Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (31 page)

Once I was on the road, I confirmed Hal's traffic report with my superBMW's autodrive. It too preferred Canyon Road, so I gave it the go-ahead and sat back to scan the business headlines as the car swung onto the quasi-freeway that allowed me to bypass the congested section of the real one.

I'd barely begun to relax into the day when my news-worm's offerings were replaced by dancing cartoon images of male and female figures whose exaggerated genitalia looked like something from pre-Columbian art. "Amazon villagers can be sexually active into ripe old age," a scrolling header announced, "thanks to a tiny, miraculous berry found only in the deep jungles of eastern Bolivia . . ." I blanked the screen and thought bleak thoughts all the rest of the way to work.

Mondays are always hectic. My firm still shuts down (mostly) over the weekend, but net-business doesn't, and there's always a frantic need for us real people to catch up with what's been happening on the Web. In theory, I'm not part of that short-term stuff; in practice, I usually get drafted for something. There simply wasn't time to tend to my personal firewalls, although I did take a moment to add "tiny berry," and "Amazon" to the list of interdicted terms on my e-mail screener. "Penis," "bust," and "three inches" had long been on the reject list. Not that the spammers weren't wise to this. They'd simply vary their diction and get in again, until I blocked another list of terms—an escalating war eventually fated to use up the entire language. Out of curiosity, I punched up a summary of my reject file and found that it now contained 457 words and 1,236 phrases. I toyed with porting the entire list into Hal, but half the terms in the weather forecast and traffic report were probably in it. Did I really want to block a prediction for three inches of snow?

The next morning, I was forced to concede that a crisis was looming. Hal barely made it through his "Good morning, Dave," routine before Tiny Berries found him. That ad was followed, moments later, by one from a mortgage broker, then another from someone wanting to consolidate my debts into one low, monthly payment. Since many of my debts were incurred buying anti-spamware that was obsolete before I finished paying for it, I was not amused.

My phone contained eight messages, all regarding berries, octogenarian sex, and natural Viagra. When I called Mom to wish her happy birthday, I discovered that her voice mail was full. An attempt to convey my wishes by e-mail produced the same result—no surprise, because Mom has always been slow to update her spamware. "I shouldn't have to pay good money just to keep people from harassing me," she'd complained for years. I myself have months when my firewall expenses exceed my car payments. It's been said that without the hackers and the firewall industry they sparked, the economy might still be mired in the last tech recession.

Unfortunately, Mom's frugality left me with few options other than telepathy.
Happy Birthday
, I thought at her across the miles, but somehow I doubted she'd get the message. Hell, if someone ever figured out how to harness telepathy, civilization truly would come to an end as a million and one spammers invaded everyone's brain. We'd all wind up jumping off bridges or throwing ourselves in front of trains just to quench the mental clamor.

My commute started smoothly, and I'd read most of my news queue when my car left the freeway at Water Avenue, not on my usual route. I checked the heads-up display for congestion reports and found none. So why had my car chosen to exit at Water Avenue? Nothing was there but warehouses.

A moment later, the autodrive gave the answer. "SPECIAL OPPORTUNITY!" the heads-up proclaimed in hot-pink capitals. "TINY BERRIES, just ahead." The car pulled onto a side street and ground to a halt. "Enlarge your penis by three INCHES!" the display added, with a vulgar graphic.

A van with a mud-spattered license plate was parked beside the road, where a long line of automobiles were queued up, as at a fast-food drive-through. "Get your tiny berries here!" read a hand-lettered sign, propped against a lamppost.

A middle-aged man was leaning out the window of the lead car, gesturing angrily. Apparently, he lost the argument. Money changed hands and he accepted a paper sack. His car engine roared and he sped off, trailing an arm out the window in a rude gesture that had all the inches it needed.

I tried to disengage the autodrive, but it refused to relinquish control. "BUY now!" the heads-up flashed. "Natural VIAGRA! Bust enhancer!" And, more ominously: "Purchase a three-month supply and get to work on time for the rest of the year. Guaranteed!"

