Computing with Heat

Is this a hot cup of tea? Or the power supply for the computer of the future?

Researchers in Singapore have shown, in principle at least, that it will soon be possible to create thermal logic gates, including AND, OR, and NOT gates. Once you have all those pieces, you've got the basic ingredients of a computer that runs directly on heat, with no need for electricity at all.

Lei Wang and Baowen Li of the National University of Singapore propose that their logic gates could soon be built of recently developed thermal transistors or related designs, which control heat flow in the same way that conventional transistors control electricity.

A thermal transistor turns on or off depending on whether the temperature at its input gate is above or below a critical temperature. Constant temperature heat baths would take the place of power supplies in operating the thermal transistors and logic gates. In theory, any heat source could be used to run a thermal computer - sunlight, the heat from a campfire, etc.

In addition to proving that thermal gates can perform all the basic functions of electronic gates, the authors of the research soon to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters point out that the work may also help us to understand the complex heat flow in biological cells and systems in terms of thermal logic.

To get a look at the research before it's officially published, you can download a preprint of paper from the online science archives.
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Cyber Attack Blows Up Generator

CNN is reporting that the Department of Homeland Security managed to blow up an electrical generator in a simulated cyber attack. It's a vivid demonstration of how the growing dependence on networked control systems links virtual world actions with real world effects.

This shouldn't really surprise anyone. Power grids are already too complex and interconnected to be controlled in any way other than by remote networked systems. Heck, pilots don't really fly jets much anymore - they just use the stick to tell the computer to take the plane in a particular direction. In fact, I doubt planes will even have pilots in 50 years, they'll be just like the automated trams that already haul people around on the ground at airports.

I can currently monitor my home through a web cam, and it won't be long before I have the ability to turn on the lights remotely and crank the air conditioning or heat from the office so things will be nice an comfy when I get home. Someday, I imagine someone could hack my house and do all sorts of annoying things. And if someone were to hack a plane, train, hydroelectric plant, or a nuclear power plant, things could get bad pretty quick.

The experts in the CNN story say that "a lot of the risk has already been taken off the table, " by finding ways to prevent the transformer hacks, but that it could take months to fix them all. That means our power grids are suffering from a classic zero day vulnerability. That is, the powers-that-be have publicly pointed out the flaw and announced fix, but anyone with the motivation has plenty of time to find unprotected systems to attack.

An expert interviewed on CNN claims that shutting down power to 1/3 of the country would have the economic and social devastation comparable to the nation being simultaneously hit by 40-50 major hurricanes.

Will there be an attack? Probably not. On the other hand, this is just one vulnerability. No doubt every networked machine or system, just like every networked computer, will eventually face similar threats.

-Buzz


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Target Practice Widget Game

In Chapter 26 of the Dark Net blog, I wrote about Max and Joel practicing with various weapons as they prepared to make an attack on one particular corner of the online world.

They were armed with fork bombs, zip bombs, denial of service attacks, and something I call a Ctrl-Alt-Del grenade.

Max and Joel took turns wreaking havoc on a bunch of characters based on the Office Assistants from Microsoft Office. The victims included Microsoft Bob and Clippit, that annoying paper clip thing that always wants to know if it can help you write a letter, edit a resume, etc.

I decided make use of my recent obsession with Yahoo Widget programming to make a game out of Chapter 26. I call it Dark Net Target Practice. You can download it from the Yahoo Widget gallery.

If you've never used a widget, but want to try out mine or one of the many other cool widgets, you can learn everything you need to know on the widgets info page.

The goal of the Dark Net Target Practice widget is to shoot all the characters except the little penguin. You Linux folks ought to recognize the little fella.

Clippy in particular is worth double points for a kill. I hate that guy.

As your score goes up, the characters move faster.

Send me a screen shot of your score, if you manage to get really good at it.

Have fun.

-Buzz

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The Dark Net on Amazon.com

The Dark Net is now available on Amazon for only $14.95 $10.17 (a 32% discount over the retail price)!



Check out the Amazon page and please leave a review if you've read the book.

You can preview The Dark Net in it's entirety on Lulu, in case you'd like to review it but don't want to buy a copy at the moment.
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Dark Net Turns Deadly in Japan

The Japanese news site Daily Yomiuri is reporting that a woman was murdered in a robbery concocted with the aid of dark Web sites set up to help criminals find accomplices.

Kenji Kawagishi, and unemployed 40 year-old man in Aichi Prefecture, sent messages from his cell phone to the "Dark Employment Security Web," which hooked him up with two other men who were also hard-up for cash. Tsukasa Kanda, a 36 year-old sales agent for the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, and Yoshitomo Hori, an unemployed man of 32, joined with Kawagishi in kidnapping Rie Isogai while she was on her way home from work. The men robbed her of 70,000 yen (about $600), murdered her and dumper her in the woods of Mizunami, Gifu Prefecture.

The Dark Employment Security Web has been closed, but the Japanese authorities say there's no way to know how many more are out there. Although the police shut them down as soon as they learn of the criminal equivalents of MySpace, new sites replace the deleted ones almost immediately.

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The Nerdiest Clock Ever

It's amazing what I have time for, now that I finished The Dark Net, at least until I start on my next book.

In the meantime, I've updated a clock for your desktop that tells time by displaying resistor color codes. Each color represents a number. In the image above, it reads 0740 06, or 6 seconds past 7:40 AM.

You can download the clock by clicking here.

Don't worry if you don't have the colors memorized -- if you right-click the clock and select 'about' you will see a chart to help you learn them.

To run the widget, you'll have to install the Yahoo Widgets engine, which is available for free on the Yahoo Widgets page. While you're there, check out all the other cool widgets people have made. Like the Resistor Clock, they're all made by amateurs and distributed for free. But lots of them are impressively sophisticated.

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NSF's DarkWeb: Life imitates Art

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is funding the University of Arizona in developing a project they call the Dark Web to track down terrorists on the net.

When I read the NSF press release that my friend Randy A. pointed out to me, I could have sworn some of it was describing chapters of The Dark Net.

Here's an excerpt from the release that reminds me of Chapter 6. The Maelstrom

"They can put booby-traps in their Web forums," Chen explains, "and the spider can bring back viruses to our machines." This online cat-and-mouse game means Dark Web must be constantly vigilant against these and other counter-measures deployed by the terrorists.

And this sounds like it has something to do with Chapter 11. AOD HQ

Dark Web's capabilities are also being used to study the online presence of extremist groups and other social movement organizations. Chen sees applications for this Web mining approach for other academic fields.

"What we are doing is using this to study societal change," Chen says. "Evidence of this change is appearing online, and computational science can help other disciplines better understand this change."


Freaky, isn't it.



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Dark Net proceeds to benefit One Laptop Per Child foundation

Dear Dark Net readers,

You can still get the complete Dark Net PDF for free, read the rough drafts of the chapters here anytime you want, or download it from iTunes and other podcast listings.

However, I hope you'll consider downloading the PDF from Lulu.com instead. It'll cost you a $1.25, but all proceeds will go to benefit the One Laptop Per Child program, which provides robust but inexpensive computers to children and schools in the developing world.

A buck and a quarter ain't much, so please consider going to the OLPC website and giving more.

If this sort of charity isn't your thing, or you prefer to give somewhere else or in some other way (or not at all), that's cool and none of my business. In that case, feel free to download The Dark Net here.
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Chapter 35. After the Crash

***
Note to readers: This is the final chapter of The Dark Net blognovel.

Download the entire book from Lulu.com for FREE $1.25,

or email me at BuzzSkyline at gmail.com and I can send you the PDF (280 pages).
***

Max piloted the motorcycle-and-sidecar rig up an embankment and onto the dirt maintenance road that ran along the superhighway. Linda giggled and clapped her hands. It always made her laugh when the rig heeled over precariously. He had to smile at her infantile joy, despite the sweat rolling down his spine as he wrestled with the handlebars to prevent the overloaded rig from tumbling down the hill and onto the roadway strewn with immobile vehicles.

---

Listen to the Chapter 35 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

The motorcycle was archaic, a motorized dinosaur from before the days of GPS, stability control, and basic safety equipment. But at least it worked, chugging along slowly and relentlessly, unlike the millions of modern vehicles that had depended on their networked processors for everything from climate control to automated guidance, and which now sat moldering on the roads.

He’d found the machine meticulously preserved in an abandoned tourist-trap museum outside of York that had been dedicated to World War II relics. It had taken him a few weeks to get the engine back in running order and adjusted to handle the ethanol he’d gotten from a moonshiner in exchange for the last of the Freedom Club’s medical supplies. The trade had been a tough call – drugs and medical instruments were valuable commodities now that nearly all commerce had shut down. If you couldn’t make something, or get it from a neighbor, you simply had to learn to do without it, and folk medicine was a lost art to nearly everyone but the Amish.

Linda was coming along well. After ten months, she’d learned several dozen words, mostly having to do with food, toys, animals and the need to defecate and urinate.

Joel had been less fortunate, despite Dr. Murray’s attempts to resuscitate him. A life-support system might have kept him going for a while, but because his basic motor functions had been scrambled, he wouldn’t have lasted long. Besides, like the cars, planes, and countless appliances that were now no more than piles of inert machinery, any modern life-support devices would not have functioned after the massive network failure. When the Freedom Club residents packed up their farm implements and animals, they simply left Joel behind and dispersed into the hills as they had planned.

Linda would have died as well, an infant deserted in the wilderness, if Max hadn’t stayed with her. He attributed her rapid progress – crawling after a few weeks and taking her first tottering steps only days later – to the fact that the neural connections in her brain were intact, even though her memories and experiences had been thoroughly erased.

It wouldn’t be long, Max guessed, before she would develop to the intellectual level of a kindergartener, and would begin asking the questions that naturally occur to any curious child. He wondered what he should tell her when she finally raised the issue of her origins and the reasons for the technological ruins all around them, particularly because he only barely understood everything himself.

In the days before the Freedom Club finally disbanded, Dr. Murray had attempted to explain it. The confetti-filled cube, he’d said, represented minuscule bits of data that did not disrupt PCs and servers directly as most previous viruses had, but instead triggered suicide code embedded in machines and systems over the course of decades. The Freedom Club, beginning with their founder Ted, had distributed the code with conventional Trojans and worms, but because it was meaningless and benign on its own, it had not come to the attention of network security experts. It was designed to appear to be the programming equivalent of junk DNA, the inert filler in living genomes. Only when the equally inscrutable data Herman had hidden inside Betty was released did the parts come together to disrupt infected systems, fulfilling Ted’s vision of using technological attacks to destroy the technology that he believed enslaved humanity.

As clever as the two-part virus was, it would have done little damage if Neumann had not existed. Networks like the Internet are very robust against most attacks. Destroying a random set of servers is no more destructive than snipping a portion out of a spider web – there are always intact paths to follow around the damage. But Neumann existed in information traveling between machines throughout the Internet. He was, in effect, everywhere at once. Infecting him was the same as infecting the entire network simultaneously.

When the Internet shut down, so did systems controlling power grids, fly-by-wire planes and vehicles, sewage and water services, household appliances, and any other networked devices, which meant just about everything in the ultra-connected modern world. Like Joel’s brain, total disruption of basic functions, even briefly, caused the entire infrastructure to rapidly collapse. And no one had ever thought to build a life-support system for the Internet, or worried about the risks of relying too heavily on networked technology.

The irony of it, as far as Max was concerned, was that the destruction of the computational network had forced people to rebuild their personal connections. The small world of the Internet, with essentially instant connections across continents, had been replaced with a network of nearest living neighbors. This was how people must have lived before the net, phone lines, and even the pony express. Messages, goods, and just about everything else were transferred hand to hand. It was, Max imagined, like living in the Stone Age.

In fact, it was the social network that had kept the two of them going during the first challenging months. They had spent the fall and winter living off the generosity of local farmers, in addition to meager supplies Max scavenged from a truck stop he’d found over the hills from the Freedom Club compound. Once Linda was mobile, he brought her with him when he went to work in the nearby fields. Although she had the mentality of a child, her size and strength made it too dangerous to leave her with the children of the families that employed him. Instead, he would sit her down nearby and sing songs or recite half-remembered stories as he cleared brush, mended fences or shoveled manure.

When he was finally sure that she understood enough to stay seated in the sidecar, Max loaded up the rig with food, water, cans of ethanol, clothes and blankets. He kept a small bag dangling from the handlebars filled with bitter valerian roots, which he chewed periodically to prevent his seizures.

An Amish woman at one of the farms had taught him to recognize the plant’s fragrant white flowers. Once he knew what to look for, he saw them everywhere. He made a mental note to collect a reserve supply before they stopped blooming in September.

Max doubted the rumors of roving gangs of hoodlums robbing travelers and pillaging towns. He had seen no indication yet that the crumbling of the country’s infrastructure had done anything more than revive the frontiersman ethic of aiding those in need. Nevertheless, he kept a small-caliber rifle strapped beneath the sidecar where it would be out of sight, and yet within easy reach in the event that they stumbled into any trouble. It would also come in handy if they ran short of food and he had to resort to hunting the deer that occasionally crossed the highway in front of them, sprinting between the cars that, in the past, would have meant their instant doom, but now posed no threat other than leaking poisonous but temptingly sweet antifreeze and other toxic fluids.

The trip back to the university in Maryland would have taken only a few hours, back in the day. With the rig’s modest top speed, even on open ground, in addition to weaving through the surreal traffic jam and frequent stops to let Linda work off her energy playing among the trees, they were lucky to cover fifty miles before it was time to set up camp each evening.

They pulled into the supermarket parking lot down the street from his old apartment on the morning of the fourth day of their trip. Orderly rows of vendors’ tents crowded the parking spaces near the vacant storefronts, where autopiloted cars had once come and gone in rapid succession. A steady stream of foot traffic flowed across the walkway beneath the darkened traffic lights. There was no need of the crosswalk signals, even if they had still worked, now that the only vehicles in sight were handcarts and occasional horse-drawn wagons loaded with produce.

Linda waved joyously at the pedestrians who stopped and stared at the curious sight of the chugging rig before stepping aside as Max slowly negotiated his way to a stall packed with an assortment of hand tools, books, and second-hand clothing. He put the motorcycle in neutral and shut off the engine.

“Whatcha got there?” said a grizzled man sitting on a stool behind the table. “That an old Beemer?”

“Don’t think so,” said Max, helping Linda out of the sidecar. “As best I can tell from the markings, it’s Soviet, probably Ukrainian.”

“Look at that, Miranda,” the old man called over his shoulder. “They don’t make them like that anymore. Looks bulletproof to me.”

“That so?” said a woman who appeared to be in her thirties and was sorting through a box on the table.

“Where’s Ukraine exactly, Miranda?”

The woman snorted impatiently. “Google it yourself, idiot.”

“I can’t,” the old man snapped at her. “I traded the Britannica for your wedding dress this morning.” He sat forward on his stool and whispered conspiratorially to Max. “I’m not losing a daughter, so much as gaining a little peace.”

The woman threw a handful of silverware into the box, snatched up a yellowing world atlas and slapped it down on the table, then returned to her work.

“Never mind,” said the man. “I can look it up later. It’s not like you have to know the answer to everything just his moment. Tends to stifle polite conversation, IMHO. Where y’all headed in that fine piece of communist iron?”

“Oh,” said Max, “just stopping by the University, then going down to the shore, I think.”

The old man pondered Linda for a moment. “Taking her in for rehab? They have a fine program at the University. Not much else just now. But classes should be starting up soon.”

“No. I think I can handle it myself. Linda’s doing all right, all things considered.”
The old man clucked his tongue softly. “That’s good. Plenty turned up worse than her after the crash. But those that made it through at the beginning seem to come along pretty quick. She your wife or something?”

“A friend.”

“Well, that’s awfully good of you then. Damned ’puters. My grandma always said they’d rot your brains. Too bad she wasn’t around long enough to see how right she was. Have you heard? The government is trying to get them running again.”

“That so?” said Max absently.

“Yup. My future son-in-law tells me they’ve already got a server and some old laptops going down there in Arlington. DARPA, I think he said, is working on it. Damned fools, should leave well enough alone. Some folks never learn.”

“I’m sure they have their reasons. It’s hard to know sometimes,” said Max as he picked through a box of tools, “what’s the best thing to do. You can’t always tell how things will turn out.”

The old man harrumphed cynically. “They didn’t turn out so good last time, now did they? That’s what separates us from the animals, and machines like your bike there or my lobotomized Civic. The ability to learn from our mistakes.”

Max turned his attention to the items spread out on the table, in part to derail the conversation. He eventually traded a leather jacket he’d picked up at the same museum where he’d come across the motorcycle and sidecar rig for a nearly complete set of metric wrenches and some juice for Linda. He shooed away the children who had gathered around the sidecar to beg for rides, and gave a few pointers to a group of men interested in converting an antique gas tractor to ethanol, before he and Linda continued on their way.

