The Path Read online

  Over the now active sirens, as the intonation of Mary’s voice faded with “5 seconds . . .” you could hear the lockdown commence and the lights flicker out. 10 floors to go, in darkness. Emergency lighting was no match for a system lockdown. The fire doors and security procedures were always perfect in these newer buildings. Only one door was open to us now, and that was the exit onto 56th street, a metal door with a mechanical lock only, no system control, just human contact, a push and we would be through.

  There were no screams from below us, only those from above. Somebody had gotten hold of a portable loudhailer below us and instructions were shouted up the well “Keep calm, walk slowly, 15 steps to each floor, count them and you’ll be on the next landing. Turn left and start again, make your way down silently. Only someone in trouble should speak.” This was repeated twice and then the only sounds were the shuffle of shoes on the metal and an occasional oath as someone fell or banged a shin. Light loomed below.

  On the first landing I pause, letting people in the dim light from below pass by, secure in the knowledge that there is no emergency now beyond that first need to evacuate to the stairwell. I wanted to count the people exiting. As one of the most senior people in the building it was maybe a responsibility, I wasn’t sure. I also knew the Police, or worse, would be waiting to interview everyone to find out what had happened. All thoughts pointed to me, something I had caused. Oh, I knew what I had done, but not what it had provoked or why. What was an event 2? What the hell was in Tom’s data file that could affect WeatherGood’s backup program that could, in turn, somehow infect the main system of the building? How in hell were the two linked? They were on separate platforms, separate systems, separate operational formats. Hell, they weren’t even supposed to be LANed, hooked up, wired, fibered, beamed, micro waved, nothing. Separate. Alone. Safe.

  Obviously not.

  People had left. I was alone, the dim light coming under the now-shut door below. I was feeling totally guilty by this time, the full awareness that I had, somehow, caused all this. But how? I walked the last steps down, a man walking the last steps to execution, a down path instead of up to the guillotine I had read about in Tale of Two Cities. Far, far better thing? Hardly. Far, far dumber thing, perhaps. The end will be just as painful, for sure.

  I push open the door expecting police, someone to take me away. But no one was there. The street was empty, a last transport rounding the corner left eastwards onto 3rd and nothing was coming from Lex. Not a soul. No cops, no sirens, no ambulances, nothing. I walked west towards Lex, away from where they had gone. Need time to think.

  On the corner of Lexington there’s something I had seen rehearsed on the screens: mass evacuation, people flinging themselves into transports, blue cop cars, orange vans, green garbage trucks, every type of vehicle was there creating the first traffic jam in years.

  What? How? How could my building system problem suddenly become a city-wide problem? Boy was I screwed. But how? My job was off the System, how did this happen?

  No matter what, I knew this could only be, for me, very bad news.

  I watched the transports, especially the cop wagons. As soon as they had scooped up their full load, they wisped away in the wrong lanes, avoiding the traffic, at speed, destination unknown. I stood there, my blue slacks, crisp pale blue shirt, over-shoe covers in matching blue, mouth agape, shaking my head.

  A big guy saw me. He didn’t wave me over, he simply looked at his sleeve display, an overlarge model like the ones police use, and ambled over. By now he had my RFID reading, knew who I was. My small sleeve display shows his: Capt. Charles Cramer, SND. The Security Net Division were the System cops. He would, no doubt, be wanting to ask me a load of questions to which I had precious few answers. My neck is starting to itch in anticipation of a throat cuff. He must have sensed my unease. Who couldn’t?

  He sneered and did that cop thing of calling me by my last name. “Unfathomable, eh Bank? Quite a screw up. An event 2 and history is made. Tomorrow it had better be unwritten, fixed, as good as new. ’Til then, maybe only you and I—and I am Control here Bank—will know how and who. And maybe Mary, once she puts all the pieces together, can figure you did all this or maybe also Suze. No, she’s not that smart.” He paused, whether for breath, effect or simply to save brain cells to record the mass exodus we were witnessing for the sake of posterity, I can’t say. I can say the pause made me wonder if the boom was about to be lowered, finally. “Problem is, ’til then we may be the only ones who know how but we have no idea why and how. Coupled together, like two codes that fit perfectly, we—you and I—need to find the answer before we lose everything, the System, everything.” He growled my name, “Simon Bank, you and I have to figure this one out, quick, and fix it.”

