1
Netwalk’s Children
CHAPTER ONE
Bess Fielding surveyed the simulated urban war zone in front of her. A 20th century-era tank lumbered around a blocky gray wall as her sensors warned her that their foes crept up behind them.
“Block it, block it, block it!”she yelled at Alex Jeffreys. “Don’t you dare let Don and Sophie beat us to this one—ah!” Alex wheeled to lay down a warning fireline behind them to back off pursuit. Bess found the shortcut code in her visual overlays that she had been seeking that would allow her consciousness to integrate fully with the virtual digital world without uploading, as long as she stayed in the dataglobe. She twisted, stretching into virtual, and traced the links through digital space to locate their target, yanking Alex after heras she jumped virtual space to reach it. Centered her sights. Clucked to crank up the volume of both the pew-pew-pew shooting sound and the bass-heavy speed death metal background music. Then she fired her blaster. The 20th century era tank exploded with a satisfying BOOM, momentarily drowning out the music. Virtual shards spilled past Bess and Alex and faded as they intersected the limits of the hologlobe. Several pieces clattered harmlessly against Bess’s armor, disappearing as they hit. Bess pulled herself and Alex out of virtual and back into their bodies.
GAME OVER flashed around them. The globe faded away to reveal the stark lines of the practice room around them as well as their opponents.
“Yes!” Alex gave Bess a rare grin. “Take that big bro!” he added, smirking at his older brother Don. “Worth a little vertigo at the end when you yanked me outta body, Bess. But you’ve gotta smooth out that virtual transition. Your Security backup won’t be any good if we’re dizzy and puking on arrival in real life.”
“Bess, you slime, you’re cheating!” scoldedSophie Morley-Garcia, pushing back an unusually errant strand of black hair that had worked free from the tight French braid favored by the longer-haired Security staffof Do It Right. “You went into Netwalk, didn’t you? That tank’s not supposed to be this easy to find and blow otherwise.”
Bess shrugged. “In a real fight there’s no rules. Especially in virtual. Isn’t that what you told me last week?”
“True,” Sophie conceded. “But you’ve got to work your way through the steps without resorting to Netwalk tricks first. Netwalk can backfire on you fast, so you need to know what to do without it before you try stuff like this with it. That’s what your mother told me when I was first training.”
Bess opened her mouth to object and then thought better of it. She had been shortcutting because the sim was getting boring. Usually, she followed the rules, simply because by now she knew the truth of what Sophie said.
Today just didn’t feel like a day for following rules, though. She worked her head from side to side to loosen her neck muscles. Something was making her tense. What? She had no new reason to worry. Her mother had murmured a surprised comment at how high her end-of-semester scores had been—Bess’s scores outstripped her mother Melanie’s at thesame age—and her father’s health was improving after his heart attack. She had a couple of weeks free before the next high school session started up. Plenty of time to work on practical applications of her studies. Just not the application she’d wanted. Her crèche cohort had planned two weeks shadowing Station Ops at Do It Right 1, Bess’s favorite of the DIR space stations, a 300-person chip production facility in high Earth orbit. All this semester she’d been training for the DIR 1 shadow command, the first step toward her future goal of leading Do It Right space operations.
Then today’s hack at Caspian Station had wiped out those plans entirely. At least it hadn’t been because her father’s health had taken a turn for the worse. Maybe they could still salvage part of that training exercise if the all clear came soon enough. With any luck, the all clear would come soon so that she and the rest of her crèche cohort could still do some of the shadowing they had planned.Mom hadn’t ruled that possibility out entirely. So why did she suddenly have that far-too-familiar jangly edged impression of wrongness, a sense that everything could go suddenly sideways?
“Netwalk or no, that’s one of the best scores ever for all age groups,” Don said, frowning as he studied an overlay scrolling in front of him. “Bess didn’t use Netwalk to speed up tracking until the very end, and not full virtual, either.” He snapped his fingers to close the overlay. “Damn, Bess, you sure you’re not gonna try to swing a Security majorwhen you finish high school instead of Management? There’s qualified Security who can’t score this well, and you’ve just started the Netwalk mixed training sessions.”
“As if.” Bess refocused on her blaster, skimming through the shutdown checks and protocols for renewal and recharging. “Security won’t get me to space.Management will.”
“There’s Security routes to space,” Sophie said. “You think we’re going to let you go up there alone?”
“Not for me because of who I am,” Bess said. “Any more Security training and they’ll find an excuse to tie me down here.”
“True,” Sophie conceded.
Don looked unconvinced. “You could combine the two.”
“I am doing that,” Bess said, rolling her eyes. “It’s just the minor. Besides, I’ve got a year to go before I finalize it. Plenty of time.”
