Tom Clancy, Steve Pieczenik, Diane Duane
Virtual Vandals
Acknowledgments
We’d like to thank the following people, without whom this book would not have been possible: Bill McCay, for help in rounding out the manuscript; Martin H. Greenberg, Larry Segriff, Denise Little, and John Helfers at Tekno Books; Mitchell Rubenstein and Laurie Silvers at BIG Entertainment; Tom Colgan, of Berkley Books; Robert Youdelman, Esquire, and Tom Mallon, Esquire; and Robert Gottlieb of the William Morris Agency, agent and friend. We much appreciated the help.
Chapter 1
The sky was a bright, cloudless blue, marked only by the thin white contrails of an aerospace plane’s jet engines passing high above. Matt Hunter squinted his brown eyes, staring up from his seat in the Camden Yards stadium. Must be just about ready to switch over to the rocket engines, he figured.
An elbow in his ribs brought his thoughts back to Earth. “Nice job on these seats, genius,” Andy Moore complained. “We’re going to broil out here in the sun today.” The blond boy ran a hand over the fair skin of his forehead. “Anybody bring the sunblock?”
“Out of luck from this end, junior.” David Gray rolled back his shirtsleeves, exposing muscular brown arms. “My sunblock comes courtesy of my African ancestors.” He shifted on his seat, however. “You’d think that after renovating this place, they’d put some comfortable padding out here.”
Leif Anderson stretched back in his seat. “It’s comfortable enough from where I’m sitting.”
Matt gave his friend a look. The seat that Leif seemed to occupy was actually empty, the space filled with a hologram. Leif was actually sitting in his parents’ apartment in New York City, no doubt sprawled in a very expensive — and comfortable — computer-link chair. Implants beneath his skin connected him to the world Net, allowing his image to be seen here in Baltimore, while he experienced everything that was happening in the stadium nearly two hundred miles away.
“You’d better tune up your sim a little, Anderson,” Matt joked. “Otherwise, you won’t be catching any hologram home runs.” To his other friends, both real and holo, he offered an embarrassed shrug. “Hey, it’s the first home game of the season for the Orioles. These were the best seats I could get.”
He shifted uncomfortably on the thinly padded bleacher seat. Any seat was worth the show they were about to see — and he didn’t mean the baseball game. Matt and all his friends had an interest in anything to do with computers. They were fascinated with the global computer Net that ran so much of the world, and with Net Force, the organization that policed that computer webwork. That was why Matt, Leif, Andy, David, and the others had joined the young people’s auxiliary, the Net Force Explorers.
Getting in had not been easy — they’d had to survive a training course nearly as tough as that faced by Marine recruits. But then, Net Force had grown from a Marine/FBI task force, and shared its main headquarters with both groups in Quantico, Virginia, so it was understandable. And getting through that training had given Matt and his friends access to an unbelievable computer education. In a world where operating a computer was more like flipping a light switch, Matt and his friends knew how the magic boxes worked.
The thing that had brought them to this game wasn’t the seats or the teams, but the stadium itself. Camden Yards had undergone a complete renovation, wiring in a huge computer system to operate a virtual reality — veeyar — simulator. Lots of sports arenas featured holographic projectors in the seats. But here, the whole field was set up for a huge-scale display.
Leif sat up a bit taller in his seat as the opposing teams finished their warm-ups. “Here it comes,” he said.
An announcer’s voice rumbled through the stadium. “Welcome to the first home game of the Orioles’ 2025 season. But we have more than just a great game waiting for you. No, you’ll spend an inning in Baseball Heaven, thanks to our new veeyar system. Some of the all-time All-Stars of the game, the greatest sluggers in baseball history, will step into the batter’s box against an ace pitcher and a dream defensive team. Can heavy hitting defeat great pitching and fielding? Let’s find out!”
For a moment, a shadow seemed to fall across the field as the last of the live players trotted off. Then, eighteen ghostly figures swam into existence in front of the opposing dugouts. They wore a variety of uniforms, all of them old-fashioned to Matt’s eyes, some of them belonging to teams that didn’t exist anymore.
Some of the virtual players waved or tipped their caps to the crowd. Leif Anderson whistled and clapped. “None of this is scripted,” he said. “It’s all being randomly generated by the system’s computers, based on the players’ records, the chances they took swinging and fielding, even the way they reacted to the fans.”
“Who’s the fat guy on the Sluggers team?” Andy Moore asked.
Leif stared at Andy as if he’d burped out loud in church. “That’s Babe Ruth. The 1927 Babe Ruth — he hit sixty home runs that season. And a little farther down the line is Ty Cobb. He got on base more than four thousand times in his career — and got into more fights with the fans than anyone else I ever heard of.”
“I hope you’ve got an info-dump whispering all this stuff in your ear,” Matt said. “Because if you’re blowing brain cells on hundred-year-old sports statistics…”
Leif just grinned. “If you take a close look at those All-Stars out there, you’ll notice that at least half of them are wearing the uniforms of New York teams — the Sluggers have Ruth and Lou Gehrig from the Yankees, Frankie Frisch from the old New York Giants, and Don Drysdale was with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Fielders have Joe DiMaggio and Bill Dickey from the Yankees, Keith Hernandez from the Mets, and Willie Mays and Christy Mathewson from the Giants. They all played for my hometown!”
“Big yawn,” Matt said just to annoy his friend. “Why have they got all these ancient guys?”
“There was a cutoff — nobody who played in this century,” Leif replied. “Some of these guys played into the 1980s, like Ozzie Smith, Mike Schmidt, and Johnnie Bench. Keith Hernandez played into the ’90s.”
Matt laughed. “What I want to see is how they play now.”
The All-Star defensive team took the field as one of the sluggers, a guy in a Philadelphia uniform, stepped up to the plate.
“One thing computer players don’t need,” David Gray joked. “Warm-up practice.”
“You got it,” Leif chuckled. “Every pitch, swing, strikeout, or error, we’ll see it because that player’s number came up on the computers.” He leaned forward eagerly in his seat, yelling, “Go, Mike!”
Glancing over at Matt, he said, “Mike Schmidt. Serious slugger.”
Christy Mathewson mowed him down with three strikes. Next up was Ty Cobb, who managed to get a single. Lou Gehrig followed with a screaming line drive, captured by Roberto Clemente in a diving catch.
Babe Ruth was the cleanup batter on the Sluggers. He had an odd batting stance, his bat seeming to rest on his shoulder. That was how he stood while the great Mathewson whiffed two strikes right past him.
“Is this the Babe or the Blob?” Matt asked.
“Let’s just see what the Bambino does,” Leif replied.
The virtual Babe Ruth stepped out of the batter’s box, taking the bat off his shoulder. Then he simply pointed off into the bleachers, beyond the outfield.
Leif laughed out loud. “That’s a famous gesture. The Babe is showing where he intends to send the next pitch.”
At that moment, though, four figures rose from their seats in the top row of the center-field bleachers. It was as if they’d been waiting for Ruth’s signal.