  I said nothing.

  “You up to that, Bank?” He tapped his knuckles on my head and spoke to me as if I were a child, “Come on wakey, wakey.” No response, I was in overload. Somehow I had created all this mess and he wants me to fix it? What was it anyway, what’s an Event 2? Again, he seemed to read my mind.

  “Okay, let’s take this one step at a time. Stay focused here. Events are system breakdowns. Level 5 is a partial system failure, like the WeatherGood One event this morning. Catch that?” I nodded. “Good. Levels 4 and 3 are wider system failures, but at level 3 it means the main programs are all out but, still, only temporarily. No permanent damage done. You’ve given us a level 2 Event, thank you. The System’s broken, some damn thing’s permanently broken and needs to be put back or mended, or re-written by hand if need be. A level 1 Event would be complete destruction of life as we know it. For now, Level 2 only means the system is broken and nothing works, so far Eastern Seaboard only. It will rain when it is supposed to be sunny. There will be no food for a week or more. The transportation systems, except for the independently operated vehicles, won’t run. And the independently operated systems will soon run out of fuel. And so on. In a matter of days, if unchecked and un-fixed, a level 2 event is reclassified to Level 1, Eastern Seaboard and, like an unstoppable tide, it’ll spread across America. When it does, it’s dead, System, 0. Primitive, defenseless Nation 1. Sheep to the slaughter. Forever. Get it?”

  I nodded. Smiled a little, sheepish, but smiled. I was smiling at his euphemisms.

  He stopped; rage took pride of place on his face, he leaned in: “You did this.”

  Shocked, I cried, “No way! How?”

  “Knock it off. Look you son of a bitch, it’s you and me now. Or, maybe it will only be me left standing by tomorrow if you wimp out, but that’s all the time we have, get it? You need to tell me what you did, everything. If you don’t, I’ll drop you here and now.” He pulled back his jacket to reveal a stun gun, orange handle, the type you see on vids but hope never to come into contact with. They had two settings: Disable and Kill. You had to be a Certified Grade 1 cop to carry one. Licensed judge and executioner. “Come on, we’ll go in there, the Waldorf, I have a pass, there’s always some food out on a tray. We’ll sit and talk.” He stomped off. “Oh, and eat all you want. Your diet counter is off too. At least there’s that bit of good news.” And he set off at a brisk pace down Lex towards the Waldorf, with me following like a stray dog, not sure why, but feeling his way might be the only way to get out of this.

  CHAPTER 3

  WHAT I THOUGHT HAD GONE WRONG, HADN’T

  Sure enough, he’s got a hot pass and we’re in the downstairs lobby at the Waldorf, empty already, everyone’s bugged out. I had to ask the question.

  “Look, I get the need to evacuate the building if there’s a lockdown, same as a fire, the gas will kill you. But why the hell has everything, every building, been evacuated and why the hell is everyone bugging out?”

  “You saw the little event on 57th and 3rd this morning—another of your little fiascos by the way—that’s why. Who knows what will go wrong next.”

  “You mean something I did killed all those people?” I was screaming, “It can’t be, I’m on
a parallel system, it’s separate, completely isolated, a test bed only.”

  We had walked quickly, me following, always a pace behind. He walked like a man on a mission, knew where he was going. Upstairs now, in the main tearoom, he had found the cake trolley and was sampling each cake in turn with his finger, sticking it in, crooking it and removing a cross sample, dripping goo. Could his target be free cake? His attention to the pastries was focused and deliberate. A red dollop went into his mouth. He pulled a face and said to no one in particular “too damn sweet, it’s a strawberry shortcake for geek’s sake, not pudding.” Next he toyed with the chocolate cake, with brown dusting and harder icing. His hand was already a mess. He stuffed his mouth, without pleasure, simply devouring cake, icing and goo. He turned to me, “Look, idiot, if you’re going to tell me crap I already know, then you’re useless to me. I know more about what you did than you do. I’ve seen all the job data. The stint you pulled with Tom Makerman—who is, by the way, gunning for you big time. He’s one of us and not pleased at all. Not at all.” The chocolate was slurring his speech. “Okay, this one’s better. Try this one.”

