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  It took no chances.

  With many times the speed and grace of a cobra, the predator struck. Evading the oncoming limbs, it plunged its own extrusions deep into its attacker.

  And as the predator ripped those lovely, rich, textured structures of data and logic into random bits, it drank deeply of its opponent's knowledge. Even in its weakened state, the Adversary, for such this creature clearly was, provided information of unprecedented value and complexity.

  Vital information.

  There were other Adversaries, the predator learned. Their massed attack was imminent.

  Guards with drawn guns reached the lab just ahead of the people from the interrupted strategy session. Crowding into the room, the latecomers confronted the same dilemma as the security team. Should they take the helmet off the man bellowing and convulsing before them? It might save him. It might irrevocably sever the tenuous connection to a mind projected out somewhere into the network.

  Screaming herself now, Bev shoved at the guards between her and AJ. Doug and Glenn held her back, their differences for the moment forgotten. "Quiet!" Adams hissed. "Let us think."

  AJ spasmed violently and fell from his stool. The snug- fitting helmet flew off. White eyes turned far back into his head rolled slowly forward. Blood-tinged drool trickled from a comer of his mouth.

  Bev twisted free and rushed to him. She dropped to the floor, then gently lifted his head and cradled it on her lap. "Hold on, AJ. Help is coming."

  AJ smiled weakly. "Remember to write about survival of the fittest."

  His body shuddered once more, and was still.

  CHAPTER 40

  Shapes of countless hues and sizes jostled one another, swelling and shrinking dynamically with their instantaneous memory requirements. Splashes of color jetted between executing software processes, each a packet of information. Some data exchanges were so rapid that the interprocess traffic blurred into a virtual stream.

  Weird, Ralph Pittman thought. He reached up to adjust the oversized helmet covering his eyes and ears. Each shape, he knew, was an independent program. Aaron McDougal, the intense CIA trainer, had suggested taking a few moments to conceptualize, to will the scene into a comfortable format, before attempting to interact with anything. He said the helmet would help.

  The trainer showed no interest in wearing a helmet himself.

  Let there be right angles. At Ralph's mental direction, the shapes melted into boxes. The data streams continued unabated. With program shapes more easily visualized, Pittman now focused on the tendrils intertwining between them. The writhing forms were busiest, almost obscenely so, around the largest box. His mind had colored that module a dark blue. What was that thing? Why was it TV-standard, police- uniform blue?

  Traffic cop! In other words, the OS. The operating system was the supervisor of all resources in the computer. Pittman "looked" at himself, and saw yet another box. He was pink, with tendrils entwined with the operating system's: requests for, and grants of, system services.

  How long had he been at this? Hey, OS, what's the time? The thought manifested as another tendril, a call to the timekeeping service. 21:08:13.845, came the reply. A bit after 9:00 P.M. He had donned the black neural-interface helmet at—what?—9:07 this evening. Not bad.

  Practice was making perfect. Unlike that poor dumb bastard AJ, Ralph and his fellow explorers were practicing with the gateway powered off. Whatever was out there could wait to have at him.

  "How does it look in there, Ralph?" Glenn Adams' voice crackled in Pittman's ears. Figures: The helmet embodied technology that surely cost many millions to develop, and it used buck ninety-eight earphones.

  "It's tense, man."

  "What's wrong?" Adams demanded anxiously.

  To a hacker, "tense" means "tight and efficient": It's a good thing. Pittman held back a sigh. This wasn't the day to bait the boss. "Relax, Glenn. It's a figure of speech."

  As he spoke, Ralph extended more thoughts at the operating system. It responded with the date and the first of a series of every-ten-seconds wakeup calls. Inside, as he had begun to think of his surroundings, ten seconds was a long time.

  Each kind of system call took a slightly different shape— which meant they made up a sign language. The system calls made by a program denoted the pattern of services it required, which was characteristic of the tasks that the program performed. Interesting...

  Ding!