The old man was right; the University was quieter than Max ever remembered it. Even during summer break, there had always been a fair amount of activity in the old days.

The Institute where he’d worked for so long was entirely deserted. One of the double doors at the front entrance was missing. The other stood wide open. He took Linda’s hand and led her up the steps. He waited a moment to let his eyes adjust to the shadows, and then followed the familiar twists of the central hall to his old lab. He gathered up some papers from a pile in the hall, wrapped them into a tight tube, and lit the improvised torch with the lighter he kept in his pocket.

His office had been thoroughly ransacked, but whoever had gone through it clearly saw no reason to make off with the memory cards that at one time had been neatly cataloged on the gray metal bookshelf. Instead, they had simply scattered the gigabytes of backup data on the floor. He sifted through the pile until he found the card he needed, and then guided Linda back out to the bright daylight.

He helped her into the sidecar. As he checked that Linda was secure in her seat, she reached for the card in his hand.

“See?” she said.

He held out the card and let her touch it.

“Mine?”

“Not now,” said Max. “Later.”

“Mine,” she insisted.

He bent over and pointed to the words he’d written on it years ago.

“This says, ‘Linus and Minus, source code and training data, session number one.’”

Linda inspected the writing without showing any recognition of the meaning. It would be a long time before she’d understand the connection between text and spoken words.

“Have it?” she asked.

“Someday, maybe,” said Max as he slipped the card into his pocket. “But first we’re going to go find a boat. Do you remember the boats we saw on the river?”

Her face lit up.

“Boat!”

“Then, who knows,” he shouted over the puttering engine, “maybe I’ll teach you to play backgammon.”

Max turned the sidecar rig around, headed out of the University, and turned east. They’d make it to the shore in a few days. All he’d need to do is trade the bike for the biggest fishing boat he could wrangle. It wouldn’t be a pleasure cruise exactly, but it would do.

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The Dark Net download

The story is almost over. I'll post the final chapter Monday evening.

In the meantime, you can download the whole novel (including the final chapter) from Lulu.com at The Dark Net for a paltry $1.25, or email me at "buzzskyline at gmail.com" and I'll send you the PDF for free.

The PDF is extensively copy edited and corrected, but not perfect yet. It's a lot better than the blog entries though, which are really rough drafts.

If you want a hard copy, you can get that from Lulu as well for the exorbitant price of $16.95, but I would recommend waiting a while. I need to make a few more typographical corrections. In a few weeks, you should be able to get it on Amazon.com at a discounted price anyway.

Thanks to all of you who provided encouragement as I wrote The Dark Net, especially Nilla and Adrian who posted multiple comments that kept me going just when I was starting to think no one was interested.

-Buzz
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Chapter 34. Bitter Reward

“Very disappointing,” said Neumann as he knelt down and sprinkled a handful of sand onto Linus. “A draw is so anticlimactic.”

Max flexed his injured leg. The fact that the blow from Minus’ chain had not sparked the seizure that should have kicked him out of the virtual world worried him.

---

Listen to the Chapter 34 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

“I’m still alive. According to your rules,” said Max, “I win.”

“No. Minus resigned.”

Max shrugged. “I don’t see a difference.”

“The difference is that you were to amuse me. Of the two of you, Minus did a much better job. If anyone deserves the prize, it’s him.”

Neumann picked up Linus and cradled him in his arms like a baby.

“In fact, I should punish you for what happened to my little backgammon buddy.”

“I did all I could to save him. If anyone had the opportunity to intervene, it was you.”

Neumann stroked the glossy feathers of the penguin’s head.

“It was your fight. I chose not to break my own rules.”

“Exactly,” said Max., struggling to keep the nervous tremble out of his voice. “And according to your rules, I get Betty and you turn us free.”

Neumann’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t be clever, little flea. I promised you Betty. That’s all. I haven’t decided what comes next.” He set Linus down gently. “Don’t risk annoying me more.”

It was clear to Max that Neumann either didn’t know about his epileptic escape plan, or that the plan itself was flawed. But there was nothing he could do about it at the moment.

“I don’t mean any disrespect,” said Max. “I only ask for my just reward.”

“Ah, justice,” Neumann smiled. “You’ll certainly get what you deserve. Come,” he said, holding out his hand, “see if you’re happy with your prize.”

Max hesitantly reached for Neumann’s hand. The instant they touched, the mournful voices of the crowd filled his head. The cacophony was mercifully brief, as the two of them seemed to sail into the sky and the arena dropped away below. It didn’t feel to Max like flying so much as simply zooming out to view more of the terrain. The landscape opened up, but even from the immense height, the town extended as far as he could see.

They paused for a moment. The network of streets and buildings shifted. After another pause, the view zoomed in with a disorienting rush, centered on a modest house at the end of a cul-de-sac. Max suddenly found himself standing next to Neumann in front of the little house, as Betty 3.5 rocked gently back and forth in a porch swing. She was oddly out of place, with her severely spiked short hair, tight leather pants and jacket, and heavy black boots.

She sneered at them. It was the very expression he recalled from the first time Betty burst into Herman’s environment, on a day so long ago that Max had begun to doubt that it ever happened.

“There it is,” said Neumann, “you’re reward.”

“What do you two pricks want?” said Betty.

Neumann walked up the steps onto the porch.

“Hey boy,” Betty said to Neumann, “you should put on some clothes.”

Neumann beckoned to Max to follow, paying no attention to Betty’s remark.

“Now, do what you came here for.”

Betty spat at Neumann. “If either of you touches me, I’ll rip your balls off.”

“What I came here for?” said Max. “What are you talking about?”

Neumann grabbed Betty by the wrist and with one swift motion, flung her out of her seat and onto the white wooden porch floor.

“You know what you want,” said Neumann. “Take her.”

“No, no. . .” Max stammered. “I don’t know what you thought.”

Betty scrambled to her feet and Neumann struck her across the face with the back of his hand, sending her halfway over the porch rail. He wrenched one of her arms behind her and pushed the back of her head until she was bent nearly double.

“Do you prefer it like this?” said Neumann as he grinded his hips against her buttocks. Betty reached back and raked at his face and neck with the nails of her free hand, snarling like an animal.

“Or are you more traditional?”

He spun her around, jammed her back against the rail, and pinned her arms to her side.

“Get off of me boy!” she shrieked.

“Stop it,” said Max, hobbling up the steps. “That’s not at all what I want.”

Neumann ripped open Betty’s jacket and pushed it down, immobilizing her arms, then turned her to face Max. He reached around her waist and unzipped her pants.

“Be honest. This is every man’s desire,” said Neumann. “I see them. That’s why half those people are here – to fulfill their secret fantasies.”

“Not this. Not me.”

Neumann laughed maniacally. “Oh, I see how it is. You’re one of those who likes to watch. Well watch this then.”

He slammed Betty down and pulled her pants to her ankles, then fell on top of her.

Max leapt forward and pushed at Neumann’s shoulder. The effort was futile. Instead of knocking the rapist away, Max was entangled in the attack. He lost his autonomy and became simultaneously witness, vicious perpetrator and victim of the rape, sharing in both Neumann’s assault and Betty’s agony. His sense of self was enveloped in a swirling vortex of fury and pain, like a scrap of paper in a tornado.

Somewhere at the center of the tempest, there was a calm spot, a dim and peaceful haven. It was not clear what lay there, but Max knew instinctively that it was his one hope to end the assault. He concentrated his effort and reached desperately for the refuge among the chaos of anger and anguish. He envisioned a tiny black cube hovering in the eye of the storm.

The cube grew more distinct as Max focused on it. The storm swirled around him as he found the object within his mental grasp. One side popped open, like the lid of a child’s music box, spilling a cloud of tiny specks that flowed out and were caught up in the tempest.

The vortex instantly broke apart into countless tiny swirls that spun away and evaporated like so many smoke rings.

Max found himself back in the arena. There was a great rumbling. The amphitheater was crumbling around them, as Neumann stood stunned before him.

“What have you done?” said Neumann. A series of cracks raced across Neumann’s skin.

He lifted his hands. The fingers began to disintegrate into dust.

“I don’t know,” said Max as a rift opened up in the ground between them. “I was only trying to stop you.”

The arena shook and heaved. Portions of the surrounding structure collapsed. The previously apathetic audience members cried out as they were crushed in the rubble.

If he was going to make his escape, the time had come – it was now or never. The injury to his leg hadn’t been enough to initiate the seizure. He needed something more severe. Max snatched up the sword beside him and braced the hilt on the ground. He placed the point against his belly just below the ribs, took a final breath, and flung himself down on the blade.

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Chapter 33. A Mortal Game

The tiered seating of the amphitheater was packed with people, to the point that they flowed out onto the steps that led down to the floor of the arena below. It was a challenge for Max to follow Perske without touching any of the audience members, which was something he wanted to avoid for fear that the visions that he would inevitably experience with even a brief contact would distract him from his mission.

---

Listen to the Chapter 33 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

Rows of tables filled the center of the arena where he had first met Neumann. Pairs of people sat at each table concentrating intently on chess boards. Based on the crowd, Max assumed it was a major tournament of some kind, although the patrons didn’t appear to be paying much attention to the competition, or anything else for that matter. They were as blithely distracted as the people he and Linda had encountered on their way to the courtyard where she had met her violent end.

Perske led him past the competitors to a roped off section that comprised the front row and six or sevens rows back. Unlike the rest of the audience, the people in the VIP section were intently focused on the tournament -- taking notes and talking among themselves in whispers and occasional animated exchanges.

Max stopped at the arena’s edge while Perske climbed up a step to one of two empty spaces in the front row.

“I understand that you want to make a trade,” she said.

“That’s right.” He held out his hand and let the pendant dangle from his wrist. “It’s too late for Linda, but there’s something else I want from you.”

She motioned for him to continue.

“Here’s the deal,” he said, his voice cracking despite the fact that he had rehearsed the words to himself over and over in his final hours at the Freedom Club. “I want you to leave me alone. I’m quitting the university and going away where you won’t hear from me again. I’ve had enough.”

“I see,” said Perske.

“And another thing,” he let his hand drop to his side. “I want Betty back.”

Perske smiled in a way that looked more sad and pitying than anything else.

“All that,” she said, “in exchange for a piece of costume jewelry.”

Max shook his head. “It’s no doomsday device, but it’s a lot more than a necklace. I’ve seen it in action.”

“You’re wrong. That thing is junk.”

She pointed to the distance and Max turned to see Spencer carrying Linus under one arm and dragging a robed figure across the arena floor with the other. He instantly recognized the aluminum skull cap.

“Joel?”

Spencer deposited the lunatic unceremoniously at Max’s feet, and continued by to take the seat beside Perske. He leaned over and set Linus on the ground where the penguin fluttered his stubby wings and preened his belly.

“Max Caine, I presume,” said Joel, lifting himself onto his hands and knees. “Funny meeting you here.”

Max’s head swam as he tried to put all the pieces together. He thrust the pendant in Joel’s face.

“Tell them what this thing can do.”

Joel sat back on his heels and inspected the jewel as though he were appraising its resale value for a pawn shop.

“Not much really, other than broadcast its IP address every few milliseconds.”

“What?”

“It’s just a tracking device.”

Spencer stood up, sneering as he displayed a necklace and pendant that was virtually identical to the one in Max’s hand.

“I presume this is the one you were thinking of,” he said. “I took it off of our mutual friend Joel there.”

A lump rose in Max’s throat. His one bargaining chip was lost.

“Linda lied to me?”

Joel shook his head. “She didn’t know about the switch. I told her you were conning us, but she didn’t believe me. It appears,” said Joel as he pushed his cap back on his head, “that her intuition was wrong.”

Max’s nostrils flared as he pointed the rifle at Joel. All that was left was to go down in a flurry of destruction. First Joel, then Spencer, then Perske and anyone else he could take out before they stopped him.

He wrapped his finger over the trigger. But the futility of the situation overwhelmed him. He threw the rifle at Perske’s feet.

“You win. You have what you want,” he shouted. “Now let me go!”

Spencer stepped down and retrieved the weapon, handing it to Perske. He walked forward, holding out the pendant.

“What are you talking about? This little thing?”

He tugged on the jewel and threw it past Max over the arena floor. It burst in mid air, incinerating the bulk of the gathered chess players, and leaving the glowing mini sun hovering in place.

“That’s what you thought you brought us?”

The fireball grew. Max raised his arms to protect his face from the searing heat and tripped backward to the ground. Spencer strode unflinching toward the circle of destruction. His clothes and hair began to smolder. When he stopped and turned, the skin on his face had a glossy sheen, like wax running down a hot candle.

“It’s very pretty,” he shouted over the fireball’s angry sizzle and crackle.

Spencer raised his hand. His arm burst into flames that instantly spread, enveloping his entire body. When the smoke and fire cleared, Spencer’s chubby form was gone and a naked youth with curly blond hair stood in his place, completely unscathed by the flaming orb. He snapped his fingers and the miniature sun was extinguished.

“Do you remember me Fishman? Dr. Perske calls me Neumann.”

Max leaned back against the arena wall in stunned silence.

The naked youth approached and sat down beside him. Max felt a gentle tugging at the collar of his shirt. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Linus’s shiny black head and yellow beak at his shoulder.

“Your buddy recognizes you,” said Neumann, “don’t ya, little guy?”

“Now Max,” Neumann sighed, “I’m going to give you a little lesson. You know these people sitting behind us. They’re the Jasons. Smart folks, all of them. I like to think of them as my parents in a way. They built the Internet, or at least got it started.”

He leaned over to look Max in the face.

“But I bet you already knew that. Didn’t you?”

Max shook his head.

“Well they did. In any case, I’m sure you don’t know why.”

Neumann reached back and lifted Linus, gently placing him between them.

“The Internet is something special. It’s designed to maintain its integrity in the event of massive destruction. You could wipe out huge portions of it and the rest will continue working just fine. It’s damn near indestructible.”

He patted Linus’s head.

“Do you know what you are to me Max?”

“No,” Max whispered.

Neumann squeezed his shoulder. With the contact, Max’s self awareness was swamped by the presence of countless trapped and tormented beings struggling to free themselves from an unfathomable purgatory. They were, Max now knew, the people who loitered throughout the town that Perske and the Jasons had built. The details were hazy, but somehow the technology that had transported him and Linda here had been adapted to capture them as they logged into PCs, accessed ATMs, played video games, or interacted with any other networked device. Some arrived and others departed, each contributing a tiny portion of the capacity of the networks that were their minds to the megalomaniacal creature personified by Neumann. They were droplets in an enormous and growing computational sea.

“You’re insignificant,” Neumann said as he released his grip on Max. “Less than nothing. A frivolous little speck.”

“Why don’t you leave me alone?” asked Max. “Just let me be.”

Neumann laughed. “I would, but Perske and her friends are cautious types. They thought poor Herman passed you something truly dangerous before his unfortunate accident. She was mistaken, wasn’t she?”

Max nodded.

“So I have a choice now. I could turn you loose to join my devoted people,” said Neumann gesturing grandly at the crowd in the arena stands, “or I could make you entertain me. And you know what?”

“No,” said Max, “I don’t know.”

Neumann leapt to his feet. “I choose entertainment.”

He hopped over the wall to the seat beside Perske and placed an arm around her shoulder.

“What do you say doc? Shall we have a show?”

Perske smiled blankly, while the Jasons in the rows behind them looked on with rapt attention.

Neumann flicked his wrist and the scorched arena floor shimmered, then changed into a smooth sand-covered oval. In the very middle, a long pike stood jammed into the ground next to a glinting sword. A gaping hole opened in the far wall.

“You get to play a game with an old friend.”

“A game?” Said Max. “What kind of game?”

“The rules are simple. If you win, you live. And if you lose, you die.”

Max looked up at Perske.

“Don’t I get a reward?” he asked.

Neumann laughed. “You’re a greedy one. The terms were good enough for Spencer, although the outcome was not the one he preferred.”

“A little reward always helps,” said Max, “doesn’t it Elizabeth?”

“Yes,” said Perske, with the voice of a person waking from a deep sleep. “Reputable research has confirmed the effect.”

“Alright,” said Neumann, “just for added incentive. What is your request?”

“Betty,” said Max. “I want her back.”

Neumann pondered the proposal with mock seriousness.

“Done, brave gladiator. Now behold your opponent.”

A clanking noise erupted from the distant opening in the arena wall. A great, dark form gradually emerged. Max raced to gather the weapons just as Minus’ glowing eyes set upon him. If anything, the penguin was larger and more menacing than the last time Max had seen him. The chain on his ankle was larger as well, like an anchor mooring from some lost ship. Crimson blood flowed between the dark stains that discolored his chest feathers.

