Fool's Experiments Page 10

  The so-called evidence was very speculative. Glenn couldn't make the leap of faith, not yet. He stalled. "You don't know whether Cherner had a helmet at his apartment. And you still haven't explained Yamaguchi in her car."

  "Think, man," Doug said. "If the onslaught doesn't kill them outright, these people have voices talking to them inside their heads. These are voices that don't stop, don't sleep, don't ever go away. Their brains fry. The virus keeps spreading—from within! As it keeps writing, the damage and the torment can only get worse.

  "Maybe the victims can't speak anymore. The helmet's whole purpose is to interface the cerebrum, the seat of human consciousness and rational thought, to the computer. The cerebrum is probably the first part of the brain attacked.

  "Too soon they can't think straight, can't reason, can't call out for help, can't form any plan beyond 'Make it stop.' So, if a victim isn't killed outright, he takes off his helmet, or knocks it off, or stumbles and it falls off. He flees like a wounded animal, searching for a refuge that doesn't exist, that cannot exist, because the enemy is within.

  "I imagine Cherner and Yamaguchi made a dash for the psychological security of home. Yamaguchi didn't make it; when the pain got too much, or too little of her brain remained, she ended it all in the only way left open to her: a lamppost. Cherner was tougher. He made it home, but that didn't help. The invader was still there, its voice getting louder and louder. By then he could no longer think straight enough to really end it all, so he tried to rip the thing out. Through his very own face, he tried to rip it out."

  Doug shivered. "That vims is still out there. The bastard who wrote that vims is still out there. And the world is full of sick copycats who adopt and evolve successful viruses. "What are you going to do about it?"

  "Doug, Cheryl, I have your statements. If you will leave your business cards, I'll know how to get back in touch."

  "That's if?" Doug wanted to scream. "You're sentencing people to pure hell. It's unacceptable. Our statement to The Washington Post may lack the credibility of a pronouncement from the forum, but maybe it'll save someone. Let's find out." He stood. "Let's go, Cheryl. I imagine the colonel has coffee to drink and forms to file in triplicate."

  Glenn winced. Before he could respond, Cheryl jumped in.

  "Sit, Doug. This is no time for macho nonsense." She removed two folded sheets of paper from her purse and handed one to each man. "This is a SIGNIT mailing list: Special Interest Group in Neural Interfacing Technology. Not many names, and I've marked the people we think were affected."

  Glenn scanned his sheet. "Is this enough data to be statistically significant?"

  Now I need to teach basic statistics? Doug fought to slay calm, knowing Cheryl was correct. How could he get through? "You're ex-military. Have any current contacts in a three-letter agency?"

  To most of the country, that question might have suggested the Environmental Protection Agency. Inside the Washington Beltway, it meant intelligence agencies, the CIA and its ilk. "Of course," Glenn said.

  "Ask one about black work done by Sheila Brunner and Tom Zimmerman." Black work was highly classified, to the point that its existence was generally denied.

  "Agency folk aren't famed for their senses of humor. Are you sure you want that kind of attention?"

  Doug and Cheryl nodded.

  "Wait here." Adams stood. "I'll make some calls."

  Doug turned to Cheryl. "Is it me, or is our host stalling?" Adams had just been paged from the lobby.

  "What do you expect? That was quite a dare you made. And who are Sheila Brunner and Tom Zimmerman, anyway? What do you know about them ?"

  "I would like to hear that, too, Mr. Carey. Behind closed doors would be prudent."

  Adams had reappeared; with him were two even more serious-looking men. One was short and barrel-chested, with Mediterranean coloring. The other was taller, wiry, and fair. Both men's suit coats bulged under their left arms. The taller one seemed to be waiting for an answer.

  Doug directed his response to Adams. "Your friends have names, Glenn?"

  "Special Agent Ted Benson, and this is Agent Alexandras Kesaris." Badges flashed. "FBI."

  The room didn't accommodate five very well, either space-wise or for air-conditioning, but Doug didn't care. The FBI's swift appearance suggested that his dare had paid off. "Did Glenn mention anything besides the names I dropped?" Kesaris shrugged; Benson did nothing.