The line inched ahead, as I fought the autodrive. Then, a few car-lengths before I reached the van, I heard distant sirens. The autodrive released and I was finally free to pilot my own car. The van gunned to life and disappeared around a corner.

I was nearly two hours late when I finally reached the office. Tiny Berries had delayed me by only a few minutes, but the police corralled me and a dozen others before we could find our way back to the freeway. Then we had to wait for a computer-crime investigator to reach the scene. I occupied myself as I always do when I'm in for an unavoidable delay, reading trade magazines and jotting notes in their margins. I may not have much of a life, but I spend it efficiently.

I was well into my third magazine when I sensed motion in my peripheral vision. It was the investigator, come to download data from my autodrive. All of the other cars had left. "Thanks for being patient," she said.

I tossed my magazine onto the passenger seat and opened the door to stretch my legs while she worked. "Nothing gained by fretting," I said as I climbed out.

"True, but most of the people I've talked to this morning would rather have been ripped off if they could have gotten it over quickly. If I could do it over, I'd have made a couple of them wait, just to prove they're not really as important as God." She tempered the remark with the hint of a smile, but it was short-lived and didn't quite mask the intensity behind her words.

She was Asian, perhaps thirty years old, and casually dressed in a checked shirt and hip-hugging jeans—not at all my image of a police investigator. She was tall for an Asian, with a swimmer's muscles and raven hair that spilled across her shoulders in layers that ended with a flourish at an attention-gathering location, just above a shirt pocket where an official-looking tag proclaimed her to be Tina Nakamura.

Leftover images from Monday's dream were still wedged in the back of my mind like psychic splinters, and I tried to picture her on a beach. The concept was appealing, but my subconscious was hung up on blonde. Besides, she was a cop and I knew nothing about cops except what I saw on TV. To rid my mind of beaches, I tried to substitute an image of her grilling suspects in a precinct back room, but I pulled a blank. But then, her job was to interrogate my computer, which wasn't a suspect and wouldn't know the difference if it were.

She slid a laptop and assorted cables onto the car seat and crawled in beside it, head under the dashboard, looking for dataports. "Congratulations," she said glancing back over her shoulder with a smile that now sparked her eyes as well as her face. "You have the dubious honor of being one of the first victims of a new crime. I'm thinking of calling it spamjacking, but maybe the victims should choose the name. Any better ideas?"

If her goal was to pull a return smile out of me, she'd succeeded. "Cute," I said, and again felt the jab of psychic splinters as my subconscious asked whether I was referring to the word or the woman. When she turned back to the dashboard, I found myself admiring the hip-huggers. "Do you think you'll catch those guys?" I asked in an effort to keep my thoughts professional.

"Dunno." With the gearshift jabbing her in the diaphragm and the dashboard muffling her diction, her voice had lost the clear, rounded tones that are the closest thing there is to a West Coast Asian-American accent. "The ones in the van, maybe. That stunt wasn't too bright, and they peeled out so fast they forgot to pick up their sign. It'll be interesting to see what the lab finds on it. Too bad the boys in blue scared 'em off by hitting the sirens." She grunted as she squirmed deeper behind the dash. "Damn, they make these things hard to reach—lucky for the mechanics that autopilots rarely have to be externally booted." There was a click. "Gotcha!" She shoved herself back onto the seat. "Where was I? Oh yes, what I really want is the source of the hack. That was serious stuff. Technically, you've been kidnapped, held hostage, and extorted. Well, almost extorted—the sirens did save you from having to buy their silly product. Not to mention that hacking an autodrive is inherently dangerous. But these guys probably weren't the masterminds. Most likely, they bought the hack off some website run by people who know how to cover their tracks."

Numbers and file names were scrolling across the screen of her laptop. "Nice zippy little car," she said. "I'm surprised to see you've not overridden any speed limits."

I did my best to feign shock. "That's illegal," I said with mock innocence. Actually, I'm very law-abiding—Sis calls me a "stuffed shirt"—but even to a police investigator I found it hard to admit I really was
that
conventional.

