would sure mess up stored data.”
His gestures grew more animated. See, information is written on memory chips and hard drives by a beam of light, and read in the same manner. Individual pulses within the beam, as well as the light wave’s pattern of crests and troughs, are all part of the information carrying code. If a creature made of light suddenly surged through a data storage device, it would completely scramble the code that had been written previously. There’d be a whole new pattern laid down, none of it coherent. And that’s what makes this spirit so perfect as a virus. There’s no way to stop it from corrupting your data. Even if you installed a passcode system, any word or image you use is encoded as light. All the spirit would have to do is reconfigure itself to emulate the passcode, write-enable the datastore, and slide right in. Only a hardwired lock could stop it-and that involves completely locking the system away from the Matrix. It just isn’t economically feasible to do that.