  "Good," Doug said. "I'll tell you about Brunner and Zimmerman, something I should have no way of knowing. Then, maybe, the government will do something."

  Benson gestured for him to continue.

  "I don't know Brunner or Zimmerman personally. I've seen their names repeatedly on conference attendance summaries. They're on the newest SIGNIT membership roll. Neither one has ever presented a paper or participated in an experts' panel. In five years, neither has submitted a paper to any neural-interfaces journal.

  "The NIT community is too small to hover on the edges, never contributing, without being noticed. I bet that means they're working on something black." He caught Benson's eye. "How am I doing?"

  The agent offered no comment.

  "Have it your way then. Your immediate response to Glenn's call tells me one thing. Something unpleasant and unexpected happened to one or both of them. Glenn may not like it, but I've got an explanation for disasters befalling people in our field."

  Benson shrugged. "Hand waving. Doom and gloom. Which checkout-counter news rag do you aspire to write for?"

  "You want specifics? Fine. An unexpected stroke, perhaps, or a heart attack." Doug looked for a reaction. No? "How about a sudden mental illness? Peculiar behavior, more than likely nonverbal."

  Watchful eyes narrowed, concession enough. "Okay, that's it: sudden mental illness. Look, you must have checked our clearances after Glenn's call. We've both built software for intel work; we've both held tickets." In the intelligence com- inunity, tickets denoted access to top-secret, compartmentalized material. You didn't get a ticket without an exhaustive, fifteen-year background check and a polygraph interview. "It's been a while since either of us has used them, but once upon a time people like you considered us trustworthy. I think it's about time you share a little information."

  The agents considered. "They were working on neural interfaces for possible mind-controlled weapon systems," Kesaris eventually offered. "Separate projects, both starting to show real progress. Very hush-hush.

  "Last summer, Zimmerman disappeared. The next thing we know, he's trying to torch a nuclear power station. We still have no idea know why. The plant survived, but Zimmerman went up like a Roman candle. It took big-time arm-twisting, but we got the incident reported as an escaped John Doe mental patient."

  Doug recalled the headlines—someone on a publicity lour of a nuke plant carrying an improvised firebomb—and, worse, the photos. His stomach lurched. "And Sheila Brunner?"

  Benson looked grim. "Dr. Brunner walked out of her office, ignoring all questions. People said she looked strange. Distracted.

  "She never came back, and we can't find her."

  CHAPTER 18

  "So that's it?" Jim asked. He was changing into customer-schmoozing garb as he spoke. "We're from the government, and we're here to help. That's your idea of a solution?"

  Doug played with a pencil from Jim's desk. "Maybe. Mostly. Some positive steps."

  To be fair, Jim thought, the government had helped—some.

  To hear Doug tell it, the forum had done things Doug could never pull off on his own. The first was the cessation of all helmet use. The feds bankrolled most neural-interface research, like Doug's own NSF grants. NIT sponsors across government had saluted the forum's recommended suspension. Companies got the message that any continuation with private resources would doom all future funding or contracts. The projects on indefinite hold included Doug's own prosthetics effort; he'd hustled to reassign all his staff, including Cheryl, to other business units within BSC.

  Doug's and Cher
yl's private queries of SIGNIT members had been met mostly with disingenuousness and dissembling. NIT research could lead eventually to a paradigm shift in computing and many billions in profits. FBI agents got answers where Doug and Cheryl encountered evasion. The toll was even higher than Jim's friends had feared: fourteen dead, eight driven incommunicative and insane—

  And one, Sheila Brunner, still unaccounted for. That, Jim thought, is the elephant in the room no one will acknowledge. He tucked in his dress shirt. "And if this Sheila Brunner also decides to go after a nuclear plant?"

  "There are no guarantees," Doug said, "but the FBI thinks they have that covered. Her picture has been sent to every power plant and nuclear-defense facility in the country. If she tries to pull a Zimmerman, she will be recognized—not that anyone is offering power-plant tours after that incident. The smart money says she's dead or amnesiac or otherwise incapacitated."

  Jim picked a tie from the rack mounted on the door. "I don't like it." My friend, you are way too trusting. "You told me she did intel stuff?"

