It was 2:15am in new Singapore and the odds on Stanislav being in Utopia were high. She chose an account. ID Pagan Moon. 23, single, here for relationships, dating, sex, chat buddy, and exotic vacations. Perfect, she thought. She took a look at Pagan Moon’s digital image and cringed. Ouch. Resolving to send Moon a message about her dress sense, she hacked the image into something less catastrophic and entered the environment.
Marty’s avatar, Pagan Moon, landed in Utopia through its main doorway. The usual touts hung around there offering software upgrades to the avatars and accessories. Pagan Moon ignored them all, and walked rather stiffly, Marty thought, as she sent out a stream of code looking for a sexier motion for her avatar. She strode over to Utopia’s map. It was large: over one and a half billion inhabitants, an alternative world with people contributing full-time within it. Her code had picked up a smoother motion than the one the default supplied.
She turned and saw that three of the touts had taken an interest in her. She ignored them and hit New Singapore on the map. It took her twenty secs to find him. Sitting on a Ferarri V9 SuperAirBike, a SAB, as they were known, in front of Newton’s Circus, he was tanned and muscled.
Pagan Moon didn’t waste any time. She walked over to him, spreading her legs apart as she stood in of him. She said, “Can we have a chat in private? I mean, really private?”
He looked at her and leered. She leered back and said, “I don’t think I can wait much longer. I mean, you know. Let’s go. OK?”
He swung his leg over the handlebars of the SAB. Marty laughed aloud, her avatar Pagan Moon swooned and put her hand on his stomach as she swung up onto the seat behind him. She pulled her body tight against his back and mashed her breasts against it. Dropping her hands into his crotch, she whispered in his ear, “How’s Fatima?” The bulge being fed by his plugged-in biosensors shrank as quickly as it had arisen and he twisted awkwardly on the seat to look at her. He had a guilty look on his face.
“Is that you, Fatima?”
“No. It’s the other female on the team. Don’t name talk OK. You know who this is. All right. Get it together and quick. I haven’t got all day.”
The avatar that was Stanislav’s grinned at her. She saw that his programming was flawless. The Avatar looked and moved as a real person would. It was hard to tell the difference. He gunned the SAB and took off heading south.
One of the Devscreens in her cockpit changed. Sitting up in his sleeper in his Env in New Singapore, wearing a plain white T-shirt and white boxer shorts, was Stanislav. He looked more imaginary than his avatar but it was Stanislav. In Utopia, Stanislav didn’t have a stammer.
“Wh- wh- wh- where have you been? I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Fatima has been going nuts and Dom thinks that he is the cause that you’ve not got in touch with us. Where are you and did you blow up the Ga- Ga- Ga- Governors like they said?”
“Are you sure this is secure?”
“Ye- ye- ye- yes. We’re still back in Utopia riding around on the bike. Well?”
“Can’t tell you where I am. That’s too risky right now and no, of course I didn’t blow up the Governors. That was Cochran getting even with me and the Governors. Just goes to show how looks can deceive right? Stanislav, I need your help. I need you to take care of Dom and Fatima OK? That’s the first thing but there are some other tasks that I need your help on. Can you help me? It’s going to be very dangerous, life-threatening perhaps, but if we succeed we’ll save the planet from destruction. Now before we go on remember what I said about stuttering. Slow down.”
“OK, Marty. Is this real or are you in the character of some cartoon? I knew you hadn’t blown up the Governors — I told Dom and Fatima that you’d been framed.”
“Stanislav, there’s a plot to kill billions of people. Will you help me stop it?”
“Are you kidding? Save the planet from destruction. That’d like make me a superhero type of stuff. Of course I’m in. What do you want?”
“First I need you to tell Dom and Fatima about this chat. We’ll need their help. Second, we-"
“Who’s we?”
“I can’t tell you right now. Honestly, the reason is that with what I am going to ask you to do, you stand a high chance of being captured and tortured. So everything I will tell you is strictly on a need-to-know basis. Getting out of this alive will depend entirely on your skill.”
Speaking very slowly with his hands on his hips and his head to one side, Stanislav said, “Oh please Marty, I may be a virgin but I’m not dumb. I already said that I would do this. No need to make it more exciting for me. OK?”
Marty laughed. “It’s great to see you. How are you guys holding it together?”
Stanislav sat down and his face loomed large in the screen as he leaned forward nearer the camera. “Not good, but OK.”
His comment made Marty feel guilty. It was irrational she knew but they were her team and they were struggling without her. She couldn’t do anything about that now but made a mental reminder to try to stay in touch with them as much as the chaos to come would allow.
“What’s Cochran got you guys tracing?”
“We’re still on the runner. We got given other stuff after you left but then when his letter came out she put us back on him.”
“OK, here’s what I need.” Stanislav had leaned back from the camera and it looked like he was watching something else as he wasn’t looking at her. “Stanislav?”
“Yeah, sorry, just checking to see that nothing is on to our chat here, but we’re cool. OK go ahead.”
“Has Cochran got you guys looking for me?”
“No, but she did order us to report any contact from you on pain of instant containment of aiding and abetting a fugitive if we didn’t.” He grinned at her, “Looks like I’m back in the crime business.”
“No, you’re not. Very much the opposite. OK then, what I need you to do is build an ironclad story around finding my location and then report that location to Cochran. Build up some trace around it and be aware that with the embarrassments the runner and I have given her lately, she will want to be absolutely sure that you are right. So be sure. Can you do that?”
“Yeah.” Stanislav put on his bored expression — his ‘this is too easy’ look.
“When she is ready to come and get me, let me know. Now, we need to set up a link between us. Can I leave that with you. It must be secure and easy to check.”
“Utopia’s best. I’ll set up a dead drop and message you from there.”
“That sounds fine. I’ll leave my hooks in their member base then and wait for your message. There’s one more thing and this is the skillful part. You have to wait for my signal before you get Cochran to make her move on me. You’ll only have a very small window, perhaps no more than fifteen or twenty mins to convince her to move.” Stanislav straightened from his slouch and flashed her a quick, cocky grin.
“Na- na- na- no problem.”
“All right then. I have to go. Give my love to Fatima and Dom and take care of each other and be very careful. OK? Cochran is a very dangerous person.”
Stanislav grinned at her again, and a twinge of conscience hit the pit of her stomach. He’s so young. Is it right for me to do this? Put him in this danger? The stakes are so high that the end justifies the means. Oh boy, what a slippery slope this is, she thought. His image disappeared from her Devscreen and she placed her palm where his face had been, just for a sec. She coughed and cleared her throat.
Sitting in the room next door, Gabriel heard the murmur of Marty talking as background noise. It was there but he didn’t pay it any attention. He was focused on his code. A Dev runs on code. The code he was writing had to be small, very small, and therefore it had to be elegant. The idea for hiding the code was simple. Make it very small. The problem with that is that the code has to do a lot. It has to find and destroy the list. Failing that it has to destroy the databases holding the PUI records of all humans. He also needed to figure out a way to get it into Sir Thomas’s Dev without any alarms going off.