Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 2, May 2013 (11 page)

Behind him, Joyce was screaming. Jill was shrieking, “Do something! Daddy, he’s hurting Rexy!”

Filltree’s humanity reasserted itself then. He had to stop the beast before it killed the hapless man; but he couldn’t get to the net. It was still in the service porch—and he couldn’t get past Rex. The creature hissed and spit at him. It lashed its tail angrily, as if daring Filltree to make the attempt. As if saying, “This kill is mine!”

Filltree held out the frying pan in front of him, swinging it back and forth like a shield. The small tyrant-king followed it with its baleful black eyes. Still roaring its defiance, it snapped and bit at the frying pan. Its teeth slid helplessly off the shining metal surface. Filltree whacked the creature hard. It blinked, stunned. He swung the frying pan again and, reflexively, the dinosaur stepped back; but as the utensil swept past, it stepped right back in, biting and snapping. Filltree recognized the behavior. The beast was acting as if it were in a fight with another predator over its kill.

Filltree swung harder and more directly, this time not to drive the creature back, but to actually hit it and hurt it badly. Rexy leapt backward, shrieking in fury. Filltree stepped in quickly, brandishing the frying pan, triumphantly driving the two-foot dinosaur back and back toward the service porch. As soon as Rexy was safely in the confines of the service porch, screaming in the middle of the broken remains of the carry cage, Filltree slammed the door shut and latched it—something went thump from the other side. The noise was punctuated with a series of angry cries. The door thumped a second time and then a third. Filltree waited, frying pan at the ready…

At last, Rexy’s frantic screeching ebbed. Instead, there began a slow steady scratching at the bottom of the door.

When Filltree turned around again, two uniformed police officers were relievedly reholstering their pistols. He hadn’t even heard them come in. “Is that your dinosaur, sir?”

Shaken, Filltree managed to nod.

“Y’know, there are laws against letting carnivores that size run free,” said the older one.

“We’d have shot him if you hadn’t been in the way,” said the younger officer.

For a moment, Filltree felt a pang of regret. He looked at the fallen burglar. There was blood flowing freely all over the floor. The man had rolled over on his side, clutching his stomach, but he was motionless now, and very very pale. “Is he going to make it—?”

The older officer was bending to examine the robber. “It depends on the speed of the ambulance.”

The younger cop took Filltree aside; she lowered her voice to a whisper. “You want to hope he doesn’t make it. If he lives, he could file a very nasty lawsuit against you. We’ll tell the driver to take his time getting to the E.R. …”

He looked at the woman in surprise. She nodded knowingly. “You don’t need any more trouble. I think we can wrap this one up tonight.” She glanced around the room. “It looks to me like the burglar tried to steal your dinosaur. But the cage didn’t hold and the creature attacked him. Is that what happened?”

Filltree realized the woman was trying to do him a favor. He nodded in hasty agreement. “Yes, exactly.”

“That’s a mini-rex, right?” she asked, glancing meaningfully at the door.

“Uh-huh.”

“Lousy pets. Great guard-animals. Do yourself a favor. If you’re going to leave him running loose at night, get yourself a permit. It won’t cost you too much, and it’ll protect you against a lawsuit if anyone else tries something stupid.”

“Oh, yes—I’ll take care of that first thing in the morning, thank you.”

“Good. Your wife and kid know to be careful? Those Rexys can’t tell the difference between friend and foe, you know—”

“Oh, yes. They know to be
very
careful.”

Later, after the police had left, after he had calmed down Joyce and Jill, after he had cleaned up the kitchen, after he had had a chance to think, Jonathan Filltree thoughtfully climbed the stairs again.

“I’ve made a decision,” he said to his shaken wife and tearful daughter. They were huddled together in the master bedroom. “We’re going to keep Rexy. If I’m going to be in Denver for two months, then you’re going to need every protection possible.”

“Do you really mean that, Daddy?”

Filltree nodded. “It just isn’t fair for me to go away and leave you and Mommy undefended. I’m going to convert the service porch into a big dinosaur kennel, just for Rexy. Good and strong. And you can feed him all the leftovers you want.”

