Cybernation (2001) Read online

  Chance stepped into the doorway just as Roberto leaped into the air and turned a back somersault, landed neatly on the balls of his feet, then dropped into a spraddle-legged posture, sweeping one foot along the floor in a broad half-circle. Only the palm sides of the hands and soles of the feet were ever supposed to touch the ground, he had told her, that was part of O Jôgo, The Game. Capoeira was a fighting system developed by slaves, and while one school of history had it that it had been disguised as a dance so as to fool the white masters, Roberto had been quick to point out that such thinking was simplistic.

  Most of what she knew of Capoeira she had learned from Roberto in bed, between bouts of an art at which she was an adept. Roberto was barely thirty years old. He was a decade younger than she was. He was handsome, had great stamina, and his body seemed chiseled from hard cocobolo wood. There was no fat on him at all. He had been a diamond in the rough when they had met. She had polished him and taught him how to be a skilled lover over the year of their association. He was coming along nicely.

  Now, wearing only a pair of thin, calf-length red-and-white striped cotton pants, Roberto glowed with passion and sweat as he practiced his exercises. Though he preferred to be musically accompanied by three or four of his fellow game players—you had to learn to play the instruments as part of the dance—the music now was recorded. When he saw her arrive, he finished his sequence, then padded across the bare floor to the sound box and shut it off.

  When he spoke, he had an accent, the soft liquid flow of Portuguese translating to his English, a rounding of hard consonants and lengthening of vowels.

  “Ah, Missy. How goes the battle?”

  She smiled, flashing perfect teeth—all marvels of expensive orthodontia, a thousand dollars a cap. “Keller says the first sortie went perfectly.”

  Roberto picked a towel up from the floor and wiped the sweat from his face and shaved head. “Jackson, he’s a fine boy, can make them computers dance like nobody else.”

  Chance smiled. That was true. Jackson Keller was a wizard with hardware and software, as good with those technical things as Roberto here was at bashing heads. CyberNation did not hire second-class talent for its key positions. There was much to be gained—or lost—in this game, and cutting corners on personnel would be short-sighted and stupid. When you were trying to create a virtual nation from nothing, to give it weight and substance, you had to do some very intricate things if you were going to pull it off. Having good help alone wasn’t sufficient. You needed the best. All of Chance’s people were just that—the best. And she wasn’t so bad herself, though her talents were somewhat harder to quantify. The higher-ups in CyberNation called her The Dragon Lady when they thought she couldn’t hear, and she took that as a compliment.

  To Roberto, she said, “Yes, but this is the easy part. Scrambling software gets their attention, but they’ll fix that, and all it will cost will be some tired programmers and a few hours’ downtime. The next stage will be more difficult. If it gets to that.”

  And of course, it would get to that soon enough—the nations of the world weren’t going to just roll over and give away anything, certainly not the kind of power CyberNation wanted for itself.

  “You worry too much, Missy.” He grinned. “That part won’t be no harder than Jackson’s jôgo, only different.”

  “Good to see you haven’t lost your confidence, Roberto.”

  “Ah, me, I ain’t lost nothin’.”

  She closed the door and locked it. “Talk is cheap.”

  He hooked his thumbs into the waistline of his pants and skinned them down, peeled them off, one foot, then the other, and tossed them to one side.

  She laughed, and reached for her shirt buttons. “We’ll have to hurry,” she said. “We have to leave for the ship in an hour.”

  “Only an hour?”

  “We have to pack.”

  “Let me show you how to pack,” he said.

  She laughed again. Life was good.

  Washington, D.C.

  Somebody screamed bloody murder, jerking Toni from her half-doze into full alertness. She came off the couch and onto her feet and into a defensive stance, expecting to be attacked, before her brain got back on track.

  It’s only the baby. Just Little Alex.

  Toni relaxed. Aloud, she said, “Yeah, little Alex, the demon child from the lowest pit of Hell.” But she was already on her way into the bedroom, and at the baby’s crib before he could get through the second outraged scream.

