I assume an expression of alarm. ‘I’ll come down right away.’
‘Good.’ Shea is relieved that his delivery was convincing. ‘We can examine you as soon as you arrive.’
I hang up and turn on my terminal to check the latest information in the FDA database. There’s no mention of any adverse effects, on the optic nerve or anywhere else. I don’t discount the possibility that such effects might arise in the future, but I’ll discover them by myself.
It’s time to leave Boston. I begin packing. I’ll empty my bank accounts when I go. Selling the equipment in my studio would generate more cash, but most of it is too large to transport; I take only a few of the smallest pieces. After I’ve been working a couple of hours, the phone rings again: Shea wondering where I am. This time I let the machine pick it up.
‘Leon, are you there? This is Dr. Shea. We’ve been expecting you for quite some time.’
He’ll try calling one more time, and then he’ll send the orderlies in white suits, or perhaps the actual police, to pick me up.
Seven-thirty P.M. Shea is still in the hospital, waiting for news about me. I turn the ignition key and pull out of my parking spot across the street from the hospital. Any moment now, he’ll notice the envelope I slipped under the door to his office. As soon as he opens it he’ll realize that it’s from me.
Greetings, Dr. Shea;
I imagine you’re looking for me.
A moment of surprise, but no more than a moment; he’ll regain his composure, and alert security to search the building for me, and check all departing vehicles. Then he’ll continue reading.
You can call off those burly orderlies who are waiting at my apartment; I don’t want to waste their valuable time. You’re probably determined to have the police issue an APB on me, though. Therefore, I’ve taken the liberty of inserting a virus in the DMV computer that will substitute information whenever my license plate number is requested. Of course, you could give a description of my car, but you don’t even know what it looks like, do you?
He’ll call the police to have their programmers work on that virus. He’ll conclude that I have a superiority complex, based on the arrogant tone of the note, the unnecessary risk taken in returning to the hospital to deliver it, and the pointless revelation of a virus which might otherwise have gone undetected.
Shea will be mistaken, though. Those actions are designed to make the police and CIA underestimate me, so I can rely on their not taking adequate precautions. After cleaning my virus from the DMV computer, the police programmers will assess my programming skills as good but not great, and then load the backups to retrieve my actual license number. This will activate a second virus, a far more sophisticated one. This will modify both the backups and the active database. The police will be satisfied that they’ve got the correct license number, and spend their time chasing that wild goose.
My next goal is to get another ampule of hormone K. Doing so, unfortunately, will give the CIA an accurate idea of how capable I really am. If I hadn’t sent that note, the police would discover my virus later, at a time when they’d know to take super-stringent precautions when eradicating it. In that case, I might never be able to remove my license number from their files.
Meanwhile, I’ve checked into a hotel, and am working out of the room’s datanet terminal.
I’ve broken into the private database of the FDA. I’ve seen the addresses of the hormone K subjects, and the internal communications of the FDA. A clinical hold was instituted for hormone K: no further testing permitted until the hold is lifted. The CIA has insisted on capturing me and assessing my threat potential before the FDA goes any further.
The FDA has asked all the hospitals to return the remaining ampules by courier. I must get an ampule before this happens. The nearest patient is in Pittsburgh; I reserve a seat on a flight leaving early tomorrow morning. Then I check a map of Pittsburgh, and make a request to the Pennsylvania Courier company for a pickup at an investment firm in the downtown area. Finally I sign up for several hours of CPU time on a supercomputer.
I’m parked in a rental car around the corner from a skyscraper in Pittsburgh. In my jacket pocket is a small circuit board with a keypad. I’m looking down the street in the direction the courier will arrive from; half the pedestrians wear white air filter masks, but visibility is good.
I see it two intersections away; it’s a late-model domestic van, Pennsylvania Courier painted on the side. It’s not a high-security courier; the FDA isn’t that worried about me. I get out of my car and begin walking toward the skyscraper. The van arrives shortly, parks, and the driver gets out. As soon as he’s inside, I enter the vehicle.
It’s just come from the hospital. The driver is on his way to the fortieth floor, expecting to pick up a package from an investment firm there. He won’t be back for at least four minutes.
Welded to the floor of the van is a large locker, with double-layered steel walls and door. There is a polished plate on the door; the locker opens when the driver lays his palm against its surface. The plate also has a dataport in its side, used for programming it.
Last night I penetrated the service database for Lucas Security Systems, the company that sells handprint locks to Pennsylvania Courier. There I found an encrypted file containing the codes to override their locks.
I must admit that, while penetrating computer security remains generally unaesthetic, certain aspects of it are indirectly related to very interesting problems in mathematics. For example, a commonly used method of encryption normally requires years of supercomputer time to break. However, during one of my forays into number theory, I found a lovely technique for factoring extremely large numbers. With this technique, a supercomputer could break this encryption scheme in a matter of hours.
I pull the circuit board from my pocket and connect it to the dataport with a cable. I tap in a twelve-digit number, and the locker door swings open.
By the time I’m back in Boston with the ampule, the FDA has responded to the theft by removing all pertinent files from any computer accessible through the datanet: as expected.
With the ampule and my belongings, I drive to New York City.
The fastest way for me to make money is, oddly enough, gambling. Handicapping horse races is simple enough. Without attracting undue attention, I can accumulate a moderate sum, and then sustain myself with investments in the stock market.
I’m staying in a room in the cheapest apartment I could find near New York that has datanet outlets. I’ve arranged several false names under which to make my investments, and will change them regularly. I shall spend some time on Wall Street, so that I can identify high-yield, short-term opportunities from the body language of brokers. I won’t go more than once a week; there are more significant matters to attend to, gestalts beckoning my attention.
As my mind develops, so does my control over my body. It is a misconception to think that during evolution humans sacrificed physical skill in exchange for intelligence: wielding one’s body is a mental activity. While my strength hasn’t increased, my coordination is now well above average; I’m even becoming ambidextrous. Moreover, my powers of concentration make biofeedback techniques very effective. After comparatively little practice, I am able to raise or lower my heart rate and blood pressure.
I write a program to perform a pattern match for photos of my face and search for occurrences of my name; I then incorporate it into a virus for scanning all public display files on the datanet. The CIA will have the national datanet news briefs display my picture and identify me as a dangerously insane escaped patient, perhaps a murderer. The virus will replace my photo with video static. I plant a similar virus in the FDA and CIA computers, to search for copies of my picture in any downloads to regional police. These viruses should be immune to anything that their programmers can come up with.