There had been cases where Fools’ bodies had woken up before the translation process was completed. The signal selves stayed in the nets as long as they could hold together, and then, they dissipated like Verence had. The body-selves though, woke up as if they had been in six month comas. They were permanently brain-damaged and unable to function independently ever again. The physiological markers for the process were inconclusive. Some theorized that without the extra boost from the implant signals, the cognitive functions repressed by the drugs stayed shut down. Some of the more theologically minded theorized it was because the soul had not returned to the body. Dobbs seldom wondered about the implications of either view. She was content to know the process worked.
Light and heat touched her. A thorny pain tingled in her hands and ankles. Her eyes blinked, her throat groaned softly and her tendons twitched as she gradually became aware that all these things really belonged to her.
Dobbs fumbled with the transceiver until she managed to pull it out of her socket and drop it into the box. Then, with forced patience, she began the long series of stretching exercises that the Guild prescribed to reorient her to her body, gently stretching and separating her toes, ankle circles, leg lifts, arm stretches, rotating her neck. At the end of twenty minutes, she was able to see without the tell-tale sensation of detachment that always followed a session in the net. She was defined by her body again.
Her body, which was parched with thirst, reeling with hunger and had a bladder that was about to burst.
Dobbs reeled to the bathroom and voided herself. She ran the tap, filling cup after cup of cold water, guzzling them as fast as she could. Feeling moderately more steady, she rifled through her bedside drawer for a deluxe-size ration bar. She had downed half of it when the grief hit.
Verence was dead. The memory surged up from her unconscious with all the rest of what she had learned in the net. Verence was dead. Her stomach clamped down on itself and so did her throat. Tears she couldn’t even think about controlling burst out of her eyes. She did manage to swallow her mouthful before the sobs welled up. Verence had saved her life. Verence had brought her to the Guild and stood by her while she was learning her trade. Dobbs remembered the little, bright-eyed woman tossing scarves in the air, heard her patient voice going over the principles of humor, felt her warm hand on her shoulder. Gone. Her first and best friend was gone.
When the tears finished and the sobs had quieted to gasps, Dobbs managed to force her damp palms down from her face and look up at the desk clock. She’d been out of the net for ten whole minutes.
All right, Dobbs, you do not have time to lollygag. She hoisted herself off the bed. A quick wash and some eyedrops took care of the worst of the evidence of her cry. She made herself finish off the ration bar, even though her stomach no longer felt like accepting it. Then, she activated the desk again and checked the time and the crew schedule. Lipinski was on duty and was probably in the comm center, building yet another diagnostic.
Dobbs took the stairs to the hold deck two at a time.
Her prediction proved accurate. Lipinski was swearing energetically at his boards as his pen flew across their surface, making choices and scrawling out orders. Whatever it was giving back to him, he did not like it.
“It’s not good enough, it’s not even close.” He wiped out the last line he’d laid down with a swift, angry stroke. “You’re not going to get around me like that, whoever the hell you are. Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, maybe you are…” If he had heard the hatch cycle, he gave no sign.
Dobbs felt a twinge of sympathy inside her as Lipinski lifted up his coffee bulb, thumbed the lid back and took a huge gulp.
She braced herself, set a cheeky smile on her face and stepped forward.
“They seek it here, they seek it there, the Houston seeks it everywhere. Is it in Heaven, is it in Hell, that damned, elusive…virus of totally unknown origin.” She finished off, deliberately lame. It was evident that Lipinski did not get the joke, but that was all right, he at least looked at her.
“Piss off, Fool,” he muttered.
“No thanks. Took care of that before I left my cabin.” She leaned both elbows against the corner of his board. “So, is it in Heaven or Hell?”
“I wish it was. Actually, I wish its maker was.” He erased the line he was working on and wrote QUERY NEW PATTERN CENTER LACKING HOUSTON AUTHORIZATION.
“Couldn’t be anywhere near that simple,” he said. “Crackers usually forget something simple though. They’re just like any other systems freak. They think they know everything, but they don’t. They know generalities, not specifics. They don’t know all the ins and outs of a particular system unless they’ve made a study of that single unit, and who in all the hells under all the heavens would have made a study of the Pasadena?”
“Someone who wanted Chandra’s curry recipe?” Dobbs quipped. “Or, better yet, someone who wanted to STOP Chandra’s curry recipe.” She drew herself up straight. “Marshall your forces troops! We cannot allow this to get out! We must invade in force, leave no corner unsearched, inside, outside, in my lady’s chamber! You!” she spun around and faced an imaginary private, “take the main database. You!” she spun again. “Take the bridge links! You!” She faced the back wall and poked at it with her index finger. “You take the kitchens, but she’s far to clever to leave it in plain sight. Stay in contact! We can’t let ourselves be cut off! We’ll surround it and cut off its back-ups, divide and conquer, Troops! Because if we don’t…”
Lipinski had gone round-eyed and slack jawed.
“Oh my God!” He snatched up his pen. “Oh my God, I’ve been looking for the wrong thing! I’m an idiot! An idiot!”
He began scribbling in a convoluted shorthand almost too fast for Dobbs to follow. He was ordering searches for binary signals, line feed-back, random number streams, not in any of the affected systems, but in the remaining “clean” systems.
The responses came back positive.
“Got you!” he cried. “Got you, you fractured key code imitation comm check! You’re mine! Intercom to Schyler!”
“Schyler here, Houston. Good news?” The hope in his voice was almost aching.
“Good news, Watch. I’ve found caught the thing talking to itself. It’s not a single virus, it’s a bunch of them.”
A moment of silence. “Please tell me you can do something about this?”
Lipinski licked his lips. “Now that I know what its comm patterns look like, I can write up some roadblocks for them. If we can isolate the individual nerve centers, we can pick them off one at a time.”
“Any chance of getting this done before we get to The Farther Kingdom?”
Lipinski looked down at his board. Responses from the ship’s systems were still coming in. He swallowed. “I don’t think so, but we can at least neutralize the thing, things, so that we stand a good chance of getting to The Farther Kingdom.”
“I’ll take that.” Schyler sighed. “Get going Lipinski. Dictate a report to your relief and let the rest of us know what we need to start doing. I’ll call Al Shei. Intercom to close.”
Lipinski flashed Dobbs the first genuine smile she’d seen in twenty-four hours.
“I could kiss you, you Fool.”
She smiled back. “Nah. You’d have to catch me first.”
She slid sideways out the hatch.
In the corridor, she rubbed her forehead. Dobbs, you need some sleep yourself. You keep giving him answers like that, he’s going to be leaving a permission-to-court request on your line before you can say ‘boo.’ And you don’t want to have to deal with that, do you ?