Minus stood his ground for a moment and scanned the arena. Max retreated slowly, hefting the pike in his right hand and the sword in his left. The bird let out a rumbling call, lowered his head, and barreled across the sand with the chain whipping and clattering behind him in wide arcs.

Just when Minus was nearly on him, Max dodged left and planted the hilt of the pike in the ground. The barbed tip buried itself in the penguin’s side as Minus’ momentum carried him past. Max’s quickness saved him from the charge, but the flailing chain was less predictable. Although he leapt clear of the chain itself, the spike at the end caught his foot and sent him spinning to the ground.

Pain shot up though his leg, and when he hit the ground he felt the nausea and light-headedness that preceded his seizures begin to rise. He rolled to his side clutching his ankle, expecting Minus to fall upon him at any moment.

The bird did not turn. Instead, it continued across the arena toward the roped off section where Perske, Neumann and the Jasons sat. As Max groped at his injury, he saw Joel leap clumsily out of Minus’ way to clamber into the stands. The monstrous bird halted at the very edge of the arena, his massive back arched and his head hanging over the first row of seats. The pike's shaft dangled from his side, swaying back and forth with the giant penguin’s every move.

Minus turned and Max groped for the sword in preparation for the next pass. It never came. Instead the bird stood facing him. He held something in his beak that Max could only make out as a shapeless, dark form. Minus stretched his neck skyward, then whipped his head down, slamming the object to the ground. The impact sent a spray of sand into the air and Max heard a panicked squawk. It was Linus, fluttering desperately on the ground in the face of Minus’ fury.

“Minus,” Max bellowed. “Stop!”

The enraged beast struck at Linus with his beak as the little penguin frantically dodged the mighty blows.

“Perske,” Max shouted, lurching forward, “call him off!” His wounded leg failed him and he collapsed.

Minus pinned Linus to the ground with the claw of one enormous, webbed foot. He glared briefly at Max, as if daring him to intervene, then plunged his beak into his immobilized victim. Linus ceased his struggles.

Max struggled to balance on his good leg and held the sword outstretched as Minus approached with laborious, agonized lurches. When the bird was at last only a few meters away, he opened his beak and dropped Linus’s mangled body to the sand, then collapsed to stretch shuddering on the ground beside his tiny twin. The fury had faded from his eyes, replaced with an expression approaching serenity.

Max hobbled forward with the sword extended before him, until he stood over Linus and held the blade pressed against Minus’ throat. The gigantic adversary gazed up at him calmly. Max grasped the hilt with both hands. One thrust and it would be over. In the distance, he heard Neumann shouting.

His knuckles were white with strain, his forearms tensed in preparation for the kill.

“Are you done?” he asked.

Minus lay still, showing no sign that there was any fight or spirit left in him. Nor was there the terrified anguish that he had once displayed in response to the riding crop that Max had tormented him with after chess and backgammon games back at the University. He displayed only resolute acceptance.

“Finish him,” called Neumann from across the arena.

Max recalled the hours of suffering Minus had endured during training, when Linus was collecting herring and praise.

“You really hated your little brother,” he said. He removed the sword from the prone bird’s neck and let it hang at his side. “I guess that’s my fault.”

He painfully made his way to the pike embedded in Minus’ side, dropped the sword, and heaved on the shaft. The barbed tip ripped away and blood oozed out from among the black feathers.

“Now go,” he said.

Minus’ breathing slowed slightly, but otherwise he didn’t stir. Max thumped him with the pike handle.

“Get!”

A tremor rippled through the bird’s huge torso as he slowly lifted himself up. Max pointed at the gap in the arena wall. Minus swung his head to the side and peered at Max, then at Linus’s tiny corpse. With one tottering step after another, the tormented giant lurched across the sandy expanse and disappeared into the dark tunnel.

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Chapter 32. The Bargain

Linda stirred slightly, to Max’s relief. For a moment he thought he might have killed her despite the fact that his rifle had been set to pause. He slipped her weapon out of her hand and placed it behind him so that it would be out of her reach should she come around suddenly.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Spencer take a tentative step forward.

“Against the wall,” he said firmly. Spencer backed up and readjusted his glasses.

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Listen to the Chapter 32 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

Max rolled Linda onto her back and unhooked the latch on the chain of her pendant. As he wrapped the necklace around his fist he saw a subtle ripple approaching in the grass a few yards off. He leapt to his feet.

“Call them off Spencer.”

“Them? Them who?”

Max flicked the setting on his rifle to kill and fired a shot into the wall a few feet to Spencer’s left. Chips erupted from the stone, leaving a ragged divot behind.

“Call them off.”

“Oh them,” Spencer yelped. “Eddie! Bob! Back away.”

The ripple halted, and then reversed direction for a few meters. It began to grow, like a bubble of turf rising out of the ground. It transformed into a humanoid shape and lifted one foot after the other with moist pops as they separated from the grass. A shifty glance from Spencer caused Max to look over his shoulder to see another human shape separating itself from one of the trees behind him.

“Over there,” said Max, waving his rifle in Spencer’s direction. The tree man blinked his little knothole eyes and plodded over to take his place.

“You too,” Max said to the turf man, who was inspecting his torso and occasionally picking out what appeared to be bits of dandelion weeds on his chest.

“Hmm? Oh sure,” said the turf man before obediently taking his place with Spencer and the tree man.

Max took a deep breath. It was good to have the upper hand over Spencer for a change. He wanted to take a few moments to enjoy it, but he wasn’t sure how long it would last. He’d have to get the deal done fast, before reinforcements arrived or Linda came to her senses. He didn’t want to hit her again in the event that it might do permanent damage.

“Are you surprised to see me?” he asked Spencer.

“A bit, at least under these circumstances. Frankly, we had planned to get you back one way or another.”

Max nodded. “I thought as much.”

“Nice of you to save us the trouble. What brings you here?”

“I’ve got something for you. It’s not what you’re after, but it’s the best I can do.” Max held up his hand and let the iridescent pendant dangle. “There's no such thing as a doomsday device you know.”

Spencer shrugged. “So some people say.”

“Everyone who isn’t a paranoid nut bag,” said Max. “This is pretty effective though, at least at short range. It’s yours, under a few conditions.”

Spencer raised an eyebrow. “Such as?”

“First, you set Linda here free. She doesn’t know the way out on her own so she’ll need some help.”

Spencer nodded thoughtfully.

“Bob,” he said to the turf man, “is that something you can handle?”

“Yes,” replied the tree man curtly, apparently miffed at the misidentification. “It shouldn’t be a problem.”

“What's second?” asked Spencer.

“I want to see Perske.”

“Now that’s a bit trickier. She has a pretty full calendar.”

Max aimed the rifle at Spencer’s belly.

Spencer swallowed hard. “I imagine we can squeeze you in.”

“Great,” said Max.

Linda groaned and Max realized it wouldn’t be long before she was fully alert, and likely very peeved.

“Bob?” he said to the tree man, who raised a wooden hand in acknowledgment. “You’d better get her now or we’ll have some trouble.”

Bob made his lumbering way to Linda, gently lifted her from the ground like a wooden Frankenstein monster carrying off the maiden in an old horror film, and headed toward the courtyard gates.

“That way is blocked,” said Max. “Denial of service.”

“Not a problem,” said Bob over his shoulder. “Those don’t last long.”

Max turned back to Spencer. “So, I guess we better go talk to Perske and explain the deal.”

Spencer and Eddie stepped away from the wall and followed after Bob. The tree man was nearing the edge of the pool when Linda began to struggle.

“Max!” she called out. “You bastard!”

She twisted in Bob’s wooden arms and Max saw the panic on her face. She clawed at the tree man’s arm and twisted until she slipped to the ground. Bob had a firm grip on her wrist, despite her kicking his gnarled legs and pounding his chest with her free hand.

“Linda, it’s OK,” called Max. “He’s taking you back.”

She froze and stared at Max. Even from a distance of twenty meters or so, he could see a look of shock on her face. In a few moments it was replaced with anger, and finally resolute sadness.

“Joel always said we shouldn’t trust you.”

Max was tempted to tell her that Joel was very wise for a madman, but decided there would be no use in aggravating her further.

“I’m sorry.”

She looked down at her feet for several long seconds. Just when it seemed she had given up hope, Linda wrenched her wrist from Bob’s grasp and sprinted toward Max. As she ran, she fumbled at her belt. She pushed a button in mid stride and the belt glowed a warning orange. A few more steps and it turned angry red. Max raised his rifle and groped for the settings in hopes of stunning her before she got too close, but Eddie had lunged forward to intercept her and had blocked the shot. The turf monster sprinted a few steps and spread his great green arms to wrap Linda up. Max turned and hit the ground just as the suicide belt detonated. The impact of the shockwave knocked the breath out of him. He gasped for air and rolled to his knees, ears ringing as the courtyard spun around his head.

In the distance someone wailed. As Max came to his senses, he saw that Bob the tree man was the source of the cry, kneeling at the edge of a smoking crater with his wooden hands raised skyward.

Bob continued to wail as he rose slowly to his feet and turned toward Max. A murderous rage burned in the deep knotholes that were his eyes. He took one deliberate step, then another, and another. Max groped for his rifle.

The first shot splintered Bob’s shoulder, halting his forward progress. The second blasted a deep hole in his chest.

“What kind of a monster are you?” asked Bob, a trickle of sap oozing down his gnarled cheek. He stood rigidly still for a moment, as a real tree would, then tipped backwards and fell to the ground with a heavy thump.

Max’s head throbbed. He sat on the grass and rubbed his temples, gauging his senses to detect any sign that the shock and pain of the explosion might be enough to trigger an epileptic episode that would eject him from the virtual world. So far, there was nothing out of the ordinary other than the ringing in his ears and the tightness in his chest that lingered after he’d regained his breath.

Linda and the turf monster had been obliterated. There were no identifiable pieces nearby, although he’d had enough experience blowing up balsawood planes and plastic cars as a boy to know that nothing is totally destroyed in an explosion, and that the rain of charred bits that fell in the moments after Linda set off her belt surely included a gruesome piece or two. He had hoped to get her sent back, disappointed and angry perhaps, but unharmed. At least it was quick. After all, the chances were good that Spencer would not have kept his word anyway.

He shook the remaining fuzziness from his head and looked at the fat man lying immobile on his back. Spencer had been about the same distance from the detonation as Max, although unless he too had had the presence of mind to hit the ground before it went off it was likely that he had taken a bigger hit.

Max jammed the butt of his rifle on the ground and used it to steady himself as he climbed to his feet and made his way over to Spencer. The man’s glasses were missing and his hair was singed on the left side of his head. Half of his face was raw and pink, and his shirt was burned through in patches here and there. His breath rasped though his thick, moist lips.

“Get up,” said Max. Spencer remained still. Max leaned on the rifle and kicked him in the ribs, eliciting a flinch and a groan.

“Get up!”

Spencer rolled to his side. Max reached down,hooked his hand inside the fat man’s collar, and heaved. Spencer sat up with a whine of pain.

“Come on Spencer.”

A few more tugs and pokes with the rifle barrel and they were on their way, both limping from the trauma.

The card table still lay on its side beneath the willows, but there was no sign of Linus.

They rounded the pool and proceeded through the door in the wall to the gate. Bob had been right, the denial of service attack had collapsed. Now only a waist high mound of paper remained piled up against the outside of the gate.

Spencer stopped, his hands hanging listlessly by his side.

“Open it,” said Max.

Spencer sighed and slid the bolt. He pushed weakly against the gate. The mound of paper compressed slightly and the gate only opened a few inches before Spencer gave up.

“Push,” said Max. “Harder.”

Spencer leaned into it. It opened another fraction. Max jabbed him in the kidney with the rifle barrel. Spencer yelped and fell against the gate. His weight was enough to move the paper mound a foot or so, which was sufficient for them to squeeze out and wade through the trash pile.

The fork bomb globules were mostly cleared up as well, dissolved into puddles of slick liquid. A few remained in the gutters, shrunken and glistening like gelatin melting in the sun. The lethargic pedestrians had resumed their strolling. Groups parted for the ragged pair, but instead of ignoring them and going about their business, all eyes were on Max and Spencer. People stepped off of the sidewalk to get out of their way, with doe-like glances of apprehension.

Spencer led the way slowly down the street for a few blocks, eventually turning into a narrow passage and a steep flight of stone steps. At the top of the stairs was a small, rough-hewn door studded with iron nail heads and fitted with an iron knocker. Spencer reached up to lift the knocker and let it drop. The door swung open.

The room that greeted them on the other side was large and airy, with bright white walls, a skylight far overhead, and large windows at either side with the shutters thrown wide. The furniture included a plush couch, several chairs, and a tiny writing desk tucked in the corner. A pair of tall French doors stood in the middle of the far wall. Although the cut glass pains distorted the view, Max could make out a long corridor lined with baroque painted walls and lit by gilded chandeliers.

Spencer shuffled to the middle of the room. He hung his head and stood still, breathing heavily.

“Where’s Perske?” asked Max.

Spencer mumbled something that Max didn’t catch. He poked Spencer with the rifle.

“Come again?”

“Through there,” he rolled his head in the direction of the French doors.

“OK. Let’s go.”

Spencer turned toward the doors and bumped against the couch, stumbling forward a few steps before catching onto the gilded door handle to steady himself. With one swift movement, he snatched open the doors and slipped through, slamming them shut behind him.

Despite the distorting glass, it was clear that Spencer was grinning that slimy grin. Max contemplated blowing a hole in the Spencer’s fat head.

“Freakin’ bastard.”

He lifted the rifle and steadied it at Spencer’s face with one hand as he reached for the handle with the other. He was sure it would be locked; in which case, he planned to blast both the door and Spencer at the same time. To his surprise the handle turned easily.

Spencer’s distorted grin grew broader. Max whipped open the door. Instead of that round face and sagging belly, he discovered a svelte woman in high heels, skin tight shorts, and a half shirt that barely covered her breasts.

“Hi,” she said, “I’m Cheryl. Don’t be lonesome tonight. My friends and I are waiting for you at www dot sexkittens. . .”

He shut the door and Cheryl was gone. Through the tiny window, he could make out the fat man rounding a corner far down the corridor.

He opened the door again.

Cheryl instantly reappeared and stepped in to the room still speaking where she left off. “. . . dot com. It’s safe and completely confidential . . .”

He moved to the side as Cheryl strutted in, rattling on about sex parties and randy coeds. He made an attempt to slip by and follow after Spencer, but his way was blocked once more.

“Earn while you learn,” said a young man holding a laptop at his side. “I did, now I’m a certified graphic designer and my life has never been better. There are plenty of other careers to choose from. In three weeks, you can complete classes that will qualify you to work as a nursing assistant, long haul trucker, lawnmower repairman, electrical tech, and dozens of other great jobs. Or get your GED without going back to school. It’s easy. All you need is . . .”

Max lunged for the opening. Before he could dive through he was forced backward by a stream of people touting cheap travel, easy credit repair, real estate opportunities, revolutionary mattresses, and penis enlargement creams.

“Have you been injured on the job?” asked a man in a navy blue, three-piece suit who rested his hand on Max’s shoulder reassuringly. “Smith, Bitterman and Smith can help. Call one eight-hundred . . .”

Max rammed him in the gut with the rifle butt. The man took a step back, blinked, and straightened his tie. He cleared his throat, and asked again, “Have you been injured on the job? Smith, Betterman and Smith can help. Be sure to ask for me – Jerald Smith.”

Max fired a shot into the lawyer, who melted to a navy blue puddle that swirled on the floor. A fellow in a Hawaiian shirt stepped into the lawyer puddle and held up a colorful brochure featuring photographs of an island paradise. The rifle bucked against Max’s hip, taking out the travel agent. The credit guy, the plumber, and the skin cream girl fell in rapid succession, all turning to slime on the floor.

He was slowly clearing the room. Although still more advertising agents flowed in, they were no match for the speed of his trigger finger. He worked his way toward the French doors steadily clearing a path upstream. It was slow going and nerve racking at first, but when he found he was making headway he began to enjoy popping off the spokespeople in rapid succession like rabbits in a carnival shooting gallery. Even the persistent tap on his shoulder was not enough to distract him from his task, until he heard the stereo voices behind him.

“Have you been injured on the job?”

Max turned to see two men in blue, three-piece suits. “Call one eight-hundred three four five. . .”

In addition to the twin lawyers, there were twin travel agents and credit guys. A dual geyser of goop shot upward from one of the puddles, and suddenly there were two Cheryls inviting him back to the sex club. More geysers spouted, spawning still more copies of ad agents intent on selling him products and services.

He blasted one of the lawyers again out of frustration, knowing that it meant he would have three of them to deal with in a moment. There was only one solution -- shut down the whole damn room.