“You think Melanie and my mom would let Bess go to space if she trains in Security?” Sophie scoffed. “Don, love you but you’re dumb about some of this stuff.”
“Politics.”
“It’s not Melanie that would keep Bess back from going into space,” Alex said quietly. “It’s Diana.”
The mention of Bess’s grandmother silenced them for a moment.
Then Bess forced a laugh. “Come on, how much does a game score correlate to real action? Training game, true. God knows I don’t have the detail skills to swing Security in space.”
“You and your space.” Don shook his head. “Think your mother will ever let you off the planet again after what happened at Caspian today?”
“Caspian’s not DIR 1,” Alex said. “I doubt Melanie would let any of us fly Troubadour to the space stations, even before that com failure.”
Thank you, Alex. Bess tapped the storage code into her blaster. It faded away, ready for further virtual use should she need it. Habits. Patterns. Routines she needed to practice for space.
Routines she needed to practice for days when the world babbled and spun around her because of the gadget, though that hadn’t happened often for the last several months, after she got her Netwalk implant. Oh, the whatchamacallit—one of the many roundabout terms they used for the Gizmo—had poked at her. But nothing too frequent until this past week, and certainly nothing as strong as what she had just felt.Could be a warning that today couldbe one of those times when her world needed frameworks to separate meat life from virtual life.
“That’s assuming only Troubadour shuttles running through Caspian were affected by the hack,” Sophie said. She tapped her fingertips and an overlay in yellow text popped up in front of her. She ran her right index finger down the overlay. “I’d have to wonder.”
“Caspianis the only station that’s affected, not the others,” Bess sighed. “Targeted. Look closer at the tracks.“ She called up her access to Sophie’s overlay and scrolled down to the intruder link. “Damn it, I’m locked out. Saw more details when I looked earliertoday. Maybe it’s because I’m not globed right now.”
Alex leaned over her shoulder. “No, not a globe issue. See that code? Your mother’s lockout. You’ve not studied that code level yet. I’d say they’ve put a Netwalker on it with that lock level. Sorry, kid.”
She frowned at him. “Since when did you get the right to call me kid?”
Don laughed. “Somebody’s getting notions above himself at the ripe old age of eighteen and a half, bro. There’s only what? Three and a half year’s difference between you two?”
“Three years, two months, one week, three days, ten hours, thirty-five minutes and two and nine-tenths seconds,” Bess answered, distracted as the wrongness poked at her again. More than tension. Her skin crawled and she fought back an instinct to run.Patterns. That’s what is real. Focus on your patterns. But she needed to identify this wrongness to be certain. She tapped her wrist controls to bring her datasuit to full power and expand a hologlobe around her for protection.
“Bess?” Alex’s voice sounded very far away as she twisted into virtual again,blinking up her personal Netwalk virtual links. A metallic taste spread across her tongue. She wasn’t imagining this. <Bess?> he speeched, using digital Netwalk subvocal communication protocols which were a virtual version of oral speech.
<Something’s wrong,> she answered back in Netwalk subvocals, concentrating on that tiny thread of wrongness. Belatedly, she called up her virtual guise for better protection, half-formed as yet. She wanted her central avatar to reflect her Kalapuyan Native American heritage, which required getting non-digital family pictures from her father’s family records. Once she was sixteen she could petition for tribal recognition in her own right using her DNA, and gain access. He had agreed to the enrollment process for Bess, but his health interfered. Without those images, Bess chose to wait to do more than the basics. It was worth delaying to create what she wanted for her base.
<Show me.> His virtual voice strengthened and his chosen virtual guise, that of an archangel with sword strapped to his side, appeared next to her.
She took his hand to show him her trace. The coppery flavor grew stronger in her mouth as they began to traverse virtual space and she started to quiver. No. I will not let that—thing—do this to me again!
But even as she and Alex focused on that one small wisp, it disappeared, leaving a bitter tang in her mouth.
<What was that?> Alex asked, surveying their virtual environment.
She took her time to answer, scanning the bright multi-colored flashes of dataflow around her. The vague sense of menace faded away, leaving only the sour aftertaste that followed these incidents.
<Nothing. I guess.>
He nodded. <Stand down?>
<I’d say so.>
<Lead us back.>
She noticed that despite her comment about standing down, Alex wore his archangel guise as they retreated back to their bodies in the hologlobe, rather than returning to his non-Security guise.
Wasn’t just my imagination. He picked up on the trace too.
That wasn’t a comforting thought about the device she dared not think about by the name it had been given.Report as an anomalous phenomenon? she asked herself.