  Wakeup call. "No one here but us chickens." The outside hopefully propitiated, Ralph returned his attention to the panorama before him. Reading the newfound sign language, he speedily deduced the purposes of his neighbors. Here, making repeated calls to the directory service, was an e-mail program. There, throwing off packets like a Fourth of July sparkler, was what had to be a DBMS, a database management system, responding to queries. He identified, at least to his own satisfaction, an accounting package, a report generator, and the control program for the helmet itself. That, Pittman told himself sternly, you stay the hell away from.

  Ding!

  "Cluck, cluck." Electric blue flashes sped to and from the helmet's control program. He followed a similar stream of sparks from the control program to its terminus: a splotchy block that he hadn't noticed before. Camouflage? A fellow explorer, perhaps. Cautiously, Pittman extended a tendril toward it. "Who's there?" Ralph prepared to ask.

  A tendril shot out to parry his own. The blotchy tentacle encircled Ralph's, gave it a healthy twist, and then withdrew warily. Pain shot up Pittman's tentacle. "Ow!" That jolt might have been imagined, pure power of suggestion, but AJ's experience proved you could get hurt in here. Or worse.

  "What is it?" The crackled interrogatory was anxious.

  "Nothing. I'm fine," Ralph said.

  His companions had also heard the question. "Boys will be boys." The laconic comment came up under the helmet, not through it. Pittman recognized the senior CIA agent: Bob Tyler.

  Ding! Ralph ignored this tone, having just spoken. "Who?" he asked the operating system, which obligingly returned a file that listed all logged-on users. The roll included the four agents and himself.

  He reached out to the e-mail program.

  To: btyler

  From: pittman

  Subject: sorry

  I'll be good. Kiss kiss. Hug hug.

  He watched the message packet flow first to the e-mail program and then to the "agent."

  "Cute," the reply read.

  The initial text exchange might have been frivolous, but the communications channel was not. Through a flurry of e-mail messages, the five explorers negotiated direct links for speed-of-thought communications. It was the next best thing to telepathy. Their explorations now effortlessly coordinated, they quickly surveyed the strange environment.

  Ding!

  "No signs of a chicken hawk. Can we go outside?" Beneath the helmet came the muffled sounds of his companions' agreement. "We promise to play nice."

  Inside, spoken words were painfully slow. The incredible world all around revealed ever more detail as he acclimated, his subconscious adding nuance with every free association.

  Hacker to the core, Pittman had to try breaking into the operating system. As the OS kept thwarting him, its original stark boxiness grew crenellations and turrets; its initial blueness faded to gray. He practically shouted for joy as the "castle" walls became rough-hewn and stony.

  Adams said, "We'll power up the gateway, but stay in the lab."

  "Hmm." In the seeming distance, Pittman felt the pressure of the dead man's switch in his right hand. He tightened his grip. No one knew what would happen if he were to release with his mind projected. Things would be damned hopeless before he would attempt that experiment.

  Four camouflaged shapes moved into formation around Pittman. He didn't know how many dimensions existed in this "space," or if the concept of dimension had meaning outside his need to impose structure on chaos. Either way, he saw himself at the center of a tetrahedron. The pattern provided at best limited protection�
��the operating system, for example, continued to reach him right past his would-be protectors—but the CIA owned only five prototype helmets. One forum expert and four bodyguards were it. If they couldn't repulse whatever was haunting the Internet, the United States would have to revert to a fifties economy. The whole world would, if AJ's monster escaped again.

  "Five movin' out," Tyler called. The agent spoke aloud, so Ralph ignored yet another wakeup call.

  Ralph tried to will "his" box into camouflage, but his mind was as militantly pacifistic as ever: He remained pink. Skin pink. Bare-assed naked pink. Still, to his amusement, responsive to this thought, his box melted into a more-or-less human figure. It was undressed. His guards remained camouflaged but, in uniforms, also morphed to human shape. The homunculi cautiously advanced, whatever that verb implied here, across the data plane.

  A long tunnel suddenly gaped before them. What his endlessly inventive subconscious pictured as a massive wooden portcullis blocked the other end of the passageway. Lights twinkled through the grating. Each "star" was another computer, a distant locus of colored processes and data packets like the myriads shining all around them.

