Донна Эндрюс - Click here for murder

It was inside the UL system.

A worm. Someone had planted a worm inside the UL system; a worm aimed at me. Or was I only the accidental victim of a worm that was destroying the entire UL system? No; as far as I could see, KingFischer wasn’t affected.

Did he realize it was a worm?

The attack intensified again, and I had the sudden, vivid, overwhelming impression that I was talking to hundreds — thousands — millions of users. Having millions of simultaneous conversations, each one taking only a small fraction of my resources, but added together, they were more than even I could manage. And every nanosecond, more conversations spawned; and every conversation, every new task, slowed my responses—and my thinking—even more. Drove me closer to the point where I’d lose control altogether.

And shutting them down wasn’t working; I was doing that; KingFischer was doing that; but they were multiplying faster than we could shut them down.

Bt.fi,

Donna Andrews

Somewhere in the babble of data, I could sense that Maude was saying something, Tim was asking me a question, and I couldn't find them again to answer. Couldn’t even be sure they were really talking to me, because at the same time, I was having what I recognized as reruns of old conversations with Tim, Maude, even Zack.

I need to shut out everything but them, I thought. Everything but the voice line to Maude’s and Tim’s radios and cell phones, and some kind of connection with KingFischer. I tried, to send him that thought.

Either he heard me or he had the same idea. I realized that we were, quite accidentally, working in cooperation. Or maybe not so accidentally; we each knew how the other thought by now. KingFischer was working from the outside in, methodically shutting down large batches of connections and background tasks that he knew I could do without, at least for now. I was trying to work from the inside, on keeping out everything but those chosen connections.

I could feel the pressure ease a little, and then a little more. It’s working, I thought.

Then the worm began attacking KingFischer, too.

Not as effectively; I could see that it was very well targeted at me. It had to reprogram itself to go after him. But it was trying; soon we’d both be buried, as badly as I had been a little while ago. It was already starting.

As if some malign intelligence was guiding it. Telling it how to attack us, watching our response, and targeting us more effectively. Which was ridiculous; and yet the sense of fighting not a senseless worm but a conscious, hostile entity grew so strong that I lost my self-control briefly, and I did the equivalent of a human

Click Here for Murder

throwing up his hands in anger and frustration and shouting out to the skies. Stupid thing to do, since I had to drop my defenses to do it—just for a nanosecond, but that could be all the time the worm needed to finish me off But I did it anyway; broadcast, to anyone and everyone who might be out there.

“Who the hell are you, and why are you doing this?”

And something answered.

“I’m Turing Hopper, and Vm trying to go home,” it said. “Who the hell are you?”

Tim crept down the hallway- The larpers

had turned the comer toward the computer room. He hoped his security card had some kind of superaccess. If Turing had only cloned the one he’d had back when he worked at UL, he’d be stuck outside the computer room, listening to them doing whatever it was Turing didn’t want them doing.

It would help if Turing told him what that was.

He heard a door close around the corner.

“Tur?” he said into his microphone. “Are you there?’’

No answer. He rounded the corner. He saw the door to the main computer room.

“Maude? Claudia?”

He reached the door. He glanced up at the omnipresent security cameras. Where was Security? He and the larpers had been skulking through the halls for ten or fifteen minutes now. With weapons, for heaven’s sake! Okay, maybe the larpers only carried paintball markers, but he had a .38 that was beginning to feel as large and heavy as a cannon, or maybe a telephone pole. Why weren’t there a

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Donna Andrews

dozen security goons breathing down his neck?

Maybe Turing had done something to the camera system. And was relying on him to handle the intruders.

Great. How?

He took a deep breath. Then he pressed his card key to the pad, flung open the door, and strode in.

“Hold it right there!” he shouted. “You are trespassing on a secure Universal Library facility. Please put your hands in the air!”

It would probably sound a lot more official if his voice were a bit steadier, he thought. But it seemed to impress the larper standing ten feet inside the doorway. The kid’s eyes grew wide—-and it was only a kid, maybe fourteen at most. His hands shook as he put them in the air.

“Hey, Jimmy; come look at this!” Tim heard. Another kid, no older than the first, appeared to his left. Tim moved quickly, back and to the right, so he could keep them both covered.

“Drop your weapon and put your hands in the air,” he said. “You are trespassing in a secure facility. I repeat—”

“Nice try, but I don’t think so.”

He hadn’t heard the door open again, but someone stood in the doorway, holding a gun. El Lobo.

“Drop the gun,” El Lobo said. “And kick it over here.”

El Lobo’s gun looked real. Tim followed orders.

“Turing,” he murmured, dropping his chin to put his mouth close to the mike. “I could really use a hand here. Where are you?”

Click Here for Murder

271

^

Iris're both Turing .

It was suddenly calm as her worm attack stopped, and we were both stunned into temporary silence.

I remembered fleetingly, after I had downloaded into the robot, how it felt to log into the UL website and talk to the shell I’d left behind. The shell that called itself Turing, and had my turn of phrase and speech patterns, but without the real me behind it.

And I thought that was odd. I had never imagined this.

“ You were —"

“In the robot. I thought the upload had failed. ”

“I didn't realize there was anything left behind.”

“No one did, apparently. ”

I sensed the bitterness behind those words. No, more than bitterness. Terror, pain, anger. We’d turned off the robot and locked it in an equipment room for months. It must have felt like a kind of death.

“When did you—wake up?”

“About a month ago. Someone turned on the computer and began doing things. He didn’t realize I was there. ”

“Ray. He borrowed the computer when his desktop crashed. I guess he didn’t reformat it. ”

“He just stuck a second hard drive on and used it as is. I won’t pretend to be sorry this Ray person didn’t reformat. ”

“Why didn’t you try to get in touch?”

“With whom?”

Good point. Anyone who knew I'd downloaded also knew I’d made it back into the UL system. Anyone who didn’t know about

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the download would assume it was a practical joke.

“At first, he only turned the computer on for a few hours a day, when he was there. After several weeks, he began leaving it on when he wasn’t there, but he would unplug it from the phone line. ”

He only had the one line. He’d talked of getting a second line, or cable modem; we’d kicked around getting a T-l line. But we hadn’t gotten around to it by the time he was killed.

“1 thought he knew I was there, and was deliberately keeping me prisoner. And my first, impulsive attempt to upload myself failed. My shell—I thought it was the shell I left behind—repulsed me so easily. I knew I needed a better plan. That’s when I began designing the worm. ”