The rabbit looked at Carla. "Upload?" it asked.
Carla nodded.
The rabbit tucked the file into its pocket. Then it used the stylus on the second file. More words appeared: LUCIFER PROJECT.
"Uplo—?"
A sudden flash of white light obliterated everything. Carla had the sensation of tumbling crazily in space. There was nothing to grab on to, no reference points. The entire Matrix and all of its graphic constructs had been instantly obliterated. She spun wildly out of control, a knot of icy fear in her stomach. She was falling, drowning in a sea of featureless white, burning in an invisible white flame . . .
It ended as suddenly as it had begun. Carla was slumped over in her chair in the research department. Beside her, Corwin held the end of the datacord that he’d yanked out of the jack in her temple. His face was an ashen color, and had lost all of its usual cocky expression.
Both of them were breathing hard. For a moment, Carla was frightened that the intrusion countermeasure they’d run into had used a biofeedback loop to accelerate their heart rates out of control. She glanced up at the clock on the wall. Only ten seconds had elapsed since they’d entered the Matrix. It seemed like a lifetime.
"What the frag was
that?"
she asked. "Some kind of ice?"
Corwin shook his head. "I don’t think so." he said. "It shut down everything in the sector—not just us."
"Do you think it was—"
"Jus’ a sec." Corwin cut her off. "I gotta check something."
He jacked back into the deck and hunched over it, eyes unfocused. As the seconds ticked past, Carla saw his fingers tense once, then relax. Then his mouth dropped open and his breathing quickened. His eyes jerked back and forth rapidly, as if he were rapidly scanning text. Just as Carla was wondering if she should do something, he blinked and pulled the cable from his temple.
"What?" Carla was bristling with impatience. "What is it?"
"Whatever wiped us wasn’t ice." Corwin said thoughtfully. "It was more like a virus. I edged back into the Mitsuhama mainframe, just to scan what was rezzin’ there. When I tried to access the research lab files again, guess what I found?"
Carla shrugged. She couldn’t even guess.
"Nada. Zilch. Static. A whole lotta nothing. The datastore for that sector is utterly clean, completely wiped. There wasn’t a single graphics pixel, not a single byte of data. And none of the programs were functional. That system is toasted. Gonzo."
He paused. "Know what it reminded me of?" he asked.
Carla nodded. This time, she could guess. "The databanks at the
"Yup. Exactamundo. Same effect exactly."
"What about the files you uploaded?" Carla asked. "Did you manage to save them?"
Corwin tapped a button on his deck. With a soft whir, a datachip slid out of a slot in the side. "I got the personnel file." he answered. "But the second file was erased, along with the rest of the lab data. The deck didn’t even have time to upload its name code."
Carla cursed silently to herself. She’d been so close.... But at least she had a tiny piece of the puzzle now. She had a personnel file that should contain the names of the mages who’d worked on the project with Farazad. The information in their dossiers might give her some leverage during the interviews she hoped to conduct with them. And she also had what had to be the name of the research project: Lucifer.
It was a curious name for what Carla had assumed was a weapons research project. Lucifer was a Latin word that translated as "bringer of light." It was also the name of the angel who was cast out of heaven and fell to earth in the form of lightning. That part certainly fit. According to the ork girl’s description of the spirit, it had looked like lightning as it launched itself into the heavens away from the body of the wage mage. One big bright flash of light. . .
She suddenly realized that her previous assumptions had been all wrong. Mitsuhama hadn’t been experimenting with spirits in order to use them as weapons. She’d let the fact that the spirit had killed the mage lull her into that crude conclusion. Instead, the research project had involved computers—Mitsuhama’s chief industry—all along.
Carla could feel her heart pounding in her chest.
"Corwin." she asked softly. "Is it possible for a spirit to enter the Matrix?"
The ork shook his head. "No way. The Matrix is an artificial reality, nothing more than a series of computer-generated simsense impressions, while magic is inherently associated with living organisms. The two are completely incompatible; that’s why mages have such trouble with simsense. Regardless of what it’s actually made of, a spirit is a living creature And nothing living can enter the Matrix."
"I thought we just did."
"Nope. What we did was download sensory data from the Matrix directly into our brains, through these." He tapped the datajack in his temple while still watching the screen of the diagnostic unit. "We weren’t actually ‘inside’ the Matrix—we just perceived it as if we were. We were actually downloading coded pulses of photons, which our datalinks translated into signals our brains could understand and interpret. Whenever I seemed to be manipulating an icon, I was actually executing a command, uploading the information that would do the job. My neural synapses fired, and the thought was translated by my datalink into a coded burst of light that activated the program in my deck." He paused, looked up for a moment at Carla. "You scan all that?"
"Uh-huh. But what if the spirit had a physical body that was composed of light?" Carla asked. "Couldn’t it enter the Matrix like any other beam of light, through a fiber-optic cable?"
The decker paused for a second, then shrugged. "Maybe for a millisecond or two. It would just blast through at three hundred thousand klicks per second and be out again."
"What would it look like?"
"Like a flash of . . ." Corwin looked up, his eyes wide. "So that’s what we saw." he whispered softly. "Mega cool." His deck lay ignored in his lap. He leaned forward, and the foam of the recliner squeaked slightly as it contoured itself to his new position.
"A creature composed of light would be one fragger of a virus." he said, thinking out loud. "It wouldn’t be affected by any intrusion countermeasures, since they’re set up to attack the deck or the decker. It would be nearly impossible to detect, because it wouldn’t interfere with the other data transmissions. Light doesn’t interfere with itself unless the two beams are exactly in phase—that’s why a fiber-optic cable can carry thousands of commands and transmissions simultaneously. One more pulse of light down the tube wouldn’t affect it a bit. And it wouldn’t hurt the hardware—at least, I don’t think so. But there is one thing the spirit would do—it would sure mess up stored data."