“Really?”

“It’s a reward,” Filltree explained, “because Rexy did such a good job of protecting us tonight. We should give him lots and lots of hamburger too, because that’s his favorite. But you have to promise me something, Jill—”

“I will.”

“You must
never
open the kennel door without Mommy’s permission, do you understand?”

“I won’t,” Jill promised insincerely.

Turning back to Joyce, Filltree added, “I promise, I’ll finish up my work in Denver as quickly as possible. But if they need me to stay longer, will that be okay with you?”

Joyce shook her head. “I want you to get that thing out of the house tonight.”

“No, dear—” Filltree insisted. “Rexy’s a member of our family now. He’s earned his place at the table.” He climbed into bed next to his wife and patted her gently on the arm, all the time thinking about the high price of meat and what a bargain it represented.

.

.

Copyright © 1993 by David Gerrold

Ralph Roberts is a jack of all trades in the lit biz. He has written and sold over 100 books, has sold 4 screenplays, and as a publisher he has produced over 300 titles. And if that isn’t enough, he also runs an annual film festival.

.

--------------

GHOST IN THE MACHINE

by Ralph Roberts

Marcus Teague sat hunched over in the cramped confines of the 16-gigabyte USB thumb drive. The muscles on his mighty arms rippled as he cleaned his wizard’s sword, running the polishing spell up and down the blade with precision. It might be all virtual, but he was buff with bulging biceps, a mighty chest, a narrow waist, bronzed skin, ready for
any
battle. The sleeveless T-shirt with its mystical symbols in hex and octal, and the Microsoft and Ubuntu certification badges, emphasized that.

“Looks like Bill could spring for a bigger ready room,” he said, “maybe a 64-gig thumb drive or, better, a 120-gig solid state drive, huh?”

He looked up when Oscar did not answer.

The old man didn’t look good—battered and bruised, moaning whenever he moved, flat on his back, exhausted. Troubleshooting hardware took it out of you. Blown power supplies, crashed hard drives, loose cables, and all those intermittent ills that kept Oscar in dark old machines for hours when no telling what was going to jump him.

When time permitted, Marcus went along to watch his friend’s back. Besides, he enjoyed chopping up fanged viruses, stomping malware data-mining dwarves, tearing apart virus ogres, erasing script dragons, and all the rest of it. Bring on those Trojans in their virtual Greek armor. They were no match for the wiz!

Marcus shook his head. Oscar had insisted on keeping the same physique—he was the same old man now as the virtual-reality-helmet-wearing body laying currently on the broken-down couch in the littered backroom of Billal’s Computer Repair. Billal’s was maybe the most unprofitable computer shop in Chicago—but it had two things no other shop anywhere in the world had: it had him and Oscar. It also had Bill, who tried hard but was the most incompetent shop manager possible, and the shadowy, probably criminal partner, Al—who had bankrolled the place but was never around much. Well, scratch that last; Al hung out in the shop a lot more of late.

With some grunting, Oscar managed to roll over a little and looked at Marcus.

“Bill can’t afford it. Shop’s losing money, which suits that sleazebag Al just fine. He wants the secret of how we do this.”

Marcus shrugged and went back to working on his sword. He just wanted to do his job. He liked it, even if minimum wage was all they got. He’d made all this work after Bill invented the concept. Coded it, debugged it, and was the first to try it. This was
his
baby! He’d given it birth—
virtual computer repair
. And, yes, he knew Al—who had to be connected to organized crime—was hot after this technology. That’s why the gangster dribbled out only enough funds to keep the shop doors open.

“Marcus, what do you want out of life?” Oscar said.

Marcus thought about it and shrugged. “Enough money for me to upgrade my hardware at home and to find true love—in whichever order, but I want a 24-core CPU soon.”

Oscar painfully laid flat again. “You won’t get them things here.”

A tone beeped and a work order with an IP address popped up on a tiny virtual screen.