He slung the rifle on his back, leapt up onto the couch to catch his breath, and lunged toward the heavy wooden door that he and Spencer had entered through a few minutes earlier. He stiff-armed a car salesman who blocked his way, checked a discount stockbroker with his shoulder, and threw an elbow into the throat of one of the porn site Cheryls before he made it to his destination. He wrenched open the door and pulled two CtrlAltDel grenades from his belt, simultaneously pressing the detonation plungers. The warning whistles began to shriek and he tossed a grenade to each end of the room.

As he pulled on the door to close it behind him, a spectacled man in a white lab coat blocked it with his foot. “Ever wished you could go all night? I bet she does.”

Max head-butted the faux pharmacist in the face, slammed the door, and raced down the steps.

Two explosions buckled the heavy door, splitting it down the middle and spewing a jet of smoke into the air. After the rumbles died away he strained to hear any hint of ad gibberish, but all was quite. After a moment the door shook, scraped open a few inches, and fell inward, releasing a wall of smoke that rolled down the stairs and obscured his view. He waved his arms to clear the air, succeeding only in stirring up countless gray spirals. When at last the cloud settled, a female shape emerged and stood on the uppermost step. For a moment he feared one of the Cheryls was back.

“You’re very persistent,” said Perske.

“Actually,” he said, coughing out a lungful of smoke, “I was just getting started.”

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Chapter 31. Hostage

The gates to the courtyard were literally crawling with security. At least that was the function they guessed the multi-legged robots served. Max counted over a dozen, each a meter or so long and low in profile, with a small turret mounted at the front that swiveled to point a tube that seemed to be a weapon of some kind. They were like enormous mechanical cockroaches, which made them creepy enough in Max’s mind. The fact that they were armed moved them into nightmare territory.

---

Listen to the Chapter 31 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

Some of the roboroaches clung to the iron bars that fenced the courtyard off from the street. A few patrolled the sidewalk outside the enclosure, while others prowled about a narrow clearing between the gate and a free standing wall that hid the distant courtyard from view. When tourists strayed by the fence or passed the gate, the nearest robots would rise up on their tiny front legs and swivel their turrets to keep a bead on the potential threats. Although the roaches were perpetually vigilant, the people they targeted seemed oblivious to the danger.

Linda checked the setting on her rifle. She motioned to Max to do the same.

“Are you sure this it the place?” she said.

Max assured her it was. At least, he had seen them there a few minutes before, thanks to the transcendent vision they’d experienced with the redheaded girl and the crowd on the steps.

Linda sketched out a brief plan of attack. It was simple and straightforward – just the way Max liked it.

“On three,” she said.

They each pushed their root kit buttons as she reached the end of the count. Linda faded from view. Only a faint distortion, like ripples rising from a sun baked highway, indicated her movements as she slipped across the street and took up her position beside the gate.

Max removed the fork bomb from his belt, snapped off the tab and tossed it a few meters down the sidewalk where it rolled to a stop just beside the iron fence. There was a muted thud, and sticky gelatinous globules began spewing from the canister, forming a growing mound that spilled onto the sidewalk, into the street, and through the fence.

The nearest roboroaches scampered to the fork bomb and swiveled their turrets frantically as they tracked the blobs and fired round after round. Although their weapons were small, they seemed to work well at vaporizing the blobs. But it was clear that they couldn’t keep up. Blobs rolled off the mound, and after a moment split into two with a pop. Each of the daughter blobs split again and again. The mound turned into a flood that overwhelmed the robots and flowed around the feet of the nearest pedestrians. Some stuck to the ankles of passersby and continued to multiply.

The previously oblivious tourists began to panic. Those closest to the mound were quickly enveloped in blobs and collapsed to the ground under the gelatinous mass. Others farther from ground zero ran a few steps before the sticky globules bound their legs and they too fell and were enveloped.

As the situation escalated, more and more of the roboroaches joined their compatriots in the struggle. Several of those closest to the mound were lost among the blobs. The rest pulled back, firing as they retreated. The ones clinging to the fence near the gate abandoned their posts to join the fight.

The gate opened and Max raced across the street, preparing the zip bomb as he ran. He slipped through the opening and heaved the bomb as close as he could to the largest group of roboroaches, immobilizing them in the face of the fork flood. A series of rapid-fire shots rang out from a spot a few meters to Max’s left, vaporizing several of the robots that were beyond the range of the zip bomb. Linda was picking them off with stunning precision.

Max pulled the gate shut and armed the Denial of Service mechanism.

“Now?” he asked.

There was a quick succession of shots.

“Hold on a second,” Linda said. She finished off the reinforcements who were still mobile, then trained her fire on the roboraoches immobilized by the zip bomb.

Max slipped his rifle from his shoulder to help out. His aim wasn’t bad, but he was pulling off shots at a fraction of Linda’s pace, often firing at a target a fraction of a second after she had already taken it out.

“OK,” she said, “now.”

Max set the fuse and slipped it through the bars. A series of warning tones was followed by a fluttering sound, like a flock of pigeons taking flight. The mechanism fired out a stream of paper packets that sailed up into the air. Moments later, similar packets began raining down from all directions, plastering themselves against the gates. All the spaces between the bars were rapidly jammed as the paper packets accumulated layer upon layer. The courtyard entrance was soon blockaded behind a rapidly growing mound. No one was going in or out of the gates, at least for a while.

“Service denied,” said Linda. Max turned to find that she had shut off her root kit. “Can’t watch each other’s backs if we can’t see them.”

“Good point.”

He pushed the button on his belt.

“This way,” he said, leading her from the gate and through an opening in the courtyard wall.

The scene spread out before them matched the vision he’d had when they’d connected with the crowd on the steps. There was a rectangular pool at the center, with a fountain at the opposite end and a polished marble patio running around its perimeter. On the far side were three large weeping trees arranged in a perfect triangle, and a card table set up in their midst. Unlike his vision, the table was tipped over on its side with four empty chairs scattered around it, as if the players had left in a great hurry, no doubt in an attempt to escape the commotion that he and Linda had caused at the gate.

There were no more roboroaches in view. Between the fork bomb and their initial assault, it appeared that Max and Linda had taken care of them all, for the moment. There was no obvious sign of anyone else either

“Did they get away?” asked Linda.

“Possibly.”

A movement behind the upset card table caught his eye. It was just a fleeting hint of a shadow.

“Hold on,” he whispered, “looks like we may still have one.”

He waved his hand to direct Linda around the right side of the pool, while he circled around to the left, his rifle up. He flicked the lever on the barrel to stun.

As they rounded the end of the pool and closed on the table, Max saw a sliver of a black form hiding behind, then a hint of white.

“Wait!” he cried to Linda at almost the same moment that the crack of her rifle pierced the air. The force of the shot spun the table aside exposing Linus fluttering on the ground. Max raced to the penguin’s side as Linda steadily approached with her rifle at her shoulder ready for another round.

“Was it set to pause, or to disrupt?” Max called frantically as he rested a hand on Linus’s convulsing belly.

She glanced at her rifle's setting. “Disrupt.”

Max realized that the table must have taken the brunt of the impact. Linus was in bad shape, but not as bad as he would have been from a direct shot.

“We need hostages at the moment,” he snapped at her, “not corpses,

“Sorry,” she said, adjusting her weapon.

Linus gradually ceased his twitching.

“Friend of yours?” she asked.

Max ignored the question.

“He’s no good to us as a hostage anyway. Come on, let’s keep going.”

They split up again, rounding the trees cautiously looking for anyone hiding behind them. All three were clear. Only two more hiding places remained; a pair of statues standing at the back corners of the courtyard. They were large, classical marble carvings, one reminiscent of Michelangelo’s David, and the other of a woman carrying an urn on her head, as her toga-like wrap slipped from her shoulder.

He silently indicated to Linda to take the David and he headed toward the urn bearer. An expanse of open ground separated them from their targets. Max sprinted quickly across the grass and rolled past the sculpture, ready to pepper anyone tucked behind. His finger tickled the trigger, but the statue was hiding nothing other than empty space.

Linda had better luck.

“Freeze,” he heard her call out.

Max braced himself against the stone wall behind the statue and swung his rifle around. Linda was standing with her feet spread apart and her knees bent as she pointed her weapon at someone hiding low behind the faux-David.

“Step out, now!”

She pulled the rifle firmly against her shoulder, emphasizing the seriousness of her intentions. Max could not see the captive behind the statue. There was a tense pause, and he feared that Linda would have to resort to shooting whoever it was so that they could drag their prisoner into the open.

She took a step back, and lowered the rifle a bit while still keeping it at the ready. There was a glint of light off of glasses as a pudgy figure squeezed from the hiding place. Max’s heart leapt. It was the very person he was hoping to find, short of capturing Perske herself.

He stood and sprinted across the courtyard as Linda directed Spencer to back up against the wall. Max felt a wave of revulsion wash over him at the sight of those tiny, piggy eyes behind the great thick glasses. Even at this distinct disadvantage, Spencer’s moist quivering lips showed a hint of a smarmy grin.

“Hello Max,” he said. “I’m glad to see you’re doing well.” He moved as if to take a step away from the wall, and Linda tensed threateningly. “You always seem to travel with such charming, and if I may say so, lovely company.”

Linda made a sound on the verge of a growl.

“Shall we have a latte and chat like civilized folk?” Spencer adjusted his glasses with trembling fingers that belied his casual confidence.

Max’s chest heaved. It was now or never. He raised his rifle as nausea and light-headedness rolled over him.

“What are you doing?” asked Linda through clenched teeth. “We need a hostage.”

“Yes,” Spencer spurted out. “A hostage. Of course you need a hostage.”

The nasty little grin drained away, along with the color in Spencer’s formerly pink cheeks.

Max steadied himself and Spencer let out a little squeak of fear.

“Please," he said. "Please don’t.”

“Come on Max,” said Linda without shifting her gaze from her prisoner. “Stick with the plan.”

“You know,” said Max, trembling almost as much as Spencer, “I have my own plans. He swung the rifle around, pulled the trigger, and Linda dropped to the ground in a heap.

Spencer blinked deliberately and removed his glasses.

“Now that,” he said as he wiped the lenses pointlessly on his sweaty shirt, “is something.”

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Chapter 30. Tourists

Linda and Max walked the cobbled streets in silence. The town was essentially as Max recalled it, with stone buildings on either side that were vaguely reminiscent of a classical ancient city, like a schoolbook rendering of the Roman forum during it’s heyday, or an artist’s reconstruction of the courtyards of Pompei before Vesuvius smothered it in ash. The streets, however, were no longer empty.

---

Listen to the Chapter 30 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

People meandered aimlessly and milled about on corners lost in conversation. They were clearly tourists, dressed in everyday clothes that clashed with the classic architecture.

They were everywhere. Arched doorways opened through bright white walls to reveal them seated at long wooden tables with their arms draped over each others shoulders like long lost brothers and sisters at a family reunion. A little farther along, groups of them lounged on a wide flight of marble stairs that rose up from the street to an obelisk perched high at the top. Snatches of guitar music drifted down from a musician who, even from this great distance, looked out of place in a red and white Hawaiian shirt as he sat on the uppermost step and lazily strummed a guitar to an attentive audience of young lovers.

Linda stopped and cupped her ear to listen to the tune for a moment.

She dropped her hand to her side, and tilted her head as she scanned the scene. “Who are these people?” she asked.

“I have no idea.”

There was nothing particularly remarkable about them. They looked like any collection of people out to enjoy a lazy afternoon in the sun {{Pause=0.25}} – some in shorts and tee shirts, some in skirts. Others were wearing business suits, or jeans, or slacks. A few were clad in uniforms, as though they had just stepped away from their jobs as police officers, crossing guards, or sales clerks. If there was anything unusual about them, it was that there were no children, and no infants. People who go out on beautiful days such as this sometimes bring children. There were none here, or anywhere else on the street for that matter, as far as Max could see now or recall from their walk.

“Do you notice anything strange?” she asked.

“About the music?” said Max. “No.”

“Look at them up there,” she said, waving her hand broadly at the people on the steps. “Everyone is touching someone else.”

Considering the setting, it didn’t seem unusual to Max. It was perhaps a bit too idyllic, but no different than a spring day in the streets of Paris, Rome, or Atlanta.

“It’s all part of the sugar-coated illusion, I guess.”

“No it’s not just couples holding hands. They are all connected.”

Linda was right. It was hard to discern at first, but like someone pointing out a subtle pattern on a tiled wall or a lifelike shape in a cloud, it suddenly became obvious. Groups sat crowded together. Pairs of entwined lovers reached out to touch other pairs. Here and there, it was no more than one casually placed ankle against another, or an extended hand resting on an arm. In other places a woman’s head might lay on one man’s shoulder while her legs rested on someone else’s lap. Tight groups were connected by long chains of people brushing hair, massaging calves, or leaning back to back. It was an orgy of semi-intimate contact. The chains broke from time-to-time when someone stood and wandered off, sometimes up the stairs and sometimes down. Inevitably, the gap was closed as people on the steps turned and stretched, or another person shuffled in to fill the space. But as a rule, it was all one broad and connected web, from the musician high above to a girl with long red hair at the very bottom of the stairs who leaned back against the shins of the boy on the step behind her. She wore a white blouse and tight blue jeans on her slender legs, which she hugged to her chest in a kind of upright fetal position as she gazed at the sky.

“Yuck,” Max grimaced. “They’ve lost their sense of personal space.”

“It’s not very American of them.”

Max nodded absently. “Maybe they’re Italians.”

The people walking the streets as well appeared inclined to keep in contact with their companions, though not quite as closely or extensively as the crowds on the steps. The street people mostly stood in small bunches with arms linked or hands on shoulders. Others walked in two's and threes, holding hands as they drifted from corners to benches to cafes, always ending up literally in touch with one group or another. Now and then, a small cluster would make their way up the steps to blend into the lounging audience.

Linda asked, “What do you suppose they’re doing?”

Max recalled the mind-opening experience he’d had when Neumann held his hand.

“I think I know, but I’m not sure how to explain it. I’m guessing they’re communing. That’s probably the best way to put it.”

Linda approached the red haired girl. “I’ll find out what’s going on.”

“Hi,” she said as she stood over the girl.

She smiled slightly in response. Linda sat cross-legged next to her and reached toward the girl’s crooked leg with the kind of caution she might have shown in trying to pet a stray kitten. When the tips of her fingers made contact with the girl’s knee, Linda tilted her head as though she were listening to an unfamiliar sound, and then smiled in much the same way the girl had.

“Are you OK?” asked Max.

Linda pursed her lips and nodded.

“What’s it feel like?”

“Very . . .” she crinkled her nose as she grasped for an adjective, “It’s very broadening.”

Yes, thought Max, broadening is a good word, and deepening and elevating {{Pause=0.25}} – and above all, seductive. As Max recalled, it was also informative.

He squatted down in front of Linda. She looked through him with peaceful blankness. Her pupils were dilated and the muscles in her face were slack.

“Are you in control?” he asked. “Can you let go?”

“Yes, I could,” she said as the slightest frown flickered across her lips, “I think. But I’m not sure I want to. Not yet.” Her eyelids fluttered.

Max reached out and grasped her free hand. In a rush, the thoughts and sensations of all the hundreds of people on the steps flowed through him. His thoughts and sensations flowed through them as well.

He was whisked away, like a raindrop that had fallen into a pond, losing itself to become a small part of a much greater whole. Although he sat only inches from Linda, in this swirling cauldron of experience she seemed both miles away and intimately entwined in his mind along with everyone else in the tortuous chains of contact.

When he’d held Neumann's hand, he had shared the thoughts and a reasonably defined point of view with a single entity. Now, linked to so many people, there was no central focus, only a liquid multiplicity of existence. It was an omni-dimensional panorama that embraced the collected being of the crowd.

The guitar music caught his attention. He listened to it with the composite hearing of all the people on the steps. He focused on how it sounded to the young man who sat just below the musician’s feet, then listened from the perspective of the musician himself, and finally from the point of view of the redheaded girl next to Linda.

Max marveled that he could experience so much without losing his mind. He wasn’t overwhelmed so much as empowered. It was like concentrating on the sensation of his big toe pressed against the inside of his shoe, then thinking about the slickness of the enamel as he ran his tongue across the backs of his teeth. Only now he could focus on the toe of the old man seated twenty steps up, or the teeth of the woman cuddled against the musician’s leg, or any part of anyone else in the assortment of humanity spread before him.

He sensed that there was something more to this conglomeration than simply artificial nirvana. He pushed the thought aside. There were more important things to worry about.

Max scanned the city through the shared eyes of all the people on the steps. They had to be here somewhere {{Pause=0.25}} – the boy, Perske, Linus, and Spencer. It was startling how far he could see, and with such extraordinary resolution. Dust specks on benches and roofing tiles on distant houses all came into focus simultaneously.