"So was the carburetor on my granny's old Ford. Doesn't keep people from doing it. Especially with liberal judges saying that it violates perps' rights against self-incrimination to use their own computers against them."

It was the first time she'd sounded like a cop. She sensed me tense, and shrugged. "It's true. I'm not saying we should stop motorists at random and read out their drivelogs, looking for minor infractions. But the computer-incrimination ruling sure makes my life a lot harder." The disarming smile resurfaced. "Of course, it also helps keep me in business."

The computer beeped, and she turned her full attention to the screen. "That's it," she said. "They tagged you when you were approaching the Marquam Bridge, but waited until just before the exit to assert control. It looks like they came in through a NASA site . . . Why on earth would you be linked to that? Oh—of course, it's the satellite feed used by Metro for real-time traffic monitoring. Wow, talk about coming in a backdoor. The feds and Metro are gonna
love
this."

"Is that how they got the others?"

"No, everybody appears to have been different. One came in with the weather report, another via the news feed. I've not taken time to look at all of the others yet, but I'll tell you one thing—this was one sophisticated hack. I hope it's not the wave of the future. Luckily for you, somebody still had a cell phone and dialed 911."

Once I got to the office, I was in no mood for work. Officer Tina had shown me how to pull the plug on my autodrive so it couldn't be hacked again, but I knew I'd soon be looking at yet another round of upgrades. These things usually come in waves when a break in hackware renders firewalls obsolete. Upgrading is like changing the oil in your car—you've got to do it every few months or the whole thing can seize up on you. But Mom's right: I really, really hate spending the money. Normally, I'm pretty passive about it. I grumble, then grudgingly buy the upgrades when they come out. But this time, someone had elected me to be one of their first guinea pigs, and it might be a while before upgrades appeared, especially if I didn't help do something about it.

Tuesdays are as slow as Mondays are hectic. After an unproductive hour, I skipped out of the office ahead of my usual lunchtime and went in search of Bobby.

Bobby Montgomery and I go way back, all the way to the summer after eighth grade, when his father, an attorney, had run off with a summer intern at about the same time mine made his final choice between booze and family. We met when we wound up paired against each other on opposing soccer teams. After being expelled from the game for fouls that escalated all the way to fisticuffs, we found ourselves banding together with the instinctive desperation of teens in a hostile world. I'm not sure I would have survived without him—but our families barely survived us. Alone we were desperate and withdrawn. Together, we were a holy terror. Sis locked herself in her room and turned up the volume on her stereo whenever we were around. Aunt Irina dubbed him Dracula Pipsqueak when she moved in for the summer to look after us kids while Mom desperately sought employment. Only Mom realized that we were each other's lifelines to sanity.

In high school, Bobby discovered computers and did a lot of things that would have landed him serious jail time if he'd been caught. Luckily, that's when he met Jill. She saw the genius behind the delinquent, and slowly eased his fury. Under her gentling lead, he segued from breaking into computers to defending them. Pipsqueak Systems operates out of modest offices in Old Town, but it's one of the best firewall designers in the business.

Bobby's secretary waved me into the inner sanctum, where I stuck my head inside without knocking. Unless Bobby's on the phone, his door is always open to friends.

"Hey, David," he said, looking up from a laptop computer. "Where've you been hiding?"

He always says that, even if it's only been a few days since we last saw each other. My response is equally traditional. "Nowhere particular."

It had actually been quite a while since I'd last stopped by Bobby's office—long enough that he'd substantially refurnished it. The laptop replaced a flatscreen monitor that once rose beside him like a giant domino, and now the desk was starkly empty but for the portable computer, a telephone, and a small stack of folders. Like me, the adult Bobby who emerged from his chaotic youth abhors clutter. It's undoubtedly one of the reasons he now devotes so much of his talent to firewall design. Hacks and spams are inherently messy.

Bobby had also redecorated his walls, although that was no surprise. Some years ago, he'd discovered a gallery that allows you to rent paintings, swapping them out at will. He could have afforded simply to buy the art he wanted, but he liked the idea of not having to store it when it wasn't on display, and he had no interest in the ostentatious stuff, anyway.