Book Two of the Travelers (2 page)

T
he search consumed most of Aja's afternoon—time she had intended to devote to her senior project. She had been working on a program to reorganize Lifelight's security protocols. Every one of the teachers had told her that if she could pull it off, it would be the most impressive senior project in the entire history of the academy.

It was an audacious project. Because to do it, she would need access to Lifelight's core—the central brain of the Lifelight system. Normally no student at the academy would ever have access to Lifelight's core. The core control room was considered to be a nearly sacred place. At the academy, the Alpha Core was spoken of in whispers. It was where only the best phaders worked—the smartest, the most experienced, the best of the best. It was certainly not the kind of place you let little peons from the academy mess around.

But everybody knew Aja was special. So when she proposed her project and showed just how carefully she'd thought it through, she'd been granted access.

She still had a lot of work in front of her before the project was complete. But first, she had to sort out this stupid password situation.

Aja walked into Lifelight, under the vault of the great pyramid of glass, then down a corridor approaching the large door of the core control room. She paused in the hallway for a moment. She could remember the first time she had come here. It was on a tour of the building with her first-level class. She'd immediately thought,
Someday I'm going to work here!

It still gave her a thrill to be here.

Several of the senior phaders stood in the corner, laughing about something. Another was sleeping at his terminal, a thin stream of drool slowly descending into his lap. Several sat at their terminals, motionless, bored looking. Another was eating gloid. A big fat pink blob of gloid fell off his spoon onto the terminal controller. The guy didn't seem to notice. Or care.

Back when she first came, she'd been intimidated by them, imagining them to be brilliant, all powerful, all knowing. But these guys? She had to admit they didn't look that intimidating. Actually, they mostly looked bored.

She smiled. Well, maybe some of the phaders were bored here. But not her!

She moved forward, inserted her card key into the slot near the door handle and stepped toward the door.

Which she bumped into, bashing her nose.

“Ow!” she said. Something was wrong with the door. She tried her card again.

Again, nothing.

She realized that whatever had gone wrong with her password had probably affected her access to the control room too. She rapped on the door.

One of the senior phaders, Dal Whitbred, looked up from his terminal at her and waved.

She pointed at the door. Dal frowned, then thumbed a button on the terminal. The door opened.

“Thanks, Dal!” she called as she entered the room. “Something's gone wrong with my password. You think you can help me out?”

“Hey, no problem,” he said. Dal was a young guy, kind of cute, with longish brown hair and warm brown eyes. “Just log on with my password and reset yours.”

“Um…” She looked at him, puzzled. “You're not really supposed to give out your password are you?”

“You going to tell anybody what it is?”

“No,” she said.

Dal grinned. “Then we're fine, aren't we?” He scribbled down his password as she sat down at the terminal next to his.

“Thanks.” She logged in.

“So it sounds like you're probably gonna get valedictorian, huh?” Dal said.

She looked up from the terminal. “How'd you know that?”

“Oh, your buddy Nak comes in here a lot. He talks about you all the time.”

“He
does
?” She'd always thought he hated her.

“Don't tell him
I
said this,” Dal said with a grin. “But I think he might have a thing for you.”

She laughed harshly. “Not likely! No, he just wants
to beat me. He wants to be Number One Student and take valedictorian.”

“Could be,” Dal said. “He's a complicated kid.” He laughed again. “Between you and me, I think he's got some problems.”

“Yeah?”

“Hey, he's a brilliant phader, though. He's been practically living in here lately. I'm surprised you haven't seen him.” Dal scratched his head. “No, now that I think about it, he always comes here in the middle of the night. I guess you're probably sleeping when he's in here.”

Aja looked at him curiously. “But…he doesn't have a job here. He doesn't have clearance….”

Dal smiled. “We kind of adopted him. He's like an informal intern. That kid's a wizard. I've never seen anybody that can make Lifelight jump like he can. Well…other than you maybe.”

“But—what if he—”

“Hey, believe me, we keep an eye on him to make sure he's not doing anything crazy.”

Aja turned back to her terminal. Reconfiguring her password was a simple process. But, still, you had to—

She paused. Strange. It
should
have been a simple process. Now suddenly Lifelight was bringing up menus she'd never seen. For some reason, she couldn't seem to get to the screen she needed in order to change her password.

“What's going on here, Dal?” she said.

