Донна Эндрюс - Click here for murder

I catch the occasional glimpse of Claudia, gliding through the shadows in Tim’s or Maude’s wake. Mostly in Tim’s. She seems to feel he needs looking after.

“Turing? Do you copy?”

Maude. She sounded tense.

“1 copy. What’s up?”

“Remember the gentlemen with whom I spent Wednesday evening?”

Gentlemen? Oh, the game players. Arnold and company.

“l remember,” I said. "What about them?'’

“One of them’s here, ” she said. “I just spotted him going down a side street. He should be passing number twelve any second. ”

I monitored camera twelve. A very short person passed by, and I caught a glimpse of a paintball marker beneath his coat. He didn’t sound like any of the men she described, I thought as I watched him walk away. Then a tall lean figure appeared. A man in his forties or fifties, wearing dark clothes. He reached into his jacket and pulled out something—a cell phone or a small radio — and spoke into it. When he tucked it away again, I spotted a gun in a shoulder holster. A real gun.

He walked away, following the short person. Who looked like a child, now that I thought about it.

Had we found our traveler?

1 relayed what I’d seen to Maude.

“I’ll follow him,” she said.

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“ No,” I said. “He could be dangerous-

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“He could be after that child, ” Maude said. “I’ll be careful. ”

I watched the camera. I saw Maude appear, and gradually dwindle as she moved away.

I fretted. Should I send Tim or Claudia to help her? Or would that spook her quarry ?

“Turing?”

It was Tim. He sounded tense.

'Where are you?” I asked.

“Tm in the Underground,” he said. “I have bad news. You know how we were going to use the UL building as one of our safety holes if things went sour?”

‘Of course I remember; what's wrong?”

7 think someone else has the same idea. I just saw two larpers go into the UL building. They had card keys.”

I checked the security cameras. Yes, I saw it. Two smallish larpers hiding at the back of the lobby. Probably waiting until the sidewalk outside was clear.

‘Follow them,” I said. “But slowly. Til send Claudia to help. ” ‘Roger,” Tim said.

I tried to contact Claudia. No answer.

The elevator arrived. After hours, you needed a valid security card to summon an elevator to the lobby. The two larpers emerged from the shadows and got on.

“Claudia, ” I said. “If you can hear me and can’t answer, head for the UL building. Tim’s following two larpers into the UL building. ”

Why wasn’t Claudia answering?

The larpers on the elevator pushed the button for the sixth floor. Why that floor? Were they just selecting a floor at random?

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Donna Andrews

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The main computer room was on the sixth floor.

I saw Tim in the lobby.

“Tim—head for the sixth floor.”

He nodded, and stood by the elevator.

“Turing?”

It was KingFischer.

“Is it important, KF?” I asked as I summoned an elevator for Tim. “Fm a little busy right now.”

“It’s about those people who just went up in the elevator,” KingFischer said.

“I’m trying to take care of them, ” I said.

“That’s good,” KingFischer said. “You see what they’re carrying, don’t you?”

I checked the security camera. One larper carried something, but I couldn’t see what.

“No, I can’t see what they're carrying, KF,” I said. “What is it?”

“I’m not positive—”

“Just tell me. ”

“I think it's an electromagnetic pulse device. Do you realize what they could do with an EMP device? If they got anywhere near the computer room on the sixth floor—”

“I get it, KF,” I said. “Believe me, I get it.”

They could erase every electromagnetic storage device in the building. Destroy every bit of data in the UL system.

Including every AIP.

Of course, UL had offsite backups, so maybe we wouldn’t be permanently dead. Assuming restoring us from backups worked, which we hadn’t really tested, and assuming some other team of lunatics wasn’t raiding the backup facility with another EMP

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device. Assuming a whole lot of things that I hoped were purely hypothetical, because there was no way I would let them any where near the computer room.

I took control of the elevator system and brought their car to a halt. Abruptly. I rather enjoyed seeing the two larpers thrown to the elevator floor.

“Head for the sixth floor, Tim, ” I said. The elevator still hadn’t gone down to the lobby. Hadn’t I summoned it? I tried again.

Only the elevators weren’t obeying. They all stopped where they were, except for the one the larpers were in, which started moving again. I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t control it.

Something else was controlling it.

Tim looked at the elevator lights, and then ducked into a stairwell.

“Turing, I thought you were stopping them,” KingFischer said.

I saw the larpers in the elevator, and then my video went black.

Not just my video.

Sound. Data. Connections began snapping, first a few, and then more and more, as if the first few had started a ripple effect. I tried to reach out, seize data, perform diagnostics, but every nanosecond more and more things were disappearing, as if they’d never existed.

“Help,” I sent out—to Tim, to Maude, to KingFischer; to anyone I could still reach as, one by one, something methodically severed every connection I had with existence.

"Help!"

Tim stopped in midflight when he heard Turing call lor help. Could it really be Turing? It was Turing’s electronic voice anyway. What was happening?

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“Turing?” he said.

No answer.

He started climbing again. Running.

Had the larpers in the elevator done something?

He was between the third and fourth floors when he heard something.

“Tim?”

An electronic voice, but not Turing. Not her normal voice anyway. Much more mechanical.

“Yeah?” he panted, continuing to scramble upward.

“It’s KingFischer,” the voice said. At least that’s what he thought it said. The pronunciation and intonation were awkward and hard to understand. “Are you going to the sixth floor?”

“Yeah,” he said as he reached the fourth floor landing. “I’m on my way.”

“Good,” KingFischer said. “You have to stop them.”

“Did something happen to Turing?” Tim said. “Did they do something to Turing?

“I don’t know,” KingFischer said. “I’m trying to determine what’s happening to Turing. But if you don’t stop them, they could take out the entire UL system, including me and Turing and everything in the building. You’ve got to stop them.”

“Working on it,” Tim said, panting.

He dragged himself up the last few steps and burst through the stairwell door, into the corridor on the sixth floor.

Someone had gotten there first.

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* * *

Something shiftedi and the attack grew

less intense. I could sense KingFischer, elsewhere in the system, furiously shutting down nonessential tasks and setting up defenses. Thank God. But I could also tell that KingFischer wasn’t really the reason the attack had eased off. He’d slowed it, hut he couldn’t stop it. Already it was regrouping and changing in response to what he did. Abandoning things he could easily counter, and multiplying its efforts at the things he couldn’t. It was learning. Fast.

And I couldn’t do anything. I was thinking, reacting, in slow motion. As if everything I tried to do was happening over a slow dial-up connection instead of a T-l line. Only that analogy didn’t really apply, I realized, because it wasn’t coming from the outside.