  “Hey, hey, hey, baby boy, what’s the matter? Mama’s here, it’s okay.”

  He stood balanced precariously on his little fat feet, holding onto the rail.

  She picked the baby up, put him over her left shoulder, and patted him gently on the back.

  He gave out one more half-hearted yell, just to let her know he wasn’t happy it had taken her all of thirty seconds to get from the living room to pick him up, then trailed off into a quiet burble before shutting up completely.

  “Oh, you’re happy now, are you? Brat. Monster.” She leaned him away and cradled him, smiling with a fierce possessive joy at him. She hadn’t slept for more than four hours at a stretch for what seemed like forever, but he was such an angel when he smiled his new-toothed grin at her, as he was doing now. He was a beautiful child. Yeah, yeah, she knew that every mother thought that about her babies, but objectively speaking, he really was. Objectively speaking. Anybody with eyes could see that.

  She smiled at that thought and at Alex Junior—a name his father had fought against but lost. Yes, she had agreed, a junior had a lot to live up to, and no, it wasn’t necessarily the best thing to tag a baby with that. The choice they’d agreed upon was “Scott,” giving him his paternal grandfather’s middle name. But when the nurse had come in with the little flatscreen to log in the newborn baby’s stats, Alex hadn’t been there.

  “What’s the baby’s name?” the nurse had asked, ready to log it into the system.

  And Toni had smiled and given it to her. Alex hadn’t really been that upset. Secretly, she was sure he was actually very pleased.

  Little Alex made sucking noises, but it was not time for his feeding yet. He had gotten off the breast and was taking milk and some solid food full-time now. And she no longer leaked milk when he cried, thank God. That had gotten a little embarrassing while sitting in a restaurant or even just out pushing the stroller.

  She walked into the living room, cooing at little Alex, looking for his binky. They had half a dozen kinds of different pacifiers, but somehow, the baby could tell the difference among them, and would spit out all but his favorite. This had caused some not-so-funny moments while they turned the house upside down looking for it against the background of unhappy baby squawls. Unfortunately, the favorite binky had come as a baby shower gift from somebody, and neither Toni nor Alex had been able to find a match for it anywhere. There was no brand name on it, and nobody remembered who had given it to them. A web search came up empty, and friends with babies were no help, either. Normally, they had the thing strapped to a clip attached to the baby’s shirt so they wouldn’t lose it, but somehow, they managed to lose it anyhow.

  Jay Gridley had come up with a tiny responder that could be hooked to the clip strap. All you had to do was say “Binky!” in a loud voice, and the electronic device, about the size of a penny, would say “Here I am!” over and over until you could find it and squeeze it off. Jay had put the thing inside a little sleeve of waterproof silicone, just in case little Alex managed to somehow get that part into his mouth.

  Life since the baby was just full of these kinds of problems, and they only sounded little to people who didn’t have children of their own.

  And being a full-time mama was a far cry from being a Net Force operative second in command to her now-husband, or working for the mainline FBI as a special liaison to Net Force.

  Just then, the baby distinctly said, “Da da.”

  Toni stared at him, astounded. “What? What did you say
?”

  Little Alex smiled and said it again, repeating it a third time for good measure: “Da da da.”

  She had to call Alex! He had to hear this, this child was a prodigy, a genius!

  She hurried to the phone, picked it up, and punched in Alex’s number.

  But naturally, the phone wasn’t working.

  Okay, fine, she’d tell him when he got home. Meanwhile, she could bundle the baby up, put him in the stroller, and go for a nice long walk. It was chilly out, but at least the sun was shining, no rain in the forecast. Some fresh air would do them both good.

  “Want to go for a walk, sweet babboo?”

  He understood her, and she was sure he nodded, a little bit. Of course. He was a prodigy, after all, wasn’t he? The smartest, prettiest, best baby in the world. Without a doubt—none at all.