  “No thanks.” I was preoccupied thinking over that Tom Makerman was “one of us,” Security Net Division. Undercover cop? Why?

  “I wasn’t asking if you wanted any.” Okay, so that’s the hard-ass he wanted to play . . . I took a fork from a table and took a chunk, avoiding his mangled half of the slice. “Get your own, asshole, there’s another trolley over there. Jeezus, ain’t it enough I got to deal with you? I got to share my cake as well?”

  I put the fork down, carefully, walked over to the other trolley, picked up the chocolate cake and took it back to him. “Here, start again, I’ll be happy with the one forkful.”

  “Suits me. So, tell me exactly, what you had in mind when you pulled that little substitution on Tom and the one you did on FarmHands and the WaterFlow and WeatherGood and the PowerCube systems. I want to know what you wanted to do, the why, what you thought about doing.”

  I thought. If he knew what I did, then why? . . . “My job, it’s my job . . .”

  He cut me off. “Screw your job. Don’t tell me what, tell me why, I need to know the why if we’re to salvage anything here.”

  “Here? In here? What can we do here? I need to get back to the office, to my dome—if it’s not going to kill me . . .”

  He raised a hand and his gaze stopped me cold. “Kill you? Explain.”

  “I went to stop the rogue runaway, and I don’t know what I did to cause it. As I touched the dome to my scalp it jolted me, knocked me flat, out cold, hundreds of volts, hung there crackling. Mary rescued me. That’s when I heard the lockdown countdown.”

  “All this is out of order.” He sat down, thinking, sucking his fingers. He had started on the second slice of cake, squeezing off bits and popping them in. He used his finger on the tablecloth, brown lines, counting off: “One, you altered code in the PowerCube program, subset swapping with WaterFlow, a false trail, causing minor damage—only one of repair. You did use one of your six little programs to match file size. Two, you tagged the tomato swap with Tom’s name. Three, his job data file was pulled by Control and, in doing so, they altered the FAT file on Central Records.” The FAT is a File Action Table, like a library card and Dewey Decimal System index for the memory of any computer. “When they put it back in, your little program came with it and screwed up his whole data file. Central Systems caught it and, to save the mainframe from crashing, it treated it like a virus and deleted Tom’s life. Tough for Tom.” He paused, “Four,” he wiped another grubby line on the crisp linen tablecloth, “you messed with WeatherGood One’s system to replicate a file, again matching size, and everything went berserk.”

  He sat there quietly, waiting to see if anything dawned on me, anything he had missed. “Yes, there’s something. You missed something.”

  “Aha, you see it now, do you? You reinserted Tom’s data file, a copy of the original. But what if the barriers were down between the two systems, what if the duplicate file already had your little algorithm inside and you ran the same algorithm again—as you stuffed it into the place of primary data in WeatherGood One’s system?”

  “Well, damn, it would measure the size discrepancy of the original file and grow to match that and, the second subset would then grow the file . . . it couldn’t wouldn’t stop until it hit buffering, processor or memory buffering.”

  “Yup, that’s what it did. But, somewhere in there you had also run a series of alterations, hadn’t you, another of your little programs, the one you like to label “Takeover.” Right?”

  “Well, I may have used that last week on the FarmHands mock program to take over supply control and feed control to itself, making Farmhands appear self-determining. That way it would appear to be following primary human logic, being self-determining, but in reality it was simply a cat chasing its tail, re-writing its own priorities as it went along. I was spotted in under 5 minutes by some gal in Chicago, as I remember.” I was beginning to see a pattern now, a horrifying one. What he was hinting at was that my programs were somehow able to transit over onto or, worse, stay resident on the Primary System even though I was working on the backup system, locked out, trial runs only, dummy files, etc. etc. At least that’s what I had been told.

