“Maybe, maybe not. You may be assuming too much, Shade.”
“Why?”
“The Wags have their own unique way of doing things here. Protecting data with walls of sophisticated security isn’t part of their usual modus operandi. They prefer plain old sleight-of-hand to keep things secret. Like bringing in all that extra equipment to build nine small projects, so it’d all be ready for the Big One. I’d cracked their security screens on every single one of those. I knew what they were bringing down and when. But I never thought to check and see how much of what they brought in was actually used on each project—why would anybody? That’s how they like to work it down here.
“If I hack in and find a really well-protected data-store, I can work my cerebellum into jelly, and maybe I’ll get inside. But when I do, I’d be willing to bet next month’s salary the data I finally download won’t be worth a damn. The whole store with all it’s security will turn out to have been created just to keep me busy, and keep you barking up the wrong trees while the data you really needed was staring you in the face all the time.”
I thought about that. It made sense. Since the Wags were themselves the masters of computer hacking here in the dome, they would naturally be aware of how vulnerable even protected data-stores could be. Then it hit me…
“What do you mean, ‘the Big One’? Do you have reason to believe they’re not planning anything bigger after this?”
“If they are,” she said, “they haven’t brought in equipment for it. Remember, I did crack their files on those first nine projects. I know what they brought down, and now that I know to look, I also know what they used, and what they had left over after each one. They already have their VR Entertainment Complex right here, in the dome. It’s in pieces spread about several warehouses, but it’s all here. Nothing else is. This is the Big One, so far as the Wags are concerned. Everything they’ve done to date has been cover for it, and after it’s complete there’ll be no spare parts left to be used in anything else.”
“I find it hard to believe they’d risk as much as they have for a VR Entertainment Complex. There must be more than that.”
“I agree,” she said seriously. “And the only explanation I can think of, that makes any sense at all, is that the VR Complex itself may be more than it pretends to be.
The architects’ plans for the Soyinka VR Entertainment Complex were easily obtained through the habitat’s Public Records Department. I accessed them from the terminal in my quarters and spent a couple hours perusing the designs looking for clues, trying to pinpoint something special in the physical structure of the building which might explain its importance to the Wags. I found nothing. In fact, the only unusual thing about this project was the rather odd nature of the “entertainment” it was being designed to provide.
Virtual Reality has been the backbone of the entertainment industry since it was invented four centuries ago. Continuously refined and improved, it can create a fantasy environment in cyberspace so real that VR addiction has become a serious problem on some worlds—people enter Virtual Reality and forget there even is a “real” reality to which they must return. Commercial programmers now design deliberate imperfections into their sensory simulations to combat this. And most VR entertainment can be accessed through the net in one’s home or hotel room, so it doesn’t require a special facility being built. But the Soyinka project was different. The promotional literature billed it as: “VIRTUAL REALITY, NOT VIRTUAL REALITY.”
Far from participating in some fantasy entertainment program, the participants were supposed to be “enabled through the miracle of modern cyber-technology to explore the true surface of this most interesting of planets, Marjolin.”
Inside the Complex would be 1,000 cells in which humans could interface with man-sized automatons deep down in the crushing atmosphere, below the yellow clouds of sulphuric acid which flow about The Volcano like an ocean. There, where Epsilon Indi’s light has been filtered into a diffuse glow the color of antique parchment; where blood-red sunsets last for hours, paying customers will “walk” on the vast basalt plains, and “reach down” to feel gritty scalded regolith slip through surrogate fingers. There will be mountains to climb, sheathed in soft metals which sublime into vapor in Marjolin’s lowlands then precipitate out at cooler altitudes: peaks covered in lustrous antimony snow-caps; slopes cut by copper glaciers; with avalanches of lead, and blizzards of arsenic. And there will be canyons to descend, even volcanoes the VR explorers can enter, walking to the very margins of the lava flows. And it will all be real. People “jaded by the easy fantasy of standard VR fare will re-discover the romance of being human in the wide unknown, beyond The Volcano.”
The copy writing was very good. I almost believed it myself. But I hadn’t noticed any decline in the popularity of standard VR fare lately. Corporate futures were still selling high, and if people were becoming jaded, they were doing a good job of not complaining about it. And I couldn’t quite see Sharawaggi actually filling 1,000 interface-cells with paying customers even during the holiday season—face it, the surface of Planet Marjolin may be “untrod by human feet,” but by itself that is only of limited novelty value. It is also a depressingly barren wasteland. Who’s going to be so excited about walking on scorched sand and broken rocks that they’ll actually spend money on it more than once, for maybe an hour? Especially when there is a crystal clear lake to swim in, to say nothing of beautiful, bored sybarites looking for “interesting” partners to alleviate the ennui of paradise. I could not believe the Wags expected such a venture to turn a profit.
I was meditating on that, trying to envision a good reason to go out on a limb to build a project that could only fail, when my comlink buzzed. I switched it on, and Lulu’s face appeared in the screen. She had her interface skullcap on, and was obviously in her office plugged into her terminal.
“Mr. Sansouci,” she said with exaggerated formality for the benefit of eavesdroppers. “I thought you would like to know, I have successfully accessed the system you were interested in and there is a large, well-protected datastore there. It’s file title suggests its contents might be of interest to you.”
“Excellent, Ms. Loki,” I replied slowly, remembering what she had said this morning: If I hack in and find a really well-protected data-store… I’d be willing to bet next month’s salary the data I finally download won’t be worth a damn.
“Ms. Loki, I’d like you to crack that file very carefully…”
And let them know, I thought, keep ’em guessing, while I try to figure it out from the data staring me in my face.
“…And let me know what you find. How is Mr. Fremont doing with the restabilization plans?”
“He and his ecotechies all looked pretty happy when I last saw them,” she said. “I didn’t get all the details, but I understand the worst cascading imbalances in ecosystem integrity can be postponed about a hundred years by simply introducing rats and cockroaches into the habitat.”
“Rats and cockroaches?”
“That’s the current most favored option, as I understand it.”
“No poisonous snakes? No scorpions?”
“None were mentioned.”
“Ms. Loki,” I sighed, “could you please kill your husband for me—nothing cruel, just a pillow over his face while he’s sleeping, perhaps?”
“I’m afraid not, Mr. Sansouci,” she said laughing, a sound which triggered memories. “Not that I haven’t been tempted from time to time, but there are the kids to consider.”