A pair of ripples traveled with steady determination along a sidewalk back up the street. The disturbances would surely have been imperceptible to his normal vision. Now he could see them, and somehow know that they had traced the path he and Linda had taken from the acropolis. The collective vision, it seemed, included a collective memory as well. He had no idea what the ripples could be, but it was clear from the path that the ripples were following them - that they were stalkers of some kind. He was not surprised; it would have been inconceivable that he and Linda could have made it this far un-observed.

That’s the place, he thought as he peered at a walled courtyard just beyond the amphitheater where he had played chess with Neumann and where Minus had skewered his thigh.

He stood without letting go of Linda’s hand, watching himself through dozens of eyes. His clothes hung on him more loosely than he remembered.

I’ve lost weight, he thought.

He pulled Linda away from the red headed girl. Her fingertips slipped off the girl’s leg, and the communal perspective snapped shut with the suddenness of a psychic mousetrap. Max teetered on his feet from the abrupt transition. Linda lurched onto her side, wrapping her arms over her ears, pulling her knees to her stomach and groaning.

“Linda, we have to go.” His voice sounded so large and booming inside his head, as if there was less space inside his own skull than there should have been.

“Are you all right?” he asked, wincing at the volume of his words.

She lifted herself gingerly to lean against the bottom step, careful to avoid touching the girl. “The exit was kind of abrupt.”

“Sorry.”

“I could really learn to like that,” she said, jerking her thumb at the people on the stairs behind her. She propped her elbows on her thighs and buried her face in her hands.

A minuscule tremor disturbed the stones beneath Max’s feet.

“We have to go,” he said softly. “They’re on to us.”

“Anything that feels that good has got to be bad,” said Linda. She straightened up and fondled the pendant on her necklace. “Let’s do what we came here for.”

“Yes,” said Max, “let’s.”

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Chapter 29. The Spat

“Hey Bob,” said the gravely voice beneath the granite floor of the building atop the acropolis.

“Yes Eddie?” replied the pillar in the back corner.

“Should we follow them?”

“What do you think Eddie?”

“Yes, we should.”

“Good thinkin’ Eddie”

---

Listen to the Chapter 29 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

The side of the talking pillar broke away, leaving a human-sized chunk behind. Bob took a few cautious steps to get the feel of his latest incarnation. Pillar marble was much more comfortable than he would have imagined - substantial and cool, and surprisingly flexible at the elbows and knees, thanks to hinged joints with glassy marble sliding over glassy marble. The pinkish hue was a bit lively for his taste, but understated enough to get away with in a pinch.

Bob rolled his head to get the kink out of his marble neck. He looked down at his marble toes and hummed his waiting-for-Eddie tune. The song was tantalizingly close to one he had heard ages ago, but couldn’t quite get right, which pissed him off even more than waiting for Eddie.

“Dammit man,” Bob said, clicking his pinkish marble foot on the granite.

The floor heaved. Eddie surged forward to his feet and stepped out of the hole he left in the floor. His broad granite chest was smooth and polished, as were the front of his legs and his forehead, all portions that had previously been part of the floor surface. His rounded sides and back were raw jagged rock. His eyes were tiny black specks set deep into craters below his flat forehead.

“Sorry Bob. I was just enjoying the ceiling for a moment.” He pointed upward with his arm of granite, which made a squeaking and grinding noise, like beach pebbles squeezed together in a child’s palm. “I don’t get the allegory there.”

“Oh geez Eddie.”

“I'm serious Bob. Look at the lower left part of the triptych. Everybody’s hanging out in paradise, and there’s that dragon peeking out from behind a bush bearing an absurd medley of fruit.” Eddie put his granite hand to his brow. “I mean, holy crap, what kind of bush produces apples, berries, bananas, and scrolls tied up with ribbon?”

“Dude,"said Bob, "let it go.”

Eddie persisted in his analysis of the artwork. “Then on the lower right," he said, "there’s a battle. The bush is dead and the fruit are rotting, and the dragon is kicking butt, slaying soldiers like flies – what with the flames and the pointy tail and all. And finally at the top, some naked guy with a helmet and a sword has the dragon on a leash, and there are little bitty bushes growing everywhere.”

“Dammit,” said Bob, his massive shoulders sagging in frustration.

“How’s a naked guy gonna capture a dragon anyway," asked Eddie. "What’s he gonna do with it now? And even if he could . . . Ow!”

A shard of granite skittered across the floor. Bob was relieved to find from his backhand swipe to Eddie’s head that marble was the stronger of the two stones.

“Oh, man.” Eddie rubbed the jagged notch over his left eye. “Look what you’ve done. Now I’m all lopsided.”

“You were never very well balanced to begin with.”

Eddie’s beady eyes glistened as he moved with sad grinding footsteps to retrieve the bit of granite skull. Bob could be so snippy now and then. He slipped the shard back in its place above his eye, where it fit like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Then he walked in grumpy silence to the stairs. Bob followed behind, rolling his pink marble eyes skyward in their pink marble sockets.

It’s going to be tough to make up for this one, he thought.

The shard shifted a bit as Eddie started down the steps. He held it tight with a thick stony finger to keep the piece from falling off during his descent. He didn’t really care about the damage that much, but he wanted to make a show of how absurd Bob’s thoughtless swipe had made him feel.

They trudged down the steps for a while in bitter silence.

Halfway down, Bob said, “Look Eddie.”

Eddie stopped, turned around and sighed. “Yes Bob?”

“No I don’t mean ‘Look Eddie.’” Bob thrust his arm toward the field. "I mean look over there."

Eddie craned his granite neck to see where Bob was pointing. The man and the woman were nearing the hedge in the distance.

“Oh. Yes, of course.”

Eddie swung around and continued to the bottom stair at the edge of the field and waited. Bob joined him and they stood side by side for a moment.

“Look Eddie.”

“I’m on it Bob,” Eddie snapped as he prepared to step onto the grass.

“No I mean - look Eddie, I’m sorry.”

“I’m sure you are,” said Eddie.

“It’s just . . . ” said Bob.

Eddie swung around to glare at his marble companion. The step was small and there was hardly enough space for them to stand face to face.

After a few moments searching for the right words, Bob gave up. “Forget it Eddie,” he said.

“It’s not that simple Bob.”

Eddie stepped backward onto the grass and dissolved into a pile of granite pebbles. First one, then another of the pebbles skittered off the pile and bounced back up the steps. Soon a stream of granite pebbles flowed up to the temple atop the acropolis. The only sign of Eddie was a slight lump in the ground that scooted across the field like a cat under a bed sheet. Bob shook his head.

“I’m going to hear about this later,” he said as he followed Eddie’s lead and crumbled into marble pebbles on the grass.

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Chapter 28. In Country

A tingling numbness started in Max’s his scalp and spread downward to meet up with the fuzzy burn that radiated from the toy car in his hands. Suddenly, both the sensations and the little car were gone. Linda too had disappeared. Otherwise, the room was exactly the same as it had been a moment before.

He walked around to the desk chair, slipped the rifle off of his shoulder and sat down. It would take a few moments for Linda to follow him, assuming that she would even end up in the same place. He swung his feet up on the desk.

---

Listen to the Chapter 28 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

It was possible that the little car had taken her somewhere else, or to a different incarnation of the same place – perhaps a copy of the room without Max in it.

A moan from the other side of the desk confirmed she had made it through. She called his name in a trembling voice.

“I’m here,” he replied without rising from his seat. Assuming that the beetle affected her in the same way that it affected him, she should be fine soon. Everything had at least started according to plan.

“That was freaky,” said Linda, apparently still on the floor. “Like wrestling with a paint mixer.”

Max stood up and leaned over the desk to see her sitting cross-legged on the floor, her hair mussed but otherwise looking well enough.

“It feels more like an electric shock to me.”

“I guess,” she said as she massaged one of her hands. “I’ve never been shocked. Not with an electric current anyway.”

Linda grasped the edge of the desk and lifted herself up.

“What now?”

“I guess," said Max, "we do what I did last time.”

He thought back to the first Beetle episode, trying to recall each of the steps he had gone through before.

“Exit environment,” he called. The room transformed into the cluttered lab. He held out his hand. “Come on.”

He led Linda to the heavy metal door that opened from the lab to the outer office. The scene outside was familiar; Stephen’s desk, the gray waste basket, the cinder block walls covered in glossy gray paint. There was a subtle shimmer to the room and the items in it, as if at any moment they could suddenly change into something else. He kicked the trashcan. It tumbled over with a clang that was very much, but not quite, like the sound he would have expected.

The route to the exit that opened on the darkened parking lot was shorter than he remembered, and when they stepped into the night, his was the only car in the lot. It was parked under the bright spot of a street lamp.

He grasped the handle. A muted click and a beep indicated that it recognized his touch and that the doors had unlocked. Max nodded to Linda. She walked around to the passenger side and climbed in.

He handed his rifle to her as he settled into the driver’s seat. The seatbelt secured itself across his lap and over his shoulder as the engine purred to life.

“Home please,” he ordered the auto-chauffeur program. The car glided out of the parking space toward the street.

“Nice car,” said Linda, waving her hand at the dashboard.

“I guess, for an econo-box. I don’t really keep it this clean.”

Linda nodded soberly. “A little light on the details?”

“So it seems.”

The streets of the campus were uncharacteristically empty, and the route felt to Max to be distinctly abbreviated. He realized that enough details were missing from the road and landscape that he might have had a tough time finding his way home, if it weren’t for the automated guidance. Clearly, whoever had programmed the environment had left the reality turned down a bit too low. That must have been what made the trip home feel so odd the last time he’d been here, although it had been good enough that it hadn’t registered as anything more than mild disorientation at the time.

His car pulled up in front of the awning that sheltered the steps leading into his apartment. They stepped out and Max led Linda up the stairs. He stopped and turned to watch his car park itself in his reserved space. As at work, the lot was empty save his lone car. It was an absurd omission, considering that nearly all the residents should surely have been home in the evening.

They made their way up the steps to the second floor landing. Max turned the key in the lock, pushed open the door with the rifle-butt and found the apartment in the exact condition he remembered from the day of his abduction. The furniture and laundry piles, the television and his laptop, everything was just as before. A prickly cold chill swept over him as he eyed the floral print sofa and the princess phone on the floor in front of it.

“Are you OK?” Linda asked.

“Sure,” said Max. “I’m fine.”

“You look pale.”

He steadied his rifle and turned to peer into the kitchen. The oven was closed, but lacking the crisscrossing layers of duct tape he’d used to seal it during his weeks of seclusion.

“It’s just that this part was a bit rough the last go ‘round.”

Linda moved in close behind him and put a hand on his arm. “Can you handle it?”

“I think so.” He noted, as much to assure himself as anything, that Spencer and Perske weren’t likely to be expecting them, and would not have sent the abductors that assaulted him the last time he was in his virtual apartment.

Linda walked around him into the kitchen. She braced her rifle against her hip, pointing it at the oven door.

“So,” she said, “this is the way in.”

Max nodded.

“What are we waiting for?”

“I’m ready if you are.”

She lifted the pendant off her chest and pressed it against her lips, like an athlete kissing a crucifix before a match.

“All set.”

Max stepped in front of her and grasped the oven door handle. He took a deep breath and pulled, letting the door drop. It bounced briefly as it revealed the gaping maw of darkness. His heart raced. The trip hadn’t really been so bad the last time, but he hadn’t had a choice either. It was one thing to be shoved into the void screaming and struggling, and another to dive in of his own volition.

He rocked back on his heals.

“You know Linda, you don’t have to go.”

She tapped the pendant.

“I’ve got this.”

Max shrugged. “Well, just give it to me. I’ll take care of it.”

“You're sweet,” she said, brushing his cheek with the back of her hand. “But I’m going. If you like, I’ll go alone and you can stay behind.”

Max shook his head. That wouldn’t work.

“Alright then,” she said, “it’s settled. Now, who first?”

“Me, I suppose.” He knelt in front of the open oven and braced himself on the door. He stuck his head and shoulders into the pitch black darkness, careful to guide the rifle in alongside. The silence was deafening. A lump rose in his throat. He swallowed hard, pushed against the kitchen floor, and inched his torso through the gap. Only the pressure of his free hand against the oven wall stopped him from tumbling in. He took a deep breath of the emptiness, leaned forward, and slipped into the void.

Max could see nothing at all. The darkness was so complete that he couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or shut. He blinked deliberately, but detected no change.

He extended his arm, searching for any point of reference. He reached, and reached, and reached. There seemed no limit to how far his arm could stretch. It was as if he were reaching out to the whole dark world {{Pause=0.25}} – to the great, empty universe. He pointed his toes and his legs too stretched out forever. His entire body was expanding, until it felt as though the tip of his nose was miles from the back of his head.

He tried to make a fist. He could feel that the muscles were willing, but the response was incredibly slow in coming, as if his nerve impulses were ripples traveling through molasses. His breathing slowed in his enormous lungs, his swelling heart thudded ever more ponderously with every beat.

He wondered, with thoughts that were as slow and deliberate as his pulse, if he would eventually dissolve into the cosmos, like a smoke ring blown into the air, expanding and fading to a shadow, then to only a memory of the ring that it once was.

He hovered for a time in the void like a cloud in a pitch-black night.

The expansion reversed itself. It was a gradual collapse at first, almost undetectable. His extremities began to pull back from the endless expanse. As they did, he could feel his body regaining its substance. His breathing and pulse increased. The contraction steadily accelerated until he was not simply solidifying, but imploding. He bellowed soundlessly. Would it stop? Would he be restored to his original form, or crushed, like a dying star collapsing into a black hole?

The contraction sped still further until there was a sudden snap, like the release of a rubber band. He was lying face down, with his nose crushed against a cold, hard floor. Max flopped onto his back gasping and struggling to regain his bearings.

He was back on the acropolis where Spencer and his goons had met him and dragged him down to see Betty’s mangled form.

He lifted himself onto his elbows, still panting and shaky. Linda hadn’t arrived yet. Max rocked forward and climbed to his feet. He scanned the horizon beyond the soaring marble columns and wandered a half dozen yards across the marble floor to the steps that led down to the field with its manicured hedgerow.

He surveyed the town, paused for a moment, then dropped to the floor onto his belly. He reached forward, hooked his fingers on the edge of the top step, and pulled himself along the smooth stone until he could just peek over. There was motion on the streets beyond the field. Dozens of people meandered about like ants living in a colony of marble houses and cobblestone streets. Some disappeared into the white stone buildings while others emerged. They were walking, jogging, and riding bicycles. Groups gathered here and there, perhaps to chat under the clear blue sky.

The town had grown since the last time Max had visited the place, and a network of roads spread cobbled fingers off to the horizon. At the town’s farthest reaches, the structures had a hazy, glittery quality to them.

There was a sudden pop and a whoosh of air. Max ducked instinctively and hid his head under his arm. A tense moment of anticipation followed, but there were no rough hands under his armpits, and no squeaky, fat man voice welcoming him to Wonderland.

He rolled onto his side and saw Linda sprawled on the floor, just as he had been when he first arrived. She stayed perfectly still for several seconds, then her chest heaved with a deep breath. She turned her head and laid her cheek on the floor. Her hair spilled across her face, obscuring her eyes.

“Linda?” said Max.

She nodded almost imperceptibly. Max squirmed around on the floor and scrambled to her on his belly, staying low to keep out of sight of the people milling about below. He reached out to her shoulder, but stopped short of touching her. Instead, he crossed his arms on the ground and rested his head on his elbow to wait for her to recover.

“That was,” Linda croaked. She cleared her throat. “That was wild.”

She slid her hand to her face and pushed her hair aside.

“Do you think that’s what email goes through when you hit send?” She let her hair drop back over her eyes and spread her arms and legs across the floor.

She pulled her limbs in tight and lifted her chest off the floor.

Max inched closer and placed a hand firmly on her back. “Stay down.”

“Why? What’s the matter?”

He crawled back across the floor to the top of the steps, beckoned to her with a flick of his wrist and whispered, “Come here.”

“What?”

“Come here,” he said more loudly.

Linda started to rise to her feet.

“Stay down,” Max hissed, and she dropped back to her hands and knees. Linda set off crawling across the floor.

“OK, cowboy,” she said when she was finally beside him. “What’s up?”

Max pointed to the city.

“Wow, busy place,” said Linda. “Who are those folks?”

“I have no idea. They weren’t here last time.”

“They don’t look very dangerous," said Linda. "In fact, the whole thing seems kind of Utopian”

Max agreed with Linda’s assessment. Compared to the grimy Freedom Club compound, this place was paradise, or so it seemed from a distance.

“Too bad we’re going to have to make such a mess of it,” she said. “What now?”

Max shrugged. “I’m not sure. We can wait for Spencer to find us, which I’m sure he will, eventually.”

“Or we can go find them. Either way, the end result is the same.” She pointed toward the amphitheater in the center of town. “That’s where you last saw the boy.”