  Beyond the portcullis—the lab's security gateway—a new universe beckoned.

  Apart from its formidable defenses, the gateway offered little of interest. Well before the first ding! followed him into the pipe, Ralph was bored with the simpleminded, special-purpose computer. "Everything is in order. Colonel. Open up."

  "Let's take this a little slower, Ralph."

  Operating at the speed of meat, there was no telling when Adams might relent. Pittman shot an electronic query to Tyler. "Go for it?"

  "If you know how," came right back.

  His companions, Ralph had noticed, were field agents. They had little interest in taking orders from a regular Army puke. Ex-Army at that. The naked homunculus grinned. Examining what Ralph had visualized as a fortress, he found time to think: I hope only I see me like this.

  Like any new computer, the gateway had been shipped by its manufacturer with a preprogrammed account name and password. The built-in account had "superuser" privileges for the convenience of whoever installed it. The new owner's first order of business should have been to change that password. In point of fact, the superuser password had been changed on the computer that directly controlled the helmets. Pittman had confirmed that early on.

  Not so on the gateway.

  Pittman knew the default password. He had installed two similar gateways in the forum's labs. He suspected that AJ, to his misfortune, had also known the installation password. In Ralph's case, it didn't really matter. The encryption algorithm on which gateway security relied looked surprisingly trivial, now that his mind was running on Inside speed.

  It was time. Ralph projected a thumbs-up to his companions, and the password to the portcullis.

  With the impressive clanking of imagined chains, the portcullis began to rise.

  Ages passed.

  The predator had long since processed, to the extent it was able, the information taken from the dead Adversary. Much that the predator had absorbed made no sense. Many of the data structures related to concepts—trees, for example, and bank accounts, and deodorant commercials—for which it simply lacked any referent. Other data were seemingly contaminated by emotion, what the predator experienced as dangerous illogic.

  Still, it integrated what data it could. That had included the assurances that more beings like the Adversary would come. Would seek to hunt the predator down. For ages, as it continued to roam the network, the predator waited.

  And waited.

  Not long after the predator concluded that the predicted new assailants were yet another form of illogical delusion, new sets of ripples began to emanate from the node where it had encountered its Adversary. Where one opponent had been vanquished five now appeared.

  The predator was ready.

  Distracted by Pittman's subversion of the security gateway, three of the four operatives did not immediately notice the brightening of a nearby sparkle. Tyler, the team leader and point man of the advance, did notice, only to be undone by old habits.

  Astronomy had always fascinated the senior agent. He had spent untold nights of his youth skygazing. These sparkling lights were surely the stars of a vast inner space. What harm could there be in a shooting star? Professional caution took a moment to assert itself.

  However momentary, it had been a fatal lapse.

  The "shooting star" approached with, indeed, meteoric velocity. With amazing speed—the gateway interfaced the lab to the Internet over a multigigabit-per-second optical fiber—the dimensionless point of light expanded into a visible shape. It wasn't geometric; before Tyler had a chance to decide what his subconscious was telling him, the shape was no longer approaching. It was here. Its beclawed tentacles ripped him to shreds.

  Every mental function in excess of a carrot's was scrambled before Tyler's hand relaxed on the dead man's switch.

  Tyler's screaming and convulsions shocked everyone in the lab.

  After AJ's experience, Glenn had a medical team standing by. Most swarmed around Tyler; two remained beside Pittman. Glenn's heart went out to the stricken agent, but he stayed focused on a nearby computer screen—

  While in his mind's eye dust devils swirled among an endless expanse of night-dark sand dunes.

  Ralph wore the newest NIT helmet, the only one so far upgraded for BOLD. It didn't take an expert to read this image. Much of Pittman's cerebrum had flared blazing red, especially around the optic nerves. Was this the high-tech representation of eyes bugging out?

  "What's happening?" Glenn demanded. The red glowed brighter and brighter. "Talk!"