Dal rolled his chair over and peered at her screen. “Huh,” he said. “Weird.” He tapped at the keyboard a few times. “Very weird!” he said. “I've never seen anything like this before.”

“What?” Aja said.

“Well…it seems as if Lifelight has partitioned your identity. It's put your whole security file behind some kind of firewall.”

“But…” She stared at the screen. “That's not possible!”

“Scoot over,” Dal said. “I need to take a closer look at this.”

Something was blinking red on the screen now, a small red flashing icon that she'd never seen before.

“You know what?” Dal said. “I…uh…I hate to do this to you. But I think this may take a while. Why don't you head back to the academy? I'll call you when I get it sorted out.”

“If you don't mind, I'd like to stay and watch.”

He cleared his throat. “Um—no, I think—no, I think you need to go home. Right now Lifelight's saying your clearance has been revoked.” An alarm began to chime. Everybody in the core control room looked up to see what was going on. Even the drooling guy woke up and looked around.

“Revoked! Why?” Aja felt outraged. Everybody knew she was trustworthy.
Everybody!

“Seriously. You need to go.” All of a sudden Dal was not his usual relaxed self.

“But—”

“Look, there's been a protocol breach here. The Lifelight directors are very strict about this kind of thing.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Do you want me to have to call Lifelight Services?”

Aja's eyes widened. Lifelight Services ran the security
force that protected everything connected to Lifelight. “What!”

“Sorry, Aja. You of all people should understand. It's procedure. If Lifelight shuts down an ID…” He spread his hands helplessly.

He was right. Security was important. Keeping the core safe was critical. If Lifelight said she needed to go, she needed to go.

Still, it stung.

“I understand,” she said softly. She stood and walked to the door. Everyone in the room was looking at her. Her face burned. She knew there had been some talk among them—especially among the old-school senior phaders who felt that letting a kid into the core control room was wrong. Much less letting her fiddle with security protocols.

“I'll be back!” she said forcefully. Then she looked at the locked door, and remembered her useless card.

“Uh…can somebody help me get out of here?” she said.

Aja wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

T
he thing she couldn't figure out was,
why had this happened?
Somebody had put up a security firewall around her Lifelight identity. Who? Why? How?

There was no conceivable reason why any of this would happen. Maybe during her work with the security protocols she had triggered some kind of automatic security precaution. She'd never heard of anything like that happening. But maybe it was possible.

No, she didn't want to admit it, but everything pointed in the same direction: Nak Adyms.

The first indication of trouble had been inside his game. First the silver control bracelet malfunction. Then when she invoked termination with an audible, passworded command—still nothing.

But unless Nak had made some kind of very strange mistake in the programming of his game, then it was hard to see any possible answer.

Except one: Nak had hacked the origin code.

Lifelight's origin code—the basic program that ran Lifelight—had been written by the founder of Lifelight, Dr. Zetlin, years and years ago. He had written every line of it. And since then, the origin code had never been touched. Never.

Sometimes phaders joked about hacking the origin code. But it was just a joke. Everybody knew that Dr. Zetlin had installed a maze of security features that made it impossible to—Wait! A maze!

That was it.

Nak's game was a maze. It was a puzzle. It was—

As she walked through the great glass Lifelight pyramid, Aja rapidly thought through the many possible implications of her conclusion. If Nak really had hacked the origin code, then he would have done it for a reason. And what could that reason be?

To show her up, to make her look foolish? No…not just that. He was trying to prove that the security innovations she was testing were fundamentally flawed. That's what he was doing. He was trying to wreck her senior project. If he could poke a hole in it, expose it as flawed, her grade for the project would inevitably suffer. In which case—theoretically—he might be able to edge her out for valedictorian.

At that moment a young man with floppy brown hair bounced around the corner. Nak Adyms. “Hey!” he said, grinning. “I was just thinking about you. Did you sort out your little password problem?”

She glared at him. “I think you know the answer to that.”

“What!” he said innocently.

“Surely you're aware that any gain in class standing that you might make by crashing my security protocols will be lost when Headmistress Nilssin finds out that you've hacked the origin code.”

Nak squinted at her. “I don't know
what
you're talking about.”

“Right.”

Aja's communicator chimed. She pulled out the small silver device. “Yes?”

“It's Dal,” the voice on the other end said. “We've run into a really serious problem. Whatever this program is that's attacked your identity…Well, that's only the tip of the iceberg.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's starting to move deeper into the core software.”