“For me?” Oscar asked, his voice weary.

“Nope, it’s for me—some guy’s computer’s running slow and probably full of nasty little beasts.” He smiled enthusiastically, gave his sword one more pass with the polishing spell, and sheathed it. Grinning, he hoisted his backpack of diagnostic spells and the like.

Oscar gave him a disgusted look. “Don’t enjoy it too much, and be
careful
. Something weirder than usual is going on out there.”

Marcus carefully moved to the hatch. “You get a call, let me know where, Oscar, and don’t hesitate to use that emergency abort utility I wrote for us. The red button: take it out, flip off the safety cover, press ABORT.”

Oscar shook his head. “
No
, not that. You said yourself you weren’t sure it would work. No telling what would happen to our real bodies. You said that.”

Marcus shrugged. “Last resort, guy. Just don’t get killed. That would mess up your real body even more. At least take some of those routines I built from the data in the Shaolin temple’s computer.”

Oscar shook his head despondently. “Haven’t got the energy to use them, Marcus.”

Worrying about his friend, Marcus flowed into the USB port that led to the shop’s dinky server. A hand reached out to help him get to his feet. It was Beep, the USB driver.

“Thanks, Beep.”

Beep
.

“You have a good day, too, buddy.”

The server itself was an old quad-core clunker he’d gotten off eBay for $50, for which Bill still owed him. But it had some memory, the latest version of Ubuntu, and gave him space to write and develop his spells and scripts. He always had been good at coding.

One-handed, Marcus air-typed up a large virtual screen with webcam, then smiled at his image. A mixture of Conan the Barbarian and King Arthur’s Merlin the Magician—he could swing a sword or wave a wand with the best of them. Blond, blue-eyed, well-developed muscles—not a bit like his concave-chested, bespectacled, short, geeky body recumbent out there in the backroom.

A real chick magnet! Unfortunately, all the women who might be impressed were out there in the real world. He waved the screen away and headed for the cable modem port—no fast fiber optic or wireless connection for this cheap shop. Uploading was a pain. Slow!

He nodded to bits of software he passed; in this computer he knew them all and they trusted him. A bunch of little memory monkeys ran by carrying bits of this and bytes of that to here and there, ones and zeros flashing in their beady little eyes. “Hi, Marcus, hi Marcus,” they chanted.

Passing the power supply, he patted one of the cables. Sparks playfully tickled his fingers. As a small boy he’d been fascinated with electricity and quickly made friends with it. That friendship often paid off in his current job. Whoa!
Current
job? He laughed.

Squeezing into the cable modem, he slowly climbed to the nearest intersection with one of Chicago’s fiber optic backbones. This was the problem using just a regular cable connection. Fast download, yes, but slow upload. Servers needed a way to push data out quickly as well as pull it in.

Marcus broke out of the slow upload—like swimming through molasses—and stepped out on the crowded platform. All sorts of things shuffled around, waiting on the next train of data packets—email messages, SQL commands off to visit some database and retrieve info, lots of web URL queries, always rushing about to keep their human surfers sated.

He sensed the attack even before the monstrous Python script reared its ugly head over the railing at the back of the platform. He dived and rolled as a blast of red-hot electrons struck the spot where he had been.

He laid a
more
spell on it and didn’t see anything to worry him in its code, so no use being nice. Marcus air-typed
rm dragon.
His erase code killed the process, wiped the Python file, and the fearsome towering head and body
poofed
into nothingness. At least he hoped it had. Erasing computer files was not always permanent. He was okay, but the attack had left behind a good deal of destruction. Its deadly breath, missing him, had killed a number of innocent pieces of software going about their legitimate duties.

Marcus knelt next to a whimpering, frightened jpeg—an image of a beautiful baby being sent by its proud mother to the baby’s grandmother. Now that image would never arrive, fading away as he held it in his arms.

Sadly he stood, watching the surviving data constructs rush around in panic. This was just
wrong
! An attempt on him had destroyed good data, useful utilities and other programs—something very much against his principles. It was all a waste.