Max nodded.

“We should get as close to him as possible,” she said, touching the pendant on her neck. “Any suggestion about how we deal with them?”

Max sat up and swung his feet over the top step. “Nope.”

“OK then. I guess there’s no point in hiding up here." She stood, slipped her rifle off her shoulder, and checked its settings. "I'm ready. Let’s go.”

“They’re growing, you know,” he said.

Linda looked out at the town. “What do you mean? They're getting larger?”

“No, they’re building up.”

The indistinct look of the far edges of the town, Max guessed, resulted from the fact that those structures were actively under construction. It reminded him of an image he’d once seen of bacteria in a Petri dish. Instead of microbes and slime on gelatin, housing construction was creeping along the fractal fingers of roadways radiating out from the amphitheater at the center.

“That’s not good,” said Linda. “I’m not sure what it means, but it can’t be good.”

She set off down the stairs. Max followed.

“I imagine not,” he said.

***

All was still atop the acropolis. Only a subtle grinding under the polished stone disturbed the silence – until a pillar, in the back corner farthest from the stairs, erupted with a thunderous sneeze.

"Bless you," said a gravelly voice from beneath the floor.

"Shut up Eddie," the pillar replied.

Read the rest of the post . . .

Chapter 27. Zero Day

Joel was recovering well after two days. Both his eyes were still blackened from the blow to his face, but Max had restrained himself enough that he hadn’t actually broken Joel’s nose after all. The lunatic had Linda to thank for the last minute mercy. If she hadn’t asked Max to go easy, Joel would have been in much worse shape. Nevertheless, he wore his protective foil cap down low on his brow and kept his distance as Linda and Dr. Murray prepared Max for the trip back to Perske’s corner of the dark net.

---

Listen to the Chapter 27 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

Max stretched out in the lounge chair and Linda placed a pair of headphones over his ears. She swung around a set of goggles mounted at the end of a jointed boom, and positioned them in front of his face. The contraption looked like it had been kluged together with parts scavenged from a dental drill, an optometrist’s testing station, and the guts of a microwave oven.

“If that thing slips,” said Max, “you’ll crush me.”

Linda winked at him and continued about her business, twisting the positioning knobs and lining up the eyepieces. She beckoned Joel to help her. He approached hesitantly, careful to keep Linda between himself and Max.

“Can you see the test pattern?”

Max focused on the image in the lenses.

“Yep, there are the cross hairs. The focus looks about right.”

“And you can still hear me?”

He nodded.

“It’s a little muffled.”

When everything was set, she stepped back to survey the set up, and then climbed into the twin lounge chair nearby.

“Wait,” said Max, “I thought I was going with Joel.”

“No, it’ll just be you and Linda,” said Dr. Murray as he began arranging Linda’s equipment. “May Ted guide and protect the both of you.”

Max lifted the headphones off of his ears.

“I’d really prefer it if he came along instead.”

“You and Linda will make a more cohesive team,” said Dr. Murray. “He’s going to work on finding a vulnerability for us to get you in. That’s really more in keeping with his talents.”

“We’ve worked things out haven’t we Joel? Come on, it’ll be fun”

Joel shook his head in a silent but vigorous negative reply before busying himself at the keyboard and monitor across the room.

Max pushed the goggles to the side.

“What’s the matter?” Linda asked. “Don’t you trust me? Or is it because I’m a girl?”

“No, it’s not that.”

“I’m a much better shot that Joel. Much better than you too, as I’ve heard.”

Max stammered, “This isn’t the way I thought it would go down.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“I don’t know. It’s just not what I expected. That’s all.”

After a moment, he pulled his goggles back in place.

“I’ll try to adapt.”

Joel made himself small at the terminal. Linda fiddled needlessly with the equipment mounted to her lounge chair.

Dr. Murray broke the awkward silence by describing the zero day exploit. Joel, he explained, was scanning the recent security bulletins for high priority patches and the flaws that they addressed. The inevitable delay between the announcement of a vulnerability and the installation of patches by sysadmins, he said, means that there is almost always a window of opportunity for a fast moving hacker to take advantage of a security flaw. Places like the University, where staff were likely to be less attentive on the weekends, are particularly vulnerable to flaws announced in bulletins released late in the day, at the end of the week, and over holiday breaks.

“In the summer,” said Murray, “they might as well hand us the keys during happy hour on basically any Thursday or Friday you like, Ted willing.” He checked his watch. “It’s five thirty Joel. Anything promising?”

“There are a few possibilities,” Joel mumbled.

“Lets get started,” said Linda. “We’ll hang out on the inside until you find an exploit.”

Dr. Murray placed a hand on each of their shoulders and blessed them and their mission in Ted’s name. He stepped back, flicked the switches on a pair of small vacuum pumps resting by each of their chairs, then opened the valve at the top of an insulated liquid nitrogen canister. Max recognized the hum of a large power supply, but the sound of a rustling wind quickly drowned it out.

He found himself standing at the prow of a large boat, with the deck rocking lazily under his feat and the distant horizon rising and falling with the rhythm of the long, low swells.

Linda squatted nearby, rummaging through an equipment locker.

“What are we doing here?” he asked.

“Just waiting,” said Linda. She lifted a rifle from the locker and tossed it to him, then pulled out a weapons belt like the one Joel had demonstrated. “You said something the other day about going on a cruise. I thought that this was the least we could do.”

She strapped the belt around her waist before reaching in the locker for another and handing it to Max. She tapped her belt’s root kit button and faded to a vague outline. Although he could still make her out as a translucent distortion against the background, she was nearly invisible other than a ripple that became more distinct when she moved. She reappeared after a few seconds with her hand in the act of falling away from the belt, where she had apparently toggled the setting back off.

“Try yours.”

He located the button on his belt and pushed it. Although he felt no change, and his extremities looked to him to be as visible as ever, Linda nodded in approval.

He clicked the button again.

“Excellent,” she said. “Should we go over the plan again?”

Max shrugged. “It seems simple enough. I show you the way in and cover you if we get in a pinch. Once we get close to Perske and the Jasons, you’ll take care of the rest. Then it’s back out in a hurry.”

He leaned over and peered into the empty locker. “Where’s that little fire cracker Joel showed me?”

Linda pulled at the collar of her plain white t-shirt to reveal the pendant on a chain around her neck.

“Do I get one?”

“No,” said Linda. “If we get close enough to set it off, we won’t have time for a second try. One’s enough.”

“Sounds exciting," said Max. "Incidentally, thanks to Joel’s little demo session, I know how to bail out in an emergency. What about your escape plan?”

Linda shook her head. “I get out the same way we go in, or I don’t get out. At least not in the same shape I’m in now.”

“What happens if you don’t make it?”

“Based on what we’ve seen in the past, short term dementia is the best possible outcome.”

“Really?" said Max. "So we’re not the first from the Freedom Club to give it a shot?”

“We haven’t sent many in, but there have been a few, and it’s never turned out well.” She rested her rifle barrel against the railing. “Joel was probably the luckiest. He was catatonic for a few days. The first week was touch-and-go; teaching him to swallow, then to chew. He’s not what you’d call normal yet, but at least he can wipe himself.”

Max whistled softly. Joel’s aluminum foil cap didn’t seem so outrageous in light of what he must have been through.

“It’s a risk you’re still willing to take?” he asked.

Linda slung her rifle on her back and tightened her belt, but said nothing.

“Alright then,” said Max, “I guess we’ll have to make sure everything goes off as planned.”

She pointed at a dark smudge on the horizon beyond the ship’s bow.

“It looks like they found us a way in.”

Max shouldered his rifle as the smudge spread across the sky like ink soaking into a cloth. When all the sky was at last dark, the deck of the ship bucked, sending Max and Linda stumbling toward the railing. He extended his arm to steady himself and found his hand resting on a warm, smooth surface.

It was the desk in his home environment on the University system. Everything was in its place, just as he remembered it. After weeks of trauma and struggle to adapt to the primitive conditions of the Freedom Club, it was a comfort to find himself in a place so familiar, so perfectly tailored for his needs.

Linda studied the walnut desk, the ceiling fan and the ancient filing cabinet.

“Welcome home Sam Spade.” She lifted the telephone receiver and tested its weight. “Where to now?”

Max scratched his chin. “I guess I need to find the message from Perske with the attachment she sent me the last time.”

He opened the filing cabinet drawer that held his email and flipped through a few of the recent files.

“I never had a very good organizational system. Hold on a moment. It’s better if I have Betty handle it.”

“Who?” said Linda.

“You’ll see.”

Max called for his virtual assistant. The door on the wall across from his desk opened immediately and Betty entered. She was dressed in her usual mob moll garb with the diving cleavage, heavy black high heels and tight skirt that stopped just above her knees.

“Betty, could you find the last message that I opened from Dr. Perske? The one with the attachment please.”

She sauntered to the cabinet and reached into the drawer to select a sheet of paper and the box that went with it. She handed them both to Max, perched herself on the edge of the desk, and pulled a nail file from her frilly sleeve.

“Thank you Betty. That will be all for now.”

“Interesting,” said Linda as Betty slipped off the desk and exited.

“Isn’t she though?”

He set the email on his desk and lifted the toy car out of the box.

“This might be a tad disturbing, but it’s how we get in, I think.” He flipped the car over and found the small switch on the bottom that set the toy lights blinking and the horn beeping. “Just follow my lead and you should be fine.”

He turned the car around and stared into the stroboscopic headlights. The fuzzy caterpillar sensation erupted in his forearm. The room began to spin. He felt his eyes roll upward.

Here we go again, thought Max.

Read the rest of the post . . .

Chapter 26. Target Practice

---

Read about the Dark Net Target Practice game inspired by this chapter.

---

At first glance, the rolling green hills, brilliant blue sky and puffy clouds looked reasonably convincing. But the illusion didn’t hold up well under close scrutiny. Everything had the shoddy artificialness of a low budget virtual environment, like an old fashioned sound stage in some epic film from the glory days of Technicolor Hollywood. Max imagined if he were to climb the nearest hill, he would find that the distant horizon where the earth met the sky was nothing more than paint on a rippling canvas backdrop.

---

Listen to the Chapter 26 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

The half dozen creatures frolicking on the artificial turf a few dozen yards away weren’t rendered any better. There was a cat that was apparently made of scraps of paper swept up from the floor of an artist’s studio, a cartoonish dog walking on his hind legs and wearing a red cape, a bearded man with an Elizabethan collar that Max assumed was supposed to evoke Shakespeare, a levitating UFO about the size of a basketball, and a claymation Albert Einstein. The final creature was the most animated of the bunch – it was a twisting, cavorting, spastic paperclip with googly eyes that Max recognized as the annoying office assistant from some ancient word processor program.

“Ready for target practice?” Joel asked as he hefted a rifle to his shoulder and took a bead on the dancing paperclip flitting through a patch of yellow flowers. He squeezed the trigger and fired off a shot that froze the creature in mid frolic.

“That just hangs the process,” said Joel. He tilted the rifle and twisted a knob on the stock. “You can adjust how long you want it to halt with this. Watch him. He’ll get going again in a second.”

After a few moments, the frozen paperclip jerked back into motion just as Joel had predicted.

He flipped the rifle over and pointed to a switch just in front of the trigger guard. “This lets you set it to corrupt the bugger all together. Wanna try it?”

Max shook his head. “After you.”

Joel aimed again and shouted, “Hey dude, it looks like I’m writing an obituary.”

The paperclip bounced spastically. “Would you like help?” it screeched.

“I think I know how to compose this one.”

Joel fired a shot. The grinning paperclip melted into a blob of gray goo that seeped into the grass.

Joel thrust the weapon into Max’s hands.

“Give it a go. It’s fun.”

The faux wood stock was warm and smooth. The rifle had a comfortable heft.

Max set the switch back to the pause position and pointed the gun up to the sky at a cloud that was unconvincingly drifting by. The butt bucked lightly against his shoulder and a jagged portion of the cloud stopped in its place, while the remainder continued on its way. He lowered the rifle toward the ground and pulled the trigger again. A spot on the shimmering grass dimmed a bit.

Finally, he aimed at the claymation Einstein. The first shot went wide right, and the second was too low. The third was dead on, freezing Einstein in place.

“If we’re going in there armed with these,” he said, “I hope you’re not counting on my marksmanship.”

Max turned as he spoke, and Joel leapt back clumsily stumbling on his robes.

“Watch it,” he squeaked. “Don’t point that at me.”

Max lowered the muzzle.

“Excuse me. Is it dangerous to humans?”

“Indeedy,” said Joel. “They tried it on me once. It was only set on pause of course. Have you ever been wrapped in a wet rubber sheet?”

Max admitted that it was not a pleasure he had ever experienced.

“You can imagine what it feels like. Anyway, we’re not relying on your aim. Linda’s a crack shot. She’s the one who popped me. I can tell you, I wasn’t standing still for it. She hit me at fifty meters and a full run.”

The image brought an involuntary smile to Max’s face.

“Besides,” said Joel, “you don’t have to aim very well with these.”

He lifted a portion of his robe to reveal a belt with a collection of canisters hanging from it. One was marked with the red letters FB, another bore the marking DOS, a third was labeled ZB, and the final canister read Ctrl-Alt-Del.

“This,” said Joel as he removed the first canister from his belt, “is a fork bomb. I like to call it a wabbit, ‘cause it breeds processes like mad.”

He pulled a tab at the top of the canister and heaved it into the field near the scrap-paper cat. After a moment, a series of translucent blobs about the size of softballs erupted from the canister and rolled in lazy trajectories on the grass. Several of them stuck to the cat, which was soon enveloped in a mound of the jelly blobs.

“The zip bomb,” he said as he launched a second canister into the midst of the animated characters, “hogs memory and slows all local processes to a crawl.”

The canister went off with a muted thud. The walking dog and the Elizabethan poet, although still animated, moved with fits and starts, like characters in a movie recorded on a scratched DVD.

“This one,” said Joel holding out the DOS labeled can, “is a Denial of Service beacon. It won’t work here because this system is isolated. There has to be at least some network connection for it to have any effect. It’s handy if you need to block a portal and shut off network traffic for a while.”

He replaced the beacon and pointed to the final canister.

"Control-Alt-Delete grenade - it's old fashioned, but it'll do the trick if you need to stop a lot of local processes in a hurry. I'm sure you can figure that one out on your own."

Max nodded. “That’s quite an arsenal. It looks like you’re all set to make real nuisances of yourselves. What do you need me for?”

Joel cinched the belt tighter around his waist. “Someone has to show us the way around. You’re the only person who’s ever been in and made it back out intact. Don’t get me wrong. Finding your way in is easy enough. It’s taking care of business and getting back out that’s tough, at least with all your wits about you.”

From what Max knew of Joel, it seemed he had little to fear when it came to losing his wits.

“Is there anything else?”

Joel tapped the belt at his waist and pointed toward a small red button.

“This enables a root kit. It’ll give you some stealthiness in most systems, but it’s not fool proof, just helpful. And then there’s this.”

He lifted a pendant on a chain around his neck. It was a black fob about the size of a peach pit and similar in shape.

“It’ll compromise just about any program in range, as well as mangle data and corrupt executable code. You just activate it like this.” He jerked the pendant off the chain and held it between his thumb and index finger. It glowed a menacing red and flashed, slowly at first and then gradually faster.

“Count to three and chuck it.”

He lobbed the pendant. It exploded with a brilliant flash, instantly incinerating the cluster of animated creatures and leaving a charred scar on the ground. At the point where the jewel had detonated, a small fireball hovered like a tiny sun. Max grimaced at the destruction and held up a hand to shield his eyes from the brilliance of the fireball that pulsed and swelled.

A circle of seared grass slowly expanded as shining blades curled, blackened and erupted in smoke like hair in a match flame. Max and Joel stepped backward in response to the increasing heat.

“Now what?” shouted Max through his clenched teeth.

“I’m going to run like hell,” said Joel, “but you can take a shortcut.”

“What?”

Joel reached out and grasped Max with one hand on each shoulder. He simultaneously pulled down and lunged forward, slamming his forehead into Max’s face. The grinding crunch of his breaking nose sent Max reeling back onto the ground.

Over the roar in his ears that came from a combination of the flaming fireball and the agony in his face, Max heard Joel holler, “Now we’re even. See you back at camp.”

***

Max returned to consciousness with a start. The pain was gone, but the throbbing memory of it was still vivid. He whipped his head around in search of Joel, but only the empty lounge chair stood where the bastard had been hooked up to the Freedom Club’s crude virtual environment interface.

He lurched forward and tried to stand. A firm but gentle pressure pulled him down from behind.

“Your OK. Take it easy.”

It was Linda’s voice.

“My god,” Max choked. “He broke my nose.”

“I know. He told me.”

Linda stepped in front of his chair, still holding him with one outstretched hand.