  "Highly classified stuff, that's right."

  Hmm. There was a marinara-sauce spot on the tie he had selected. Jim grabbed another. "Isn't fingerprinting part of the clearance process? If she were incapacitated or dead, surely a hospital or medical examiner somewhere would have taken her prints to ID her." His naive buddy stiffened in his chair. Hadn't thought of that, had you? "It seems to me your Dr. Brunner must still be somewhat functional to elude the cops and the FBI.

  "Now what do you suppose she has planned?"

  Doug sat in his house, pensive after lunch at Jim's. Perhaps his old buddy had a point: A paranoid could have enemies.

  Too bad Doug couldn't be diverted by the novelty of Cheryl's pleasant company. She planned to work all weekend, getting up to speed on the non-NIT project to which she had been reassigned.

  What if Sheila Brunner was in hiding? That would be scary, FBI assurances notwithstanding. Despite his own no-nukes brain damage, Zimmerman had functioned well enough to plan an attack. He had acted normal enough for admittance to the public tour of a nuclear plant. Mental hijacking did not preclude another assault from being as—or more—ingenious.

  And had the FBI alerts been distributed widely enough? Doug recalled Bob Cherner's hysteria at the sketch of an atom: Would any reference to the word "nuclear" set off Sheila? Say, a hospital with a nuclear-medicine department? A class on nuclear physics?

  Whatever she was going to do ... why hadn't she done it already? The other unfortunates had all died or been stricken many weeks ago.

  He stiffened. Damn, but assumptions are dangerous things. The FBI guys had given Doug their mobile phone numbers. "Ted, when did our missing friend go missing?"

  "Twelve days ago. Why do you ask?"

  "Probably nothing. Let me think something through, and I'll get back to you."

  Did it mean anything? Many people were careless about computer hygiene. It would be simple to believe that Sheila Brunner was the victim of sloppiness in updating antivirus definitions as much as of no-nukes. Too bad Cheryl wasn't here to talk this through with.

  Twelve days ago. Doug went over to his home PC. What viruses were most prevalent twelve days ago? Many web sites published such data, including the forum's.

  His memory was correct: The biggest was Frankenfools, a rant against biotech—and a simple hack of no-nukes.

  With a shiver of premonition, he did a "people search" on Sheila Brunner. She lived about ten miles away. No longer, of course—the FBI would surely have her place under j surveillance—but if she had lived nearby, she presumably worked nearby, and she had disappeared from her office. Chances were she was still somewhere in this area.

  The largest biotech company in the county was BioSciCorp.

  Beep beep beep.

  Doug cursed at the fast-busy tone he was hearing. He had known BSC's phone system was getting an upgrade this weekend but not how long service would be interrupted. He tried Cheryl's mobile but only got her voice mail. The mobile phone was probably in her purse in her office, while she was off in a lab. She wasn't logged into Instant Messenger. He shot a message to her office e-mail address, not that he could count on her to read it.

  From his car, Doug called back Ted Benson, and got voice mail this time. Doug had no better luck with Benson's partner. The second time, Doug took the option to be rung through to a Bureau operator. "Track them down!" Doug demanded. He left his mobile number as, horn blaring, he ran a red light.

  Careening into the BSC parking lot, he jolted over a speed bump. A microprocessor misunderstood the jarring; his prosthesis decided on its own to jerk the steering wheel violently to the right. The car spun, tires squealing. Over and over Doug saw scattered lights on in the office building and a trench-coated woman getting out of an SUV. His car slammed broadside into a parked minivan.

  Doug's last thought as he blacked out was that one of the lit offices was Cheryl's.

  Sheila turned in confusion at the unexpected noises. She didn't hear well these days. Had she ever? There was a car in the lot she didn't remember, crumpled against a minivan. That explained the noises.

  "Do not alter the human genome," thundered the voice in her head. "Death to the Frankenfools."

  It was hard to think with that constant shouting. Did the newly arrived car matter? "Death to the Frankenfools."