  2

  Madrid, Spain

  Summer 1868

  The summer’s day was scorching in Madrid, time for siesta.

  Jay Gridley sat in the shade of a wide awning at a sidewalk café, sipping warm red table wine, waving flies away from the dirty checkered tablecloth, and watching a sleeping dog under a nearby table twitch as it dreamed its mysterious canine dreams.

  Isabella II, eldest daughter of Ferdinand VII, still sat upon the Bourbon throne on this hot day, but her rule, balanced precariously as it had always been on a high wire, was finally about to come to an end. Isabella had sporadic popular support, she changed her cabinet as often as she changed her underwear, and the lumpy stew of monarchists, moderates, progressives, and radical unionists in late 19th-century Spain was about to come once again to a roiling boil. Her military politicians, the generals Ramón María Narváez and Leopoldo O’Donnell, were both dead by now. Led by Serrano y Domínguez, the Duque de La Torre, who had run things before Isabella’s ascension, and Juan Prim y Prats, the prime minister, Isabella was about to be booted out of the country in the Revolution of 1868. She would flee to Paris, where she would stay until her son, Alfonso XII, eventually ascended the Spanish throne some six years later, but even then her influence upon him was to be minimal. She would, however, outlive the leaders of the revolt against her by long margins. Prim would be assassinated a mere two years after the revolution, and while Serrano lived until 1885, Isabella lasted until 1904.

  Living long enough to spit on your enemy’s grave was a certain kind of revenge.

  Jay sipped his not-too-bad wine and grinned. Well, what was the point of creating a VR scenario if you couldn’t make it sing and dance and do tricks like you wanted it to do? Being a history buff could be a lot of fun, if you let it.

  In the Real World, Jay sat in his office at Net Force HQ, part of the almost four-hundred-acre FBI compound at Quantico, plugged into full wirelessware haptics, including top-of-the-line optics, otics, reekers, droolers, and the brand-new version of spray-on WeatherMesh, which could be set and controlled by your computer to plus-or-minus one degree Fahrenheit, and none of the Madrid afternoon was the least bit real. But it looked, sounded, tasted, smelled, and felt real—close enough for government work, anyway.

  Sure, you could still input everything into a computer with a keyboard or voxax, or read words scrolling up a holoprojic screen if you wanted to, but with VR software as good as it was, why would anybody do that if they didn’t have to? When you could get the same information you needed and be entertained at the same time, why wouldn’t you, unless you were short on imagination?

  A short, balding man wearing a clean but out-of-date summer suit strolled toward Jay, mopping his florid face with a handkerchief he pulled from one jacket sleeve.

  “Señor Gridley?” His name came out as “Greed-lee.”

  “Sí.”

  “Por favor, Señor, I have a message for you.”

  Jay nodded. He indicated the chair across from him. “Have some wine, Señor . . . ?”

  “Montoya. Jaime Montoya. Muchas gracias.”

  The little man sat. A waiter appeared with a glass, plunked it down, and sauntered away. Montoya poured himself a glass of the wine, took a long sip, then sighed.

  “Ah, good. Hot today.”

  “Mucho,” Jay said.

  The man removed a folded parchment from his jacket. The yellowish document was sealed with a dollop of orange wax, imprinted with the signet of a local marquis. Jay expressed his thanks as he took the parchment, thumbed the seal open, and unfolded the document.

  Sure, he could have downloaded this file to his system and scanned it. And sure, if he needed hard copy, that would be courtesy of the office printer, on so-so grade ink-jet paper and not parchment, but what the hell—if you couldn’t have fun, why bother?

  It was what he had come to find, but a quick read told him it wouldn’t do him much good. The hackers who had attacked the net servers were too good to leave an obvious trail he could follow. The marquis could not point him in the right direction, lo siento.