No, she decided. “I’m not going to say anything about that last bit,” she told Alex as she stretched, reminding her consciousness of the parameters of her meat self. Not everyone had to reorient themselves as aggressively as she did when returning from full-body Netwalk, and maybe after a few more months getting used to her chip, she’d be the same. “Not until we know more.”
He frowned. “You sure?”
“At some point we have to manage these situations ourselves,” Bess said, trying to project a confidence she didn’t really feel.
Can’t always go running to Mama when things go wrong in virtual, especially after Dad’s heart attack. I don’t want to worry them. It’s not that bad.
Yet.
“Hey! You two are gonna be last to dinner if you don’t get moving!” Sophie yelled. “Shut off the hologlobe and let’s go! Real steak tonight!”
Alex snapped the hologlobe closed. “Won’t be last to dinner if I can help it,” he said, switching off his datasuite.
Bess tapped off her datasuit and slowly followed Alex into the hallway that led to the cafeteria which served all the crèche cohorts.
The gadget shouldn’t have reached her here, in the training wing. Supposedly the wing was heavily shielded. That she’d felt its presence didn’t bode well for her future plans. At the moment, its reach didn’t extend to space, but who knew if that would continue to be the case? She’d never get off of Earth as anything more than a tourist if she didn’t develop better shielding and better protection strategies independent of external shields and the protections of others. Everyone had to cope with the Gizmo, but not everyone had her extreme sensitivity to it. She had to fix that reactivity, or accept the limitations of Earth.
Not an acceptable alternative.
~0~
Later that night, Melanie Fielding rubbed her eyes and leaned back in her office chair, snapping down her hologlobe to energy saving mode while she took a break to consider what she’d just discovered.I’m getting too old for this Security save-the-world crap.She blinked up the clock. One A.M.Far too late to be tracking down that rogue hacker who’d spoofed Caspian Station communications guidance systems, even though she now knew did it. Certainly not the optimal time to have to think about the politics thisfinding had just uncovered.
The Caspian Station hack wasn’t malevolent, fortunately. Just a kid playing games. Still, any interference in a com control system like Troubadour’s meant problems. Despite the warnings from Melanie and her husband Marty, Gerard Montcrief kept insisting that Troubadour didn’t need the secured arrangements Melanie required for her Do It Right com programs.
He might have a different opinion after this incident.
And the identity of the kid hacker was hugely problematic, even more volatile than the hack itself. For once the hacker wasn’t one of the Freedom Army anarchists seeking to shut down the High Space consortium of high Earth orbit industrial stationsand free the destructive machine known as Gizmo that also empowered the digital online advances of the past forty years. This kid was harmless, had apparently ventured beyond the bounds as part of a game or a dare.
Correction. The kid would be harmless, if it wasn’t for who he was.
Richard Stephens. My nephew. Andrew’s boy.Her mother Diana, well established as the New American Federation ambassador to the Corporate Courts for the past fifteen years, would blow a gasket once she knew this. Would argue to the Courts that something had to be done to restrain Richard in the future. Would advocate for removal of the special circumstances that kept Richard from the Courts and the resulting required exposure to Gizmo’s influence. Might even argue that such treatment be extended to Richard’s sister Christina and Melanie’s daughter Bess. For a very brief moment Melanie flirted with the notion of signing off and telling her mother about her discovery in the morning, after a few hours’ sleep. Curl up with Marty and reassure herself that he was all right.
No. By morning Mom’s pet hackers will have fingered Richard.She couldn’t leave her mother to develop her own conclusions and a solution to this incident without input. Like Melanie, her brother Andrew had chosen to resist the dictates of the Corporate Courts which required the leadership of its corporate members to expose their infant children to the thing—the Gizmo—that the Courts had been created to guard. Ostensibly the exposure was required to ensure epigenetic modifications that would allow for more effective digital communication links as well as control over Gizmo.
Bess hadn’t received that exposure. After Gizmo tried to kill Bess before she was a week old, Melanie had pulled out of the Courts except for technical consults. After his son’s first Gizmo exposure resulted in temporary behavior and language regressions, Andrew chose to follow Melanie’s lead, refusing to expose either of his children to it. As a result, his Stephens Reclamation participated in the Courts as a lesser entity, despite their mother’s high position.Diana had reluctantly accepted their withdrawal.
Richard’s actions threatened that acceptance.
And then there’s our Netwalker grandmother, who’s found a way to pester us after death. Sarah probably knew that Richard was the culprit. Would she tellDiana? The Netwalker-host relationship between Sarah and Diana was particularly poisonous. Sarah might tell Diana that Richard did it, or she might not, depending on her mood and whether she was angrier with Diana or Andrew at this particular moment. Or Melanie.