Allen Steele - Jericho Iteration

“Hey, Gerry,” he said. “Did you get something to eat?”

“The crow’s good,” I murmured as I lowered the camera. “Just ask my friend here.”

Huygens simply stared at me. A moment later, two plainclothes security guards materialized behind John and me; they must have been hovering nearby, waiting for Huygens’s signal. They were on us before I had a chance to compliment Huygens on his choice of catering service.

“Get ’em out of here,” Huygens said to the large gentlemen who had descended upon us. “See you around, Gerry.”

He didn’t even bother to look at me before he turned his back on us and waddled back into the crowd.

John looked confused as a pair of massive hands clamped onto his shoulders. “Excuse me, but is there a problem?”

“Yes, sir,” one of the mutts said. “You are.” No one at the reception noticed our sudden departure. They were too busy applauding the videowall as the Endeavour, spewing smoke and fire, rose from its launch pad into a perfect blue Floridian sky.

(Thursday, 12:05 P.M.)

Tiptree’s rent-a-goons escorted us out the front door, where they confiscated our smartbadges and pointed the way to the road. John and I didn’t say anything to each other until we reached his car and had driven out of the company parking lot. When we had passed through the front gate and were heading back down Clayton Road toward the highway, though, the first thing John wanted from me wasn’t an apology.

“Okay, what was that all about?” he asked. “I thought you were just talking to that guy.”

He wasn’t pissed off so much as he was bewildered. I felt a headache coming on, so I lowered my seat-back to a prone position and gently rubbed my eyes with my knuckles.

“He said it was because I had taken a picture of Steve Estes,” I said, “but he was just looking for an excuse. I could have complained about the catering and he would have tossed me out just the same.” I let out my breath. “He had no problem with you. You just happened to be with me, and that made you an accessory. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

“Hmm … well, don’t worry about it. What’s done is done.” He stopped to let a mini-cat rumble across the road in front of us; the machine was carrying a load of broken cinderblocks away from a collapsed convenience store. The flagman waved us on, and John stepped on the pedal again. “So you think he did that just to get rid of us? I don’t-”

“For the record,” I went on, “the jerk’s name is Paul Huygens.” I hesitated. “He used to work for CybeServe, maker of the fine line of CybeServe home VR products … specifically, the VidMaxx Dataroom. Ring any bells with you?” John’s face was blank for a moment, then Big Ben tolled the midnight hour. He cast a sharp look at me. “I’ll be darned,” he said slowly. “Is that the guy who got you canned at the Clarion? ”

“One and the same, dude.” I gazed out the window at the ruins of a collapsed subdivision, remembering an unsigned note that had been faxed to me only a few years ago. “One and the same …”

Time for another history lesson. Today’s lecture is how Gerry Rosen, ace investigative reporter, once again tried to get a good story and, not incidentally, save a few lives, but instead ended up losing his job. Take notes; there will be a quiz on this at the end of the postmodern era.

Three years before, I was working as a staff writer for another weekly alternative newspaper, this one the Back Bay Clarion, a muckraking little rag published in Boston. I had been assigned by my editor to follow up on a number of complaints against a medium-size electronics company based in Framingham, a Boston suburb that has been the heart of the East Coast computer industry since the early eighties. As you may have guessed, this was CybeServe.

CybeServe was one of many corporations that had cashed in on the virtual-reality boom by manufacturing home VR systems for the consumer market. It had previously lost tons of money on the cheap-shit domestic robots it had attempted to sell through department stores, so its VidMaxx line of VR equipment had been one of the few products that were keeping the company afloat. All well and good, but the problem lay in their top-of-the-line product, the VidMaxx Dataroom 310.

The Dataroom 310 was much like its competitors: the unit could transform any vacant household room into a virtual-reality environment, transporting the customer into any world that could be interfaced by the CPU-the sort of thing for which Jah now wanted to write programs. Want to see exactly what the NASA probes on Mars are doing right now? Experience a role-playing game set in a medieval fantasy world? Go shopping in the Galleria Virtual? If you had all the right hardware and enough money to blow on on-line linkage with the various nets, the Dataroom 310 would take you there toot sweet.

However, unlike similar equipment marketed by Microsoft-Commodore or IBM, CybeServe’s VR equipment had some major flaws. First, there was no built-in interrupt timer; anyone who plugged into cyberspace could stay there indefinitely, or at least until hell froze over and you could build snowmen in Cairo. Also, because of various bugs in the CybeServe’s communications software sold with the hardware, anyone with a little knowledge could hack straight through the security lockouts installed by sysops to prevent users from accessing various commercial VR nets without ponying up a credit card number.

This type of bad engineering had made the CybeServe Butler 3000 the joke of the robotics industry; CybeServe tended to do things fast and cheap in order to cash in on a marketing trend. But most people were unaware of the subtle flaws with the Dataroom 310 when they bought it and had it installed in their homes. Their kids, though, soon discovered those glitches that allowed them practically unlimited time on whatever nets they were able to access, with or without authorization. Blowing three grand on phone bills to Madame Evelyn’s House of Love is enough to make anyone break out in a cold sweat.

That’s bad. What’s worse was that, according to the tips my paper had received from distraught and angry parents, several kids were losing themselves in cyberspace. They would rush home from school to lock themselves into the datarooms and, using various commands and passwords they had learned from their friends, jack into the VR worlds of their choice … and some of them, because of the lack of an interrupt toggle, wouldn’t come back home again. It became a form of avoidance behavior for children who didn’t like genuine reality, much as drugs, excessive TV viewing, or 1-900 phone services had been for previous generations. A few emotionally disturbed teenagers had even attempted suicide this way, trying to starve themselves to death while locked into an unreal world they refused to leave.

When I checked into it, I found that CybeServe was aware of the problem yet had done nothing to solve it. The corporation had a consulting psychologist on its payroll, whose only job was to jack into the system and talk kids out of virtual reality. The company offered generous “refunds” to their families if they kept their mouths shut about the accidents that had befallen Junior and Sis and didn’t file any lawsuits. Yet CybeServe had not recalled the Dataroom 310 to install timers nor made any effort to update the communications software to prevent hacking. Instead of fixing its mistakes, the company had concentrated solely on keeping potential buyers and the company’s competitors from learning about the product’s defects.

A few local families wanted to talk; so did a couple of their kids, particularly a thirteen-year-old boy from Newton who had spent six months in a New Hampshire psychiatric hospital after he had attempted to kill himself by locking himself in the household dataroom for nearly three days. They had tipped off the Clarion, and I was put onto the story.