  She lost interest in the smashed car, the bidding of the voice ever insistent. A bulky object in her coat pocket slapped against her side. The parking lot was almost empty; her sport-ute was parked close to the Frankenfools building. Soon, she thought at her voice. It continued its oration, unimpressed.

  Sirens sounded in the distance. Were they approaching? Feet pounded in the lot, weekend guards running to the accident.

  "The human form is not to be tampered with. This folly must stop." She could recite the litany verbatim, if only to her mind's ear. The sirens were getting closer.

  Sheila hastened across the parking lot, reaching for the box in her pocket as she strode.

  Doug woke into a familiar nightmare, although the side-impact air bag had taken the brunt of the crash. His door would not open. A turn signal was ticking.

  "Sir, are you all right?" It was one of a pair of building guards. "Don't move. I've called an ambulance."

  Doug shrugged off his seat belt and slid to the passenger side. That's where the guards stood. His side of the car was crunched against a minivan. "Move aside!"

  The woman in the trench coat was lurching away. Her coat was filthy, her hair matted. A homeless person, fleeing attention? Or a brilliant scientist driven insane by voices inside her head? The Lexus sport-ute argued for the latter. As Doug stumbled after her, she croaked inarticulately, wrestling with something tangled in her pocket.

  A guard recognized him. "Mr. Carey, sir. You shouldn't move."

  "Sheila!" he called, ignoring the advice. "Shei...la!"

  The woman turned, wild-eyed. She tugged frantically at something in her pocket. Fabric tore; a metallic box came loose. A whiplike appendage of the box snagged in the pocket lining; she ripped the—antenna?—free and it twanged straight. The box had a large button in its center. Twitching, muttering, she pointed the antenna at the row of parked vehicles nearest the BSC building. At her SUV.

  A radio remote control?

  "Bomb!" he called over his shoulder. He was so close. The sirens were almost here. "Sheila, wait! This isn't your plan; it's a computer virus." She paused in confusion, gurgling something interrogatory but unintelligible. "Remember your research." He leapt midsentence—not at her but at the trembling end of the aerial. His prosthesis closed around the tip of the antenna. Stay closed, he ordered the artificial limb. His grip was solid; a hard tug pulled the box from her hands as he belly-flopped into the asphalt.

  County police cruisers and an ambulance fishtailed into the lot. Each of the BSC guards held Sheila Brunner, barely, by an arm. A paramedic helped Doug to his feet; a county cop gingerly took the remote cont
rol from Doug. His head was ringing.

  In his peripheral vision, someone rushed from the BSC lobby. He turned his head: It was Cheryl. Investigating the sirens, perhaps. Her eyes goggled, taking in his battered appearance. She slipped an arm around his waist, supporting him as he slumped against her. "We need to get you to the ER," she said.

  A cop in his cruiser called for a bomb unit. More sirens were converging. Sheila Brunner sagged as a paramedic administered a sedative.

  Cheryl was safe. Sheila just possibly had been given a second chance. Doug looked at his wrecked car and smiled in satisfaction.

  The sun was not shining. Birds were not chirping. Only a megadose of painkillers kept Doug from aching head to toe.

  Life was good.

  He sipped from a mug of chicken soup. "This hits the spot."

  "I'm glad." Cheryl sat to his left, holding his good hand. "I am so glad." She wasn't talking about his opinion of her soup.

  "What did you tell Carla about this? I don't want her to worry about me."

  "Just the car accident part, and that you'll be okay." Silence stretched as he finished the soup and set down the mug.

  "Doug?"

  Did she feel the awkwardness, too? Had their relationship, if that was what they had, turned a comer? He no longer remembered how to find these things out. "What?"

  "You can do something else. I can do something else. I just hate that the field will go under—it had such potential. We'll never be rid of all viruses. Why would anyone risk using a neural interface ever again?"

  He bent his right elbow, raising the prosthesis. The wrist swiveled and flexed; the fingers curled one at a time into a fist and then individually back open again. "Because, with suitable precautions, it's the right thing to do. We don't let viruses, and the fools that write them, prevent us from using computers. We won't let them keep us from other progress. You wondered what our department's next project would be, since prosthetics are on hold.... I think we've found it: defenses we can trust."