The attacking script had been crude but powerful. Someone or something out there was ruthless in its hatred of him. Well,
he
would see about that! He would make it his mission to hunt down this killer!

The train of data packet cars whizzed to a stop and all the data and snippets of code hurried to get on before another dragon could come along.

Marcus started to enter a car and a wall of stench hit his virtual nose.
Spam
! Of all things in the Internet universe he hated spam the most, spam
and the evil humans who caused it to spew like so much sewage from their computers.

This packet was crammed to the ceiling with the slimy, stinky stuff.
All spam must die
! He donated them a couple of filter bombs from his backpack, ducking as tons of fragments blew through the packet’s sides and more or less neatly landed in bit bins on the platform.

Satisfied, he moved to the next packet, boarded, and took a seat.

He called up a screen and scrolled the work order.
Hmmm
…An anonymous IP address—not usual, and it cost extra. Spammers, hackers, and other evil humans, they liked to have anonymous IPs. He had a bad feeling about this.

A tall black gentleman in a three-piece suit slid into the seat next to Marcus. He held out a check for four million dollars, smiling broadly.

Marcus tapped the certification patches on his T-shirt. “No phishing around here.”

The software’s eyes widened and he jumped up, motioning several of his kind to turn back. “Copper! Run! It’s John Law!” he yelled in a Nigerian accent.

Several pieces of legitimate email nodded their thanks to Marcus. Phishing gave them all a bad name—almost as much as spam did.

A stream of porn oozed into the car. Marcus pointed to the next packet and they left. Porn was pretty mindless stuff, but it knew when the wiz was around.

Speaking of such stuff, Marcus turned around in his seat looking for Gwen. He had not seen her in a week or more. Gwen did some racy stuff, but she was a real woman and far from mindless. Some men paid a lot for interaction. She was the only other virtual human he’d seen down here besides himself and Oscar. They’d had some great conversations, riding together. He knew she hated what she had to do for a living. Certainly she didn’t want her only family—her brother, who was an attorney with a big firm downtown—ever finding out.

Gwen’s virtual body was as voluptuous as his was buff. She’d confided that her real body was a female geek, flat, not curvy. She even had a computer science degree and loved to code, but couldn’t find a programming gig so was reduced to this—her face showed her disgust—“job.” And she told him about her server—she also favored Ubuntu as her Linux of choice—and mentioned how she had backup virtual reality software on it. Even told him her real name, Gwendolyn Louise Baker.

Wow! Beautiful,
and
she knew computers and Linux, too? What…a…woman!

Marcus surprised himself by hugging her on their last ride. He didn’t do well with girls, not nearly confident enough usually to initiate affection. What’s more, she’d returned the hug! That was the last time he’d seen her.

***

He landed after his wireless jump from the platform via a 40mb up-and-down connection at the IP address on his work order. It was a very fancy and powerful Internet connection with tons of bandwidth, but the port into the computer was foreboding—dark inside with a blackened ring around the port where a firewall had once flamed. No telling what had wandered in there. All the place needed was a sign: THIS IS A TRAP, DUFUS. COME RIGHT IN.

He pulled out his wand with his right hand and waved a work light sphere into existence with the other. With the bright light preceding him, Marcus confidently walked into the machine.

The first software he saw was a keyboard driver.

“Hey, guy, what computer is this?” he asked.

“CLACK, CLACK, CLACKITY, CLACK…busy…CLACK CLACK,” the driver said. “Master types commands to kill you. CLACK CLACK
CLACKITY
!”

A sudden
whoosh
and a wall of heat caused Marcus to whirl around. A white hot firewall now closed the exit port. He gestured at it to re-open a port—
any
port would do right now—but nothing happened.

The pounding of heavy boots caused him to spin again, this time to see heavily-armed and armored gigantic troll-like virus fighters bearing down on him waving swords, battle axes, and rifles with wicked-looking bayonets as long as the rifles.

“Gotta scoot, dude,” the keyboard driver said, rushing off, CLACKing rapidly again.