“He wasn’t supposed to do it that way. But he made the point.”

“What the fuck point was that?”

“Shush, you’re alright now,” she said. “The point is that you can get out at any time, provided something triggers a seizure. Pain is the quickest way.”

Max’s chest heaved. He touched his nose gingerly. It was intact and painless.

“How convenient,” he said, “all I need is for Joel to assault me and I’m out.”

Linda shook her head. “No, anything painful enough will do. I suggested breaking your arm. Dr. Murray thinks a dislocated finger would do it. Joel did this on his own.”

“I’m gonna kick his ass.”

“Maybe you should,” Linda said. “But you might want to change your pants first.”

Max looked at the wet spot that extended from his crotch and down his right thigh.

“I don’t want anything to do with you lunatics. I thought Joel was the only madman. You’re all crazy.”

“It’s up to you," said Linda, "although I don’t know where you’re going to go. They’d find you if you set foot anywhere near your apartment.”

“Somewhere else then.”

“OK,” said Linda, “any ideas?”

“I don’t know,” he snarled, “anywhere. Maybe a cruise. I’ve always wanted to go on a cruise.”

Linda shrugged. “It’ll cost you. And even if you have money, you remember what happened when you bought the soda back at the fuel station.”

Max grumbled wordlessly.

“I’ll set you up with supplies, if you want to take off on your own. But the minute you resurface, you’ll be in trouble. The way I see it, you can help us take them down, in which case you’re clear and we’re on our way to liberating everyone else.”

Max wanted to be angry, but her calm tone dampened his fury.

“So you’re out to destroy them and the whole Web? That’s a tough job.”

She walked over to Joel’s lounge chair and sat on the arm.

“Constant struggle. That’s what revolutions are all about.”

“If you succeed,” said Max, “then what?”

“We put the skills we’re learning to the test. Live like we’re living now, the way nature intended.”

“Like cave men?”

“Like natives. Humans. Not slaves to the machine they call the Internet. You can help us, or you can go your own way. I’d prefer it,” she said softly, “if you helped.”

Max slipped off the chair and stood. He pinched the leg of his pants and pulled the damp cloth away from his thigh.

“When are you planning to go in?”

“Soon. Probably on a weekend. We’re waiting for a zero-day vulnerability we can exploit.”

Max shook his head. The term was lost on him.

“Think about what you want to do and I’ll explain it to you if you decide to join us.”

“First,” said Max, “I’m going to find Joel and exploit his vulnerability for a while. Then I’ll let you know.”

“Good enough.” Linda led the way to the door that opened onto the stairs to the landing at the front of the farmhouse.

“After you change,” she said when Max was halfway down the steps, “you might try looking for Joel in the north barn. That’s where he hides when he knows he’s in trouble.”

Max rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“Thanks,” he said as he reached for the doorknob. “I’ll change after I check out the barn. No point in washing up now just to have to clean his blood off later.”

“Max, don’t be too rough on him.”

“Goodnight Linda.”

He walked across the porch, flexed his hand, and imagined how good it was going to feel breaking Joel’s nose for real.

Read the rest of the post . . .

Chapter 25. Weatherman

The hottest part of the day was past, but the evening breeze that alternately lifted the plain white curtains and pressed them flat against the screens in Linda’s cabin was still too warm to be of any comfort.

---

Listen to the Chapter 25 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

Max sat on the edge of the small bed, stripped to his underwear and t-shirt, sweating and waiting for the dinner bell. After dinner, he imagined, he would lie here and wait for breakfast. Then lunch, and then dinner again. Eventually he would become nothing more than a great, fat, sweating lump, venturing out only to eat.

Joel was right – if you’re going to drop out you have to commit to it. This was about as out as he could get.

Although Linda had promised to explain everything to him, the information she’d offered was vague and minimal. She and her compatriots at the Freedom Club, she said, had been keeping an eye on Herman Grunding, as well as Perske and a think tank that Linda called the Jasons. How a bunch of granola munching Luddites in the Pennsylvania Mountains managed that was not something she was willing to go into, just yet anyway.

Max had only come to their attention when he’d logged in as Herman and started raising red flags by lumbering around and asking lots of questions that Herman would surely have known the answers to.

The door opened and the curtains snapped tight against the screens. Linda stepped into the room, leaving the door open behind her.

“Here you are,” she said. “Is everything all right?”

“Sure. Just doing my part. Staying low, dropping out.”

“Had enough of hornworms?”

“Yep,” said Max. “It’s not much of a hobby. The tomatoes are as good as dead anyway. I figure Joel can collect them himself, if he’s hungry.”

Linda shrugged and stood quietly for a while, apparently in search of a reply. When she didn’t find one, she made her way to the bathroom. The water ran briefly in the sink, then she stepped out as she dried her hands on the rough hand towel from the hook next to the bathroom mirror.

“You know,” said Max, “it’s not as exciting being on the lam as I might have imagined.”

“It never is.” She tossed the towel into the bathroom where it landed soundlessly on the tile. “There are,” she said as she crossed the room to sit beside him on the bed, “ways to pass the time.”

“Checkers?”

She placed her hand lightly on his thigh.

“Not board games.”

Max blinked. “It’s very hot, you know.”

Linda plucked at the leg of his boxers.

“It would be cooler without these.”

He reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze.

“Thanks, but I don’t think so.”

“Don’t you like me?”

“It’s not that. I have,” he said slowly, “a problem. It’s the drugs, mostly.”

She slid closer to him, pressing her leg against his.

“Are you sure? Have you tried?”

“Of course,” said Max. He stood and stepped away from the bed.

“Would you like to just lie down for a while? Until dinner.”

She pulled her shirt over her head, unbuttoned her shorts and pushed them down to the floor, then stretched out naked on the bed.

“Please?”

Max climbed onto the bed and she snuggled against his side.

“I’m sorry – about your problem,” she whispered.

“So am I.”

He stared at the ceiling as sweat trickled off his brow to the pillow behind his head. When the bell finally rang in the distance he took a shower, dressed in a fresh shirt and overalls, and walked with Linda down to the tent to eat.

***
{{Pause=0.5}}
“Attention, brothers and sisters,” called a man standing by the fire pit where the Freedom Club members gathered after dinner. He was dressed in robes similar to Joel’s but much cleaner. Even from a distance of twenty feet or more under the dim light of the crackling fire, Max could see that the man had wispy white hair and skin that was dry and loose.

Despite his announcement, the chattering of the crowd subsided only slightly. “Your attention please,” he said more forcefully. “I have a few announcements to make before this evening’s workshop.”

Linda patted Max’s knee and leaned back to rest her elbows on the blanket she had spread across the grass for the two of them. But for the most part, no one else appeared to pay any mind to the host.

“Holy robots,” the man shouted. “People shut up.” The crowd fell silent with the exception of what sounded like a woman softly whimpering.

“Thank you friends. The quicker we get started, the quicker we can wrap this up.”

He glanced at a single limp sheet of paper in his hand.

“First of all, I want to remind you that tomorrow is silent Thursday. Please avoid speaking for any reason other than absolute emergencies. Take time to reflect on your autonomy -- your individuality and separation from society. This is especially important for the new comers.

“Secondly, Friday’s workshop will focus on skinning and cleaning of small game. Brothers Alan and Justin will lead the class. Guys,” he said to a pair of young men seated next to the fire, “do you have anything to add to that?”

One of the men stood up. Max recognized him with a shuddering start. It was the hoodlum who had stripped the clothes from him in the parking lot outside the café.

“Please bring your knife,” said the ruffian, displaying the toothy smile that still haunted Max. “We’ll have a few squirrels and rabbits for those of you who don’t have a chance to trap one of your own, but not enough for everyone. So if you’re relying on us, you might end up just watching this time.”

“Thanks Alan,” the host said.

“You’re welcome Dr. Murray.”

“Third,” the old man continued, “I want to recognize sister Lorraine.”

The soft whimpering grew louder at the mention of the woman’s name.

“As you all know, her son Richard turned four last month and it was time to place him with a host family. Ted bless him.”

The whimper escalated to a muted wail.

“Ted teaches us that rebels beget and nurture more rebels. Our precious young revolutionaries are the greatest export that we can send to heal the world.”

The wail was broken with racking sobs.

“As you all can hear, sister Lorraine is overcome with joy at the prospect of her second son following the first in venturing out to plant the seeds of revolution. I’m sure we’ll learn great things about Richard in the decades to come. Would someone please help Lorraine to her cabin where she can celebrate her son’s transition in privacy for a while? Thank you.

“Finally, I want to welcome our guest, Max Caine. Most of you have met him by now. He’s been through a lot, as you all know. He’s staying in cabin twelve for the time being, and Linda has moved temporarily into the big house.

“He has walked among the enemy, and returned to tell the tale. He’s the only one we know of to have done so. We have a lot to learn from you, Max, and I hope we can teach you a thing or two as well. You’re welcome and safe here until it’s time to return and take up the battle again.”

Max asked Linda in a whisper what the hell the old man was talking about.

“He’s being a little dramatic,” she whispered back.

“Now, brothers and sisters,” said the old man, “let us recite from the manifesto.”

He raised his hands over his head and began a droning speech. Linda and the rest of the Freedom Club members muttered along with him.

“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences,” they said in unison, “have been a disaster for the human race. Over socialization leads to low self-esteem, a sense of powerlessness, defeatism, and guilt. Science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives. Freedom means having power; not the power to control other people but the power to control the circumstances of one's own life. Industrial-technological society cannot be reformed. We resort to modern technology for only one purpose: to attack the technological system.”

“Thanks be to Ted.” The old man said. He let his arms fall to his sides. “Tonight we’re going to focus on the restriction of freedom in modern society. Consider the ways that people have become enslaved by the very technology that is claimed to free them. A supposedly free citizen labors day in and day out to earn the money to buy machines – cars, washing machines, refrigerators – to save, of all things, labor. How absurd it is to work all your life to build machines, and then buy those same machines, only to have them do the things you don’t have time for because you’re building machines. Why be a slave to your car when you can walk? Why sell your freedom for a washing machine when you can buy a basin and some soap for a thousandth the price? Refrigerators? They are no more than tools of the enslaving industrial complex designed to prevent you from producing your own fresh and wholesome food.”

He glared at his audience, as if daring anyone to contradict him.

“There’s nothing new about this. Absolutely nothing that Bookchin or Proudhon, Tzu or Zeno, or any of countless other anarchists didn’t already know. Despite all their wisdom and insight, however, there is one insidious evil they didn’t see – one that they couldn’t possibly imagine. Since the beginning of recorded history, so-called civilization has been nothing more than an effort by the powerful and rich to harness the strength of your body. But even Whitney, Stevenson, Deere and Ford couldn’t dream of what Gates, Jobs, Anderson, Page and Brin had in store for us. I would gladly turn back the clock to the time when all they could steal was the strength of my right arm. Manual labor is yesterday’s currency. Today’s unit of exchange is the mind.

“My friends, when a person boots up a computer, when they turn on their GPS, when they sign into an ATM, they’re not logging into the system, they’re logging out of life. Ask yourself why email and I M are so seductive. Why do technophiles get the shakes when they can’t connect? Why would a person adore their Second Life lover more than their spouse? And why do so many people coddle and refine their avatars more than they play with their children?

“It’s because every time you log off, part of you stays behind. They are kidnapping you, thought by thought, experience by experience. The average person used to watch four or more hours of television each day. They said that we were trading our lives and culture for bland mind candy. Now, most workers spend six or more hours a day online, only to go home to hours more time with their interactive entertainment system. At least when we watched TV, the information only flowed one way, only came into our heads. Now it goes the other way.

“The evil of television is that it added something to your life that you found addictive. The Internet, video games, and interactive entertainment can’t work unless they take something from you – your input. And when you step away, that stays behind. Your bank account, your emails, your web page, your blog. If I erased all that, the average person would effectively disappear. They’re not addicted to the Internet, they’re incomplete without it.

“That’s part of the reason why we’re here – to become whole again. But there’s more to it, as you all know. Otherwise we would be no better than our primitive Amish neighbors. No my friends, that’s not enough. That’s merely selfish. Ted tells us that we have a mission. Technology is evil. Evil is seductive. Someone has to be strong enough to resist the seduction and put an end to it, not just for us but for everyone.”

The old man took a step forward and scanned the crowd deliberately.

“Are you strong enough to resist? Are you committed enough to fight? Think about it.”

He brought his hands together and knit his fingers. “Now gather in your workshop groups and discuss ways that you will resist the insidious, creeping influence of technology and mind control. I want each of you to tell your group at least one thing you’re willing to do. Would you follow the example of our new friend Max and risk your very existence to venture into the lion’s den? Could you walk in Ted’s footsteps and attack the technological backbone of society? Be bold. Be creative.”

The crowd shuffled and divided into small clusters. Linda turned on the blanket to join a pair of couples sitting behind her, while Max kneeled up to get a better view of the exercise. Some groups launched into vigorous discussions almost instantly, others talked casually. The bunch near the fire that included the skinners Alan and Justin seemed to Max to be particularly ill at ease, as the two young men dominated the conversation. Although he couldn’t hear everything they said, he made out a few words from the thugs, including suicide vest, improvised explosives, and air burst. Linda’s group focused more on passive resistance and demonstrations.

The old man wandered from place to place, asking questions and making suggestions. When he caught Max’s eye, he grinned broadly, marching over and thrusting out his hand.

“How are you Mr. Caine?”

“You can call me Max.”

“Certainly,” said the old man. “My name is Henry. What do you think of all this?”

“I think,” said Max, “that you don’t need a weatherman.”

“To know which way the wind blows?” said Henry. “Very old school, Max. That’s excellent. I hate to drag you away from all this, but I think we should take a walk. Linda, would you like to join us?”

The three of them stood and Henry led them along a path toward the big house with its glowing window eyes.

“Linda has told you a little about us, I imagine.”

“Not much,” said Max as he strained to make out the dim crease of the path in the darkness.

“We’ll fix that.”

They climbed the creaky steps of the farmhouse and Henry stopped on the unlit porch. He knocked on the pitch black door. It opened slightly and a beam of light from inside illuminated Henry’s face.

“What’s the password?” asked a voice behind the door.

“The password, Joel, is ‘let us in.’”

“Righty ho.”

Henry pushed his way through the doorway with Max and Linda close behind. Max squinted at the relative brightness inside. Despite a dull and worn carpet, and a rustic mantelpiece of stained wood, there was little that resembled the country house that Max had expected. Instead, racks of instrumentation, much like the equipment back at the university lab, lined the walls. In the panel above the fireplace, where a mirror or family portrait had probably once hung, a video panel displayed several news feeds, two in English, one in Chinese, one in Arabic, and one in German.

Joel stood next to a rolling stool parked beside a screen with a shot of the gathering outside the dining tent, with the Freedom Club members rendered in the glowing green of a night vision camera.

“High tech,” said Max. “Aren’t you worried about Jobs and Gates stealing your souls?”

“We’re just stirring up the weather.” Henry smiled and winked. "If you know what I mean."

Max had no idea, but it didn't sound good.

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Chapter 24. In the Garden

Max squatted among the rows of tomato plants, turning over leaves one by one in search of hornworms. When he plucked them off the plants, they would squirm and twist in a sort of slow motion panic, as peristaltic ripples flowed from one end of their bodies to the other. The largest of the hornworms were about the length and thickness of his pinky. There were plenty of the pests to find munching on the pesticide-free plants in the Freedom Club gardens. After only an hour of searching, he had already collected enough to cover the bottom of the rusty coffee canister resting on the dirt by his knee. They weren’t really worms at all, but a fleshy type of caterpillar with rich, emerald green skin and a menacing though apparently harmless horn at the tail.

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Listen to the Chapter 24 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

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As a rule, Linda had told him, everyone staying at the Freedom Club compound was assigned chores. Although in Max’s case it wasn’t required, considering the circumstances of his arrival. He did essentially nothing for his first three days in the compound except breathe deeply of the manure scented air, eat mounds of organic food, and wander about observing the rest of the residents hard at work planting, harvesting, and tending to animals.

It wasn’t long before boredom and a twinge of guilt at his privileged leisure inspired him to volunteer for work. Lacking any other identifiable skills, he’d been assigned to the vegetable gardens. He’d never had much luck at gardening in the past, but given the choice between working with plants or the commune’s collection of pigs, sheep, and goats, picking vegetables and clearing hornworms off of tomato vines seemed the best option for a soft, son of the suburbs.

When Joel first led him out to the garden, Max cringed at the thought of picking hornworms by hand, and gagged when Joel picked a juicy one from a leaf, pinched off its head and tossed the squirming remains into his mouth.

“Best way to make sure they won’t be comin’ back,” Joel said. He grinned to reveal bits of emerald hornworm skin on his yellowing teeth. “Or you can do it the sissy way and put ‘em in a bucket.”