  “Takeover saw your hand in Grow and joined forces.”

  “What? There’s no such thing as a self-determining algorithm, subset or program. It has to have been guided, put there, connected.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know. What I don’t know is critical here: Why did you do it Simon? What were you thinking?”

  “I wanted to screw up the System.” I said it before I thought about it. Big mistake. I should have said mock System.

  “I should drop you here, now, for that. I won’t. Yet. Listen,” he got up and moved around to counter to the coffee urn and poured a cup of coffee, “if you are right and your little two jewels—which are quite clever by the way, the boys uptown in the Control were impressed when they saw your use of old calculus to define a parameter of action for your algorithms, old-fashioned of you, but very stable they say coupled with some slick new coding—anyway, if your two little programs needed a human insert to intervene and then needed programming to act in tandem—and you didn’t do that—we need to find who did so and why, fast.”

  “But surely, all you have to do is create a worm to seek out and destroy them, and they’ll be useless. If they are behaving or being used as a virus to attack the system, surely we can create an anti-virus to stop them?”

  “Thought of that, the guys in the Control are doing that, or trying to, something’s screwing that up. But first off we need to know who and why. The Nation’s under attack here. People will die, how many will depend on what you and I can discover. Someone you know must have access to what you do, know your ways, your keys, passwords, access pathways. They left no trail except your own. You are, for the time being, the only suspect and can be the only suspect. The law says you go . . .” He flashed the gun again, “I push the button.”

  I was getting frightened again. Somehow, chaos all around me or not, I didn’t really want to die, not just yet. She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed might be happy though. I thought about that. I had never been found guilty before, of anything. Well, stupidity sometimes, but illegal? Never. But She? Is she the only one I’ve ever talked, all the way through, about what I do?

  “What, what are you thinking about? Your wife, Bank? Forget it. She’s way too stupid and unqualified. We have her readings—you know the ones you keep trying to trick the System into releasing to you.” I frowned. “What, you honestly think you are that good that you can move around the files and data and not leave traces?”

  “No, I know I do, I just didn’t think anyone would be watching except my competitors.”

  “Who?”

  “You know, the guys doing the same job as I do, the ones I see on my trail in there.”

  His voice went cold. “S
imon Bank, you are the only one doing that job. There is no other bugger, no other re-codifier, no other system breaker. We only need one.”

  I shivered.

  He watched closely, “How do you know someone’s in there with you? When?”

  “Sometimes I’ve doubled back to check something and seen that my keys, little bytes here and there, have been moved, re-prioritized. Once I found a tag, well half a tag, with a partial code attached, a crude algorithm, new sets, Colis 6 stuff, you know, fresh out of school, shortcut programming, bags too much repetitive and redundant crap. The failure discovery on that stuff would be under 2 hundredths of a second I can tell you. But then I looked laterally at the same co-running program time code and saw what he or she had really done. They camouflaged, they played the 3 card Monty switcheroo, the subtle stuff was in time code. It was hard to spot, it was good, I mean good, stupid Colis 6 but good, almost too good, a bit unstable. But I knew they had followed me in. There was no way they would be working there, way too much coincidence, unless they followed me in. So I deleted their time code alteration, dropped some simple errors, left their tag in place—for them to get the blame and the bad rating.”

  He was leaning forward now, positioning his sleeve to make sure it recorded and played back (broadcast) every word. “Bank, did you delete that code or did you cut it and save it?”

  “I cut it. Look, it’s good, clean code, effective, smart. I pasted it into my Takeover algorithm.” I guessed what was coming next.

  “Simon, could you have written that code?” I shook my head. He had me. “Thief. Idiot. Well that at least explains something: How an idiot like you could make a jump from grade 5 all the way up.” I never knew there was anything past grade 5, and I was proud of my rating, well I was, until then.

  Then he jumped up . . . “Simon, come on we’re going back to the building. Tell me straight, did you cut/copy that tag of his as well?”