“Forget it, I was just messing around.” In the virtual workspace, one encryption key was fitting into another, the chain enclosing Bob’s data beacon opening up.
“This is such a load of horseshit!” roared a voice that stopped both Sibeal and Sid in their tracks. It was Zoraster, lumbering up from his table to confront them. “You two, dancing around each other like teenagers in heat.”
Sibeal frowned at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking—”
“Your little crush is putting us all in danger,” he growled, pushing aside two tables. “We should have turned this worm in for a reward days ago. Now the heat’s on, the feds are breathing down our necks. We already got what we needed, why are we waiting?”
Sibeal stood to face the Grilla. While she stood just a foot shorter than him, he was four times wider at the shoulders. “Don’t you want to find the truth? If what Sid is telling us is true…”
Sid told them everything he knew, what Patricia Killiam told them about Jimmy Scadden, stealing peoples’ minds, corrupting the pssi program from the inside out. He didn’t have proof, though.
“The truth?” Zoraster grabbed Sid by the back of his neck. “The truth is that we have no idea what’s inside that data beacon, and you’re granting him outside access to share it. You know the kind of trouble this could get us all in?”
Sid squirmed to get out of Zoraster’s grip. “It’s a risk for me, too. I have no idea what Bob put in that beacon. I’m being totally open with you, and the second we open that thing, either you’ll see I’m lying or you’ll get your proof.”
Zoraster picked Sid up off the ground as if he were a toy. “You’re making your responsibilities ours.”
“Put him down!” Sibeal yelled.
“And here you are,” Zoraster continued, ignoring Sibeal, “chatting about free will and responsibility—a slippery fish with a silvery tongue. In the real world, you do something wrong, and you’re responsible. It’s that simple. Time to own up, fly boy.”
Sid dangled in the air, staring into Zoraster’s face. “But what is the ‘real world?’ ”
“This”—Zoraster banged the pub tabletop, knocking over the empty glasses—“is the real world, my friend. Screw it. Enough is enough.” He turned, Sid flying through the air on the end of his arm.
“I don’t think so,” Sid whispered.
Zoraster snarled. “What did you…”
The outlines of the pub and pit walls shimmered.
“…say?…”
The world around them reformed, and Sid and Sibeal were standing on the floor of a repair pit, several tunnels down from the main den. Now Zoraster was the one suspended in the air, twenty feet up in the tight grip of a construction mechanoid.
“What the…?” He squirmed, then roared, the sound echoing down the tunnels.
Sid laughed. “Really? You expect me to be here for a week and not crack into everything? Overpower your synthetic immune systems, hijack your realities? You might think you’ve been watching me.” Sid smiled. “But I’ve been the one watching you.”
“Let… me… down!” Zoraster flexed, straining in the grip of the mechanoid. Its metal fingers shuddered, but did not give.
“Calm down, you big monkey.”
Sibeal’s eyes grew wide. “You really shouldn’t call him a—”
Sid put one hand up. “We’ve cracked the data beacon. Who wants to see what’s inside?”
At that, Zoraster quit wriggling.
“Outside access first,” Sid reminded Sibeal.
“Don’t do it,” Zoraster growled, but it was too late.
“Your security blankets are bullet proof, right? Both outgoing and ingoing?” Sid asked Sibeal. There might be something nasty inside.
Sibeal nodded.
Dangling the unopened data beacon in a private virtual world, Sid reached out to grab the exit key from Sibeal. In an instant he was out, spinning a part of his consciousness—chaperoned by a splinter of Sibeal—to soar above New York while he reconnected his meta-cognitions systems with his outside search agents. At the same time, Sibeal opened the data beacon, spreading its contents across the walls of a secured space.
“My God,” she whispered.
Sid left a good chunk of his attention matrix with her. From what he saw, most of what Bob put in the beacon was data from Patricia Killiam that Sid had already seen. At least this would confirm his story, hopefully calm the Grilla down. He watched Sibeal as she absorbed details of Jimmy Scadden’s probable exploits on Atopia; killing his own mother, killing Patricia Killiam, trapping the wife of Atopia Defense Force’s Commander, Rick Strong, in a simulated reality suicide.
“What’s in there?” Zoraster grunted. He wasn’t plugged into the data stream.
Sibeal looked at Sid. He shrugged, why not. Something tugged at Sid’s awareness, and a mediaworld broadcast opened up around him: mushrooming explosions, a wave of attack drones descending onto a submerged city. “Why didn’t you tell me?” New Orleans had been attacked.
“Nothing we could do.” Zoraster relaxed as he assimilated the stories about Jimmy. “Could you let me down from here?”
The mechanoid’s hand opened up, dropping Zoraster to the floor of the pit.
They hadn’t found Vince yet, Sid saw as he scanned the media reports, so maybe he escaped. Or maybe they captured him. Or maybe he was dead. Nothing in his networks gave any indication of where Bob might be. As the number-one suspect in the Manhattan attack, a manhunt was underway by nearly every police agency on the planet, but so far, it seemed nobody had any ideas.
Sibeal grabbed Sid. “What the hell is this?”
Sid was busy dropping agents into the Louisiana networks and digging into the New York passenger cannon logs. “What?”
“This Pacific Ocean Neutrino Detector data.”
The POND? Sid had heard of it. It was one of Patricia Killiam’s pet projects. “It’s a planetary scale neutrino detector that Dr. Killiam embedded on the floor of the ocean—”
“I know what the POND is,” interrupted Sibeal. She grabbed Sid’s primary subjective and dropped a stream of data into it. “But what is this?”
Sid’s mind did a double-take. He redirected part of himself to see what Sibeal was freaking out over. The POND had detected something in the neutrino flow it was monitoring—a message or transmission. He tried to understand the script of physics that came next, but it appeared the message emerged from another universe, or, at any rate, not from a terrestrial source.
“Aliens?” Sid mumbled, trying to get his head around it. Bob never told him anything about this.
From the logs, Patricia terminated the POND project right after the message was received. While the translation systems weren’t able to decode the content, a contextual pattern had emerged. It wasn’t just a message—it appeared it was a warning, and one directed specifically at Atopia.
“I’ve never seen this before,” said Sid. “I’m as surprised as you are.”
Sibeal began running her own translation memes through it. “Can this be real?”
For once, even Zoraster was silent.
The back of Sid’s mind tickled, and he reflexively shoved away whatever it was, trying to focus on the POND data. Then it tickled again. He swiveled his attention outward. In an instant, he began shutting down his external networks and cutting off the agents he’d instantiated in Louisiana. He closed down the world with the data beacon in it.
Sibeal turned to him. “Why’d you do that?”
“Something in that data beacon we just opened, it’s alerted Atopia.”
A composite of pssi-kids, ones that Sid grew up with on Atopia, just turned their attention his way. He’d sensed them in the bar the night of the attack in Hell. Bob had warned him about the danger of exposing the private data on Jimmy Scadden. It was what had gotten Patricia killed, and why they had to escape from Atopia.