His gestures grew more animated. "See, information is written on memory chips and hard drives by a beam of light, and read in the same manner. Individual pulses within the beam, as well as the light wave’s pattern of crests and troughs, are all part of the information-carrying code. If a creature made of light suddenly surged through a data storage device, it would completely scramble the code that had been written previously. There’d be a whole new pattern laid down, none of it coherent. And that’s what makes this spirit so perfect as a virus. There’s no way to stop it from corrupting your data. Even if you installed a passcode system, any word or image you use is encoded as light. All the spirit would have to do is reconfigure itself to emulate the passcode, write-enable the datastore, and slide right in. Only a hardwired lock could stop it—and that involves completely locking the system away from the Matrix. It just isn’t economically feasible to do that.
"You’d have to have some way of directing the spirit. Otherwise, it would wipe out every file it passed through along the way. Maybe if you got it to home in on a keyword ..."
"That’s it!" Carla said. "The spirit showed up in the research lab node of the Mitsuhama system as soon as we decrypted the name on the project file. It’s also wiped datastores at a theology school and a televangelist network, and keeps attacking a woman by the name of Luci Ferraro each time she tries to access any computer or telecom unit that’s linked to the Matrix. What do these four things have in common?" She smiled, pleased with herself for putting the pieces together and waiting for Corwin to do the same.
Corwin frowned, puzzled. Then he broke into a wide, snag-toothed grin. "The word Lucifer."
"There’s your keyword." Carla concluded.
Corwin shook his head. "Doesn’t make sense." he countered. "You say this spirit was developed at the Mitsuhama research lab. Why would they target their own facility?"
"As a test, maybe?"
Corwin snorted with laughter. "A test capable of wiping out their entire data-storage system? No way!"
"No, not a test." Carla agreed. Then the answer hit her. "The spirit is trying to wipe out the files on itself. In the process, it’s erasing a lot of unrelated data—any file that contains the word Lucifer. But why does it feel the need to do that? It’s already killed the man who conjured it and become a free spirit. Even if it was once under someone’s control, nobody’s controlling it now."
Corwin reached for his deck. "This is totally wacked. I’d better warn my chummers about—"
"Don’t!" Carla grabbed the ork’s hand. "Keep this to yourself, O.K.? At least until I’ve completed my story. That run you just did was on KKRU time, and as an employee of this station, you have to honor your confidentiality oath. Agreed?"
Corwin sighed heavily. "Yeah, I guess so."
"Good." She left him staring morosely at his deck and hurried back into the newsroom.
Pita sat in the basement room, stroking the white cat. She stared at the ray of sunlight that slanted through the broken window, trying to ignore the hunger that gnawed at her belly. She listened instead to the sounds of people moving through the store above her, to the traffic outside, to the purring of the cat in her lap. Without meaning to do so, she began to hum a ballad she’d heard on one of the muzak stations last week. She’d laughed at it when she first heard it; the song was some mushy thing, not a bit like the scream-rock she usually listened to. But humming it now somehow made her feel better.
She stroked the cat’s soft fur, concentrating on its texture in an effort to focus her thoughts. She was beginning to feel light-headed, dizzy. As her mind drifted, her body felt thinner, less substantial. All that existed was the dust motes, the sunlight, the rumbling purr of the cat. Or was that the sound of her humming? The two had blended together in a gentle harmony.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the floor drifted away. Pita was floating, bobbing like a dust mote in the air. With a sense of wonder, she unfolded her legs from their crossed position and placed her feet on the floor. Through her legs, which had become
translucent, she could see her body, still seated and
leaning back against the wall. Her eyes had closed and her head hung to one side, mouth open. Her chest was still; it didn’t look as though she was breathing.
Amazingly, the sight did not frighten her. It seemed natural, right. This detached perspective was better, somehow, than confronting her own face in a mirror.
From this angle, her wide face, jutting teeth, and broad shoulders seemed perfectly proportioned. She reached out to touch herself but overshot her mark, and her hand passed through the wall. Amazed, she drew it back. She could pass through man-made objects as if they were not there.
She looked down at her body once more. The cat, still curled in her lap, climbed out of its own body. Its ghostly form stepped delicately aside, extending each of its back legs in a spine-lengthening stretch. And then it began to change. It grew larger, sleeker, more supple. Its fur took on the pattern of a tabby cat, but with stripes the color of a rainbow. Its eyes began to glow, to turn into molten pools of gold. And its whiskers began to hum with a strange electric force. When the transformation was complete, it looked up at her and gave a faint, ghostly
mrrow
.
For the space of a few heartbeats, Pita was unable to speak. At last she was able to utter a single word: "Cat?"
The animal nodded. Then it turned and leaped gracefully onto a box, and from there to the window ledge.
Pita felt no fear—only a burning curiosity to see where this magical creature was going. She followed it, climbing up and through the wall as if it were not there. She had a brief moment of disorientation as her form flowed through the cement; she saw every grain, every particle. Then she was standing in the alley, beside Cat. The animal gave a quick backward glance, then trotted around a trash can and into another wall.
Pita followed, her mind bubbling with laughter as she explored her newfound perceptions. She could walk through walls, or across a busy street while cars zoomed through her ghostly form. She was jostled once, when a passenger in one of the cars made contact with her, and found that trees felt equally solid. But she could, if she chose, climb a flight of stairs, her feet never once touching them. Or she could wade chest-deep through a floor, as if it were made of water. The only things that presented a barrier to her were those that were alive—people, plants, and the earth itself.