“So you've isolated the program?”

“Well…sort of. The program we've located is just a shell. It sits over the top of more programs. But we can see what's underneath it. The shell program is hiding its real function.”

“Well, go Command Level One.”

“Come on, Aja. We've done that already.”

“I wrote a new security facility called—”

“I already tried that. We've tried everything obvious.”

“Then why are you calling me?” Aja said.

There was a long pause. “Because the program that crashed your password…”

“Yes?”

“Well…you wrote it.”

Aja felt momentarily confused. “What! That doesn't
make any sense. Why would I write a program that crashed my own identity?”

“Look,” Dal said, “I know you've been messing with a lot of Lifelight's deeper code for your project. If you made a little mistake or something, hey, we understand. But you need to tell us.”

Aja felt a stab of dread. This was starting to get serious. “I swear!” Aja said. “I didn't do anything. What's the name of this program anyway?”

“It's got some kind of goofy name. Hold on….” She heard some keys clicking. “It's called ‘King Hruth's Maze.'”

Her eyes widened. “That's not my program!” she shouted.

“No need to get emotional,” Dal said. “Just admit what you did, and we'll figure out how to stop it.”

“I didn't do
anything
!”

There was a very long pause. “All right.” Dal's voice sounded distant and cold. “If that's the way you want to play it. But I'll be forced to notify the Lifelight directors about what you've done here.”

“Dal, how could you even think that—”

“Last chance, Aja. Your little program is already attacking the core.”

“No, Dal, I—”

“All right. But don't say we didn't give you a chance.”

Her communicator went dead. She started to call Dal back. But what would that do? Right now logic pointed straight at her. If she was going to prove she didn't have anything to do with this problem, she'd have to get more evidence.

Nak was still leaning casually against the wall, a placid smile on his face. “Everything okay?” he said.

“Nak, you framed me!”

Nak shook his head, as if she were speaking a language he didn't understand. “You seem kind of nervous,” Nak said. “Maybe a quick jump would calm you down. I have an excellent game in mind that might—”

“This is not funny anymore!” Aja said. “Your clever little program is attacking the core!”

“
My
program? What program? All I'm talking about is playing a game.”

Something was forming in her mind. An idea. A plan. She could feel the shape of the idea…but she couldn't quite get her fingers around it yet.

“You can't win if you don't play.” Nak was still smiling. But she could see something in his eyes underneath the smile—anger, spite, envy.

“The program that's attacking the core—it's
inside
the game, isn't it? You buried it inside a jump program.”

Nak laughed. “Boy, you sure are being dramatic.”

“You won't get away with this.”

“But, just for the sake of argument, if I were going to attack the core using some kind of game program, I wouldn't put it
inside
the game.”

She looked at him for a long time. Then it hit her. “It's not inside the game, is it?” she said. Her eyes widened. “It
is
the game!”

Nak raised one eyebrow. “Want to play?”

“Nak,” she said, “I just told Dal that I had no idea what King Hruth's Maze was. If I played your game right now, Lifelight would send a message straight to the control
room saying I had invoked the program. Dal would think I had just lied to his face. He'd think that I really
was
the one who'd written your nasty little program.”

Nak rolled his eyes. “Give me a little credit here. I'll reroute everything so they'll never even know you're jumping. I've got tricks the phaders in the control room can't begin to figure out. Those guys do everything by the book. I can run rings around them. You'd be totally safe.”

Aja hesitated. If she was right, the only way to beat the program, to keep it from destroying the core, was to play the game. But if she got caught before she figured out what Nak was up to—well, it could be disastrous. Just for starters, she could kiss valedictorian good-bye. In fact, she'd probably get thrown out of the academy. Even worse, the Lifelight directors could ban her from ever working as a phader. Everything she'd been working for would be down the tubes.

Aja was not a natural risk taker. But right now she didn't see any logical alternative. If she went to Dal and tried to blame everything on Nak, she'd look like a liar. Nak was a good phader. If he'd intentionally made it look as though she had written the program, then talking to Dal right now would only make things worse. The problem was, Nak's program was already munching away at the core. She had to do something to stop it.

But the only way she could think of to stop Nak's program was to jump into his game. Now.

Aja pointed at the tier above her. “Okay, Nak. I see a free jump station up there.”

Nak smiled. “I knew you'd see the light eventually.”