  Oh, well, how big a surprise was that? The shock would have been if somebody good enough to rascal their way into major computer nodes had left obvious clues to back-track.

  “Personal call override” came a warm and sultry voice. “Saji on line one.”

  Jay cancelled the VR scenario with a finger-weave in the sensor grid and told his phone to put the call through. It came across in visual, so he could see her sitting in the kitchen at home. She was, as always, beautiful.

  “Hey, babe,” he said.

  “Hi, Jay. Have you once more made the world safe for democracy?”

  “If you count Republicans, safe enough. What’s up?”

  Saji—Sojan Rinpoche, his fiancée and the world’s most beautiful and bright woman—said, “My mother needs my help picking out the bridesmaids’ dresses.”

  “And I can help you do this how?”

  “Not at all, wiseguy. I was just calling to let you know I was going to look at bridal magazines with her.”

  “In Phoenix?”

  “No. She’s visiting my aunt Shelly in Baltimore. I’m going to take the train up for the day.”

  “You’re gonna ride the train to Baltimore? Are you crazy? The local is full of perverts and weirdos! Why don’t you just do it in VR on the net?”

  “Because it isn’t the same for my mother, she wants to sit next to me on the couch, and I’m trying to connect with her on this. You want her to like you, don’t you?”

  “Well, sure. But—what’s this got to do with liking me?”

  “You want me to tell her you said I couldn’t go see her?”

  “I didn’t say that. And it wouldn’t do me any good if I did say it, would it?”

  “No. Besides, I used to take the train to see my aunt every time I came to Washington, three or four times a year. Nobody ever bothered me.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t have to like it. I’m just telling you as a courtesy, idiot-mine. I don’t recall either of us planning on putting anything about ‘obey’ into our vows.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t mean to come off as some kind of authoritarian jerk here or anything, sweetie—”

  “Oh, I don’t think of you as authoritarian at all, Jay.” She batted her eyes at him theatrically and gave him a big, fake smile.

  “You’re a Buddhist, you can’t convince your mother that VR and RW are essentially the same?”

  “They aren’t, and you know it. We’ve had this discussion before.”

  He grinned. Yes, they had. Several times, and a couple of those were after mad and passionate lovemaking.

  “I’ll be back before it gets late, and I’ll have my com. I’ll call you when I leave for home.”

  He nodded at her. “Okay. It’s just that I worry.”

  “I know. It’s sweet. Don’t do it anymore. I’m a big girl; I can take care of myself.”

  “Not so big.”

  She laughed. “I love you. See you later.”

  Jay nodded, and said, “Love you, too.”

  She disconnected and his screen went bla
nk.

  Given that she had hitchhiked across most of Southeast Asia when she was seventeen—once fending off a gang of bandits who wanted to steal her backpack—and ended up in a temple in Tibet where she stayed for three months, Saji could indeed take care of herself. Riding a train to Baltimore and back shouldn’t present much of a problem. Although he felt that since they were getting married, that should become his job, taking care of her.

  He wondered if most guys felt that way about their bride-to-be.

  Well. He could watch her anyway. When you were Smokin’ Jay Gridley, the fastest computer cowboy at Net Force, tapping into the surveillance cams on the trains that ran the corridor between D.C. and Baltimore was nothing. He could do that one-handed, with a head cold and a hangover. Saji didn’t ever need to know, and if something happened, Jay could have the transit cops there in an instant.

  On the Bon Chance

  Jackson Keller went to the main computer complex. There were only eight programmers and netweavers here, aside from himself, but they were certainly among the top twenty or thirty such people worldwide. Bernardo Verichi from Italy, Derek Stanton and William Hoppe from the U.S., Ian Thomas from Australia, Ben Mbutu from South Africa, Michael Reilly, the Irishman, Jean Stern the Israeli, Rich Rynar, the Swede. There were a few better, but the ones without vision didn’t interest him. Keller’s people had to be good, but as important as that was, they also had to be believers.