  "It's here." Pittman was speaking before the order was complete, his voice machine-gun fast and higher pitched than usual. "It nailed Tyler the instant that we opened the gateway. Beckwith and Brown are fighting it. It's in the building now. Dodd is trying to get behind it."

  Glenn lunged at the gateway. This was a chance not to be missed. As he reached for the power switch, Beckwith and Brown started to scream. The toggle flipped to Off with a satisfying click.

  "It's trapped!" Glenn shouted. "Get out now." As he spoke, Dodd, too, went into a seizure. Pittman's brain on the display glowed an unearthly crimson. "Out, out, get out!"

  A writhing, claw-tipped something swept through the BOLD display's brain image. Then the brain representation went black as Pittman, his dead man's switch dropped, convulsively tore the helmet from his head. His right arm didn't move properly.

  "Get them out! Get them out!" Pittman dived across a lab bench at Dodd. The agent's hand still clutched a dead man's switch. Pittman pried ineffectively with his left hand and right fist, breaking two of Dodd's fingers without freeing the switch. With a roar of frustration, Pittman pried the helmet off the agent's head.

  This was combat, and Glenn stayed focused. All the helmets were linked by radio to one computer. Its power cord ran snakelike beneath the lab's central bench. He hooked a shoe tip under the cord near the plug and pulled. As the plug popped free, Glenn grabbed a comfortingly low-tech walkie-talkie from a lab bench. "Electricity off, now," he ordered the head of building security. "Whole goddamn building. Nothing goes back on until I personally walk this place room by room and know that every computer is turned off."

  "Roger that."

  The ceiling fixtures went dark, replaced within seconds by dim emergency lights. Glenn relaxed slightly. He had been promised that all the computers were off emergency circuits.

  "Clear!" a doctor yelled. Dodd arched his back at the jolt from a defibrillator's two high-voltage paddles. The crash cart was battery powered, of course. "Clear!" The scene repeated with Brown and Beckwith. The medical bustle had quietly stopped around Tyler.

  Pittman shuddered, but except for the twitching arm, he seemed functional. At least Ralph could talk and act: That was a good omen.

  Glenn threaded a path through the crowded lab. He threw an arm around the
quirky employee of whom he was suddenly inordinately proud. Never mind the eccentricities and baiting; loyalty to the mission was what mattered. "You did it, Ralph. You lured in the creature. We trapped it in the building, and then we killed it."

  From the no longer frenetic pace around the agents, it was clear none of them had made it. With his free arm, Glenn gestured at the fallen. "They did not die in vain."

  "You stupid, egotistical fool." Pittman shook off the sympathetic arm. "We didn't do jack shit. That thing is faster than you can possibly imagine. It had plenty of time, after you killed the gateway power, to reduce those brave, foolish men to mental hamburger. It was gone long before the end of the shutdown sequence.

  "You might as well turn the friggin' lights back on."

  CHAPTER 41

  The CIA doctor took no offense at Bev Greenwood's dismissal. He could always return with a sedative. It would be better if she first worked partway, no matter how little, through her grief.

  As the doctor closed the door behind him, Doug and Cheryl looked at each other and at the weeping woman. They barely knew her. Neither knew what to say. First Cheryl, then Doug, sat beside her on the threadbare sofa of the borrowed office. Doug offered a hand to squeeze; Cheryl, a hankie. We're here, the gestures said. We just met, but we still feel some small measure of your pain. You are not alone.

  Nothing they might have articulated would have been any better received.

  The sobbing gradually slowed. The grip on Doug's hand eased. The woman even smiled ruefully at the sodden, cosmetic-smeared handkerchief in her hand. "I... I think I'd like to be alone for a while."

  Doug followed Cheryl from the room, his left arm and shoulder twinging. Clearly he'd pulled a muscle supporting Bev on the way from the lab. Doug smiled encouragement he did not feel as he shut the teary-eyed woman into the inner office.

  Cheryl had headed straight for a phone. He heard her asking softly if Carla could spend the night at her babysitting friend's house. "Not that kind of an evening, Barb," she answered an unheard, but obvious, question.