Max had opted for the bucket.

When he reached the end of the row of tomato plants, Max tucked the captive hornworms into the shade under the vines and stood, pressing one hand against his lower back to ease the crick that had resulted from squatting in the garden. He was, at best, a quarter of the way through. Considering the density of hornworms and lack of viable tomatoes, there seemed little chance that the plot would ever be very productive, unless the goal was to harvest the hornworms rather than the fruit.

He arched his lower back until the muscles spasmed in protest, and listened for the telltale clatter of cooking pots and utensils that would have indicated that the communal lunch was near. For the moment, he could make out only an occasional hammer blow, along with the mews and brays of farm animals and the syncopated cough of the archaic engine that ran the camp’s generator. Although there was a promising sign in the wisp of gray smoke that snaked from the stovepipe poking out of the long, low tent that served as a dining hall.

The Freedom Club compound was tucked in the Amish hills of Pennsylvania. Buggies, scythes, and horse-drawn ploughs littered the outdoor spaces. Of the several dozen people in the camp, most dressed like Max in denim overalls, t-shirts, and work boots. Every article of clothing as far as Max could tell had a ragged patch sewn in where the label had been torn out. A few residents, like Joel, preferred linen wrappings that may have been intended to evoke scholarly dignity, but achieved something closer to a frat boy toga party look. Universally, hygiene was a lower priority at the camp than Max was used to, even in comparison to the grad students back at the university. No one looked particularly dirty, other than Joel of course, but regular bathing, antiperspirants and deodorizing soaps were clearly uncommon at the Freedom Club. After a few experiences with the poorly heated shower water, Max was inclined to let himself get a bit ripe before washing up as well.

The Freedom Clubbers were about as friendly as they were fragrant. Which is to say, just a little friendlier than Max cared for; offering a hug rather than a handshake, for instance, or a pat on the back instead of simply saying goodnight after supper.

Idle conversation, however, was generally limited to speculation about the weather and observations on the size and quality of the vegetables and plants. None of them expressed much interest in revealing anything of themselves or learning about Max. It seemed that they knew all they needed to know. Just what that was they didn’t say, but with the exception of Joel, they treated him with a kind of familial affection and respect, as if he were a revered but mildly demented uncle.

Inevitably, they sprinkled their lightweight chatter with cryptic invocations.

“It’s a beautiful morning,” a woman had said as she was gathering onions in a garden behind Linda’s cabin, “Thank Ted.”

“May Ted protect you,” responded a ruddy man pushing a wheelbarrow full of wet cement when Max had apologized for stepping in his path.

“Ted only knows,” was a common response to many of Max’s queries, from the state of an ailing dog’s health, to the prospect of rain, and even the time of day.

When Max experimented with the phrase “Ted be with you” in lieu of a simple hello, no one seemed startled at the sentiment. “Ted-sundheit,” in response to a sneeze, he had discovered, crossed the line of propriety.

The joke solved one mystery. When Max made the irreverent remark at dinner the night before, the woman who had sneezed hopped up from her seat and wove her way through the picnic-style benches to the picture of the chained prisoner, which was mounted on a post to offer a clear view of it to everyone under the tent. She kissed her fingertips and pressed them against the captive’s cheek, then returned to gather her plate and utensils and move to a seat facing away from Max, only stopping long enough to glare at him and say, “May Ted forgive you.”

He hadn’t been very surprised at the connection. The photograph hung throughout the camp. Every room had at least one copy in place. There were other pictures as well, mostly of revolutionaries and libertarians who Max would not usually have recognized, except that many had the names of their subjects inscribed across the bottoms of the images. Thomas Paine, Jean-Paul Marat, Molly Pitcher loading a cannon, and Che were among the ones he had identified. But only the mysterious Ted-in-chains appeared everywhere.

Perhaps he was only being paranoid, but the slightly-too-friendly Freedom Clubbers seemed to have cooled a bit toward him after the dinner incident. Their hugs were less sincere, though just as frequent, and the pats on the back were slightly more spirited and a bit painful. When they’d rearranged the seats for the after-dinner lecture, which focused on fifteen fun ways to use Willow bark, the seats on either side of Max had remained empty.

As he stood in the garden working the tight spots out of his lower back, he was glad that collecting hornworms was a solitary task. It gave him fewer opportunities to offend anyone. Still, he was careful, as he tapped the can of hornworms with his foot, to double check that nobody was close enough to hear him say to the entangled wad of caterpillars, “May Ted have mercy on your slimy souls.”

The tomato plot was set part way up the side of the valley, at the edge of an area cleared of trees and brush. The vantage point gave him a clear view of the haphazard smattering of cabins and the dusty paths cut into the turf that radiated out to each of them from the ogre-head house. A similar spider web of paths linked each of the cabins to the dining tent at the opposite end of the camp. The indelible marks left behind from the foot traffic suggested that the dining tent and the big house were in nearly equal competition for the campers’ attention. The popularity of the first was clear enough, based on Maslow’s pyramid of needs -- after all, everyone has to eat. Max was not yet privy to the reason for the attraction of the second.

He was on the verge of returning to the hunt for hornworms, when a team of horses emerged from the woods beyond the dining tent, pulling a wagon piled high with bundles, packages, and bushel baskets.

The driver stood on the bench at the wagon’s front. It seemed to Max a reckless way to drive a horse team, except that the man so easily maintained his balance atop the swaying cart. The driver’s face was hidden beneath the broad brim of a straw hat. He wore a pale blue shirt buttoned up the front with the sleeves rolled neatly to the elbows, black pants with suspenders that seemed more decorative than functional, and shiny black boots.

The driver guided the cart across the spider web crisscross of paths to the center of the Freedom Club clearing, pulled on a handle that ratcheted into place, and leapt gracefully to the ground by way of a step that protruded from the cart next to the front wheel. He strode across the grass, ignoring the worn pathways, to vigorously ring a brass bell that hung from an A-frame of heavy wooden posts. He turned to head back to his rig, and Freedom Club residents began emerging from the cabins to gather around the wagon.

Max jumped at the sound of a violent struggle that erupted in the woods beside the tomato plot. Joel careened out of the underbrush, his grimy linen toga entangled in raspberry briars, and stumbled into the garden.

“Come on man,” he said, “the ice cream truck is here.”

He snatched up the coffee can and gave it a shake.

“Nice haul,” he said with a wink. “I’ll take care of these slimy souls.”

Joel lunged down the hill, clutching the can in one arm while urging Max to follow with the other.

After a moment’s reflection, Max started down the hill as well. He’d assumed they were keeping an eye on him. But he was shocked that Joel of all people could have managed to be so stealthy as to hide in the woods only a few meters from the tomato patch.

The crowd clustered around the back of the wagon. A man and a woman who had climbed on board handed down baskets and bundles into outstretched arms. At least one basket appeared to contain ripe red tomatoes, which put the anemic green ones in the Freedom Club garden to shame.

Meanwhile, Linda negotiated with the driver, who Max could now see sported a tidy beard but no mustache. She counted out cash, and then bent to open a small suitcase that stood by her side. She flicked it’s latches and lifted the lid, revealing a pile of cell phones and other gadgetry. The man in the straw hat picked out a half dozen phones, some miniature video players, and a couple of memory sticks.

Linda laid the selection on a cloth and rolled it up into a tight bundle, which the man tucked under his arm.

The wagon was emptied in a few minutes. The crowd dispersed and the driver hopped back to his perch, pausing for only a moment to lift the seat and stash the rolled package in a compartment underneath.

“Electronics buff?” Max asked Linda as she approached, the suitcase in her hand.

“Sort of,” she said with a shrug. “Jacob’s really a kind of smuggler.”

“No kidding.”

“The Amish elders don’t look kindly on modern evils, but there’s a demand anyway.”

“Really,” said Max. “I thought you were trying to break free of that stuff too.”

Linda nodded. “We are. This is just business.”

“I see. And the tomatoes. They looked tasty. What’s the point of a tomato garden if you have them shipped in?”

“We haven’t had much luck with the garden, but Joel said you wanted to work on it. See you at lunch.”

She hefted the suitcase and chose a path that took her to the ogre-head house.

Max gazed up at the blighted patch on the hill where the spindly tomato vines nourished the hoards of hornworms.

“Ted dammit,” he said.
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Chapter 23. Welcome to the Freedom Club

The old van struggled along the hilly roads, coughing and sputtering as it labored up toward each crest and revving frantically in a motorized scream as it careened down from the heights. To Max, it felt less like a trip in a panel van than a ride in a creaky trawler that was climbing the petrified waves of an ancient storm, frozen in time and encrusted with ribbons of asphault.

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Listen to the Chapter 23 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

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Max had only a vague notion of where they were headed. But the angle of the shadows on the road ahead indicated that they were traveling north. Considering they had been en route for several hours, that placed them somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania. The rocky, tree-covered hillsides seemed to confirm his guess.

The asthmatic engine relaxed a bit as their travels took them to slower secondary routes, and soon was drowned out by the rattling spray of gravel against the wheel wells and jarring rhythms of washboard dirt roads. At last, Joel stabbed the break pedal and killed the engine. The van ground to a halt.

Linda slid open the side door and Max followed her out. He stretched his aching legs and scanned a hodgepodge of cabins nestled into groves at the edges of a tiny valley that was ringed with tree-lined hilltops. The largest building in sight was a clapboard house at the far end of an oval-shaped expanse of severely mowed grass. It was two stories tall and painted in pristine white with black tar roofing and a screened veranda that extended the full length of the first floor. The building was brightly illuminated by the sun, which was on the verge of sinking behind the hills. A pair of gables poked up through the rooftop. In combination with the veranda and jet black door at the very center of the structure, the gables created the impression of a squinting, angular head, as if some wooden giant was buried up to his chin. Max couldn’t decide if the behemoth was rising out of the ground or being sucked down in. Either way, the expression seemed an indication of his irritation at the glaring sunshine blinding him as he strained against the earth.

The brilliant white farmhouse was in such glaring contrast to the rest of the shadowy valley that it took a few moments for Max to make out the figures on the veranda and strolling about near the other buildings. There were perhaps a few dozen people. It was impossible to guess their genders, partly because of the distance and partly because they all seemed to be dressed as Max was, in denim overalls and white t-shirts.

Joel leapt from the driver’s seat and waved his hand in an attempt at a grand flourish. “Welcome to the Freedom Club, our Shambhala of the Poconos.” He dropped to his hands and knees to kiss the dirt.

“Shit,” he said, wiping grit off of his lips. “It don’t taste like paradise.”

He sprang back to his feet, but stepped on the hem of his robe in the process, which prevented him from standing fully erect.

“Unless,” said Joel, contorting his bent body so that he could grin at Max, “paradise is supposed to taste like crap.” He tugged at his robe with both hands, tearing the hem. “It sure smells like crap. In case you hadn’t noticed.”

Max had noticed indeed. It was an amplified version of the fragrance - if so delicate a word can be applied to such an odor - that Joel had been emitting the first time they met at the café back home. Out here, Max guessed, the smell was probably due to nearby stables and animal pens of some kind. Joel may have picked up his stench from tending livestock, but it seemed just as likely that he was capable of generating it all on his own.

Linda reached for Max’s arm. “Come on.”

“Are we going to give him the grand tour?” asked Joel as he struggled to disentangle his foot from his robe.

“It’ll be too dark soon," said Linda with a shake of her head. "We can show him around tomorrow.”

“The dark,” said Joel, “ is when this place is in it’s best light. ‘Course, you’re the boss.” He winked, nodded, and hitched the rope around his waist a little tighter.

“Hold on Joel.”

“What?”

She extended her hand, with her palm open.

“Oh,” said Joel, reaching into his robe and searching around near his crotch. “You want these?” He pulled out two blister packs of pills and laid them in her hand. They were Max’s Phenobarbital tablets.

Linda turned to Max.“Is this all?”

“I had three packages.”

Joel hung his head and reached into his robe again. “Really? Three? Are you sure it wasn’t just two?”

“Three.”

“Right.” Joel produced another pack and handed it to Linda.

She pulled at Max's arm, leading him onto the grassy oval as Joel knitted his hands behind his back, looked skyward and meandered away, whistling tunelessly.

She handed the pill packs to Max. One pack, he noticed, had been ripped in half along its perforated strip. “He kept eight tablets.”

“I thought he might snag some. Is that going to be a problem?”

“Eventually.”

“Well,” said Linda. “We can take care of it later.”

Max tried to recall when Joel would have had a chance to get his hands on the pills. He couldn’t think of an opportunity. Then again, most of the day had been a blur. At least he wouldn’t have to worry about refilling his supply for a few weeks.

They started off across the grass. The work boots were heavy on Max’s feet and the stiff denim of his overalls seemed to resist his every step. They had only gone a few dozen yards when he had to stop to catch his breath. Linda waited in silence until he was ready to resume the walk. The sun had sunk just past the hills, and the sky was a bright orange to the west while darkness was rapidly encroaching from the other side of the valley. The giant-head house no longer gleamed. It seemed to Max that the building grew noticeably grayer in the few moments that they paused, although the angry eyes of the gabled windows still reflected the flame of the sunset in burning orange slits of light.

He couldn’t bear the thought of trudging any further in the leaden boots. He dropped to his haunches and untied the laces. He stood and lifted his feet out of the boots, tied the laces together and hung the boots over his shoulder. The short, stiff blades of grass crackled with each step and tingled the souls of his feet. It was mildly stimulating and gave him the energy to continue.

After the rattling ride in the van, the valley had initially seemed dead silent. Now that his ears were adjusted, Max was inundated with a multitude of hums, chirps, and croaks of invisible insects and distant amphibians. A dip in the landscape to their left indicated the likely presence of a stream that was apparently the source of the thrumming that he recognized as the calls of bullfrogs. Countless lighting bugs flashed in the dimmer sections of the trees, and occasionally the shadowy outlines of small birds or bats flitted overhead in acrobatic pursuit of an invisible meal.

Max struggled to keep up with Linda despite her leisurely pace. She led him to one of the small cabins. It was of the same style as the farmhouse, painted white with tar shingle roofing and its own tiny porch that emulated the farmhouse’s veranda. It even had tiny, obviously decorative gables peeking up from the roof and a door painted in glossy black. He followed her up the short flight of steps to the porch and through the door that Linda swung silently inward. She pulled a string attached to a lamp mounted at the center of a slowly spinning ceiling fan. It illuminated a single room that appeared to encompass essentially the entire floor plan. There was just enough space for a small bed, a couch that was barely more than a love seat, a dresser and a writing desk. A narrow door near the back stood open, where Max could see a sink, a toilet and a white vinyl shower curtain. The only decoration in the room consisted of two photographs in simple black frames; one was of Che Guevara, and the other of a bearded man in an orange jump suit and manacles who bore a passing resemblance to Joel.

“This is my place,” said Linda. “We’ll find one for you in the morning. For now, you can have the bed and I’ll take the couch.”

Max dropped his boots on the floor, shuffled to the bed and collapsed on his back without bothering to turn down the sheets.

He heard water running in the bathroom. After a few moments, cool fingertips brushed his forehead.

“How many?”

He opened his eyes to see Linda standing over him with his pill packets and a glass of water.

He held up two fingers

She popped the pills from the pack. Max heaved himself up onto his elbows and opened his mouth. Linda placed the pills on his tongue, and then held the glass to his lips. The water was tepid and tasted of metal. When he finished drinking, she took the rest of the pills and the glass to the bathroom.

He dropped back onto the bed and turned his head to study the manacled prisoner in the photo. The man didn’t seem distressed at his chains. His head was up, with his brow slightly wrinkled and his lips parted as if he where on the verge of speaking. Max suddenly had the impression that the prisoner wanted to ask him a question, although he had no idea who the man could be.

As his eyelids grew heavy, Max half dreamed and half hallucinated that the prisoner said, “These are just chains. They’re nothing. How about yours? Do you have an escape plan?”

Max thought he might.

He slept at last as visions of flashmobs, search engine cabs, chess-playing penguins, couch creatures, laundry monsters, and an eviscerated virtual Betty flitted through his dreams like bats on the wing.
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Chapter 22. Roadtrip

Max fingered the buckle on one strap of the stiff denim overalls as he shuffled to the restroom at the highway convenience plaza, where Joel had parked the van so that Max could pee. The plaza was a bustling collection of hydrogen recharge points, a few gas pumps for older combustion-engine cars and farm vehicles, fast food joints, and convenience shop counters where travelers in a rush could pick up gum, coffee, newspapers or condoms.

Joel hadn’t wanted to stop, but when the girl, whose name Max had learned was Linda, threatened to let Max have another swing at him, Joel had given in and pulled off the road.

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Listen to the Chapter 22 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

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Max passed up the rows of urinals that lined the ceramic-tiled walls, and chose one of the larger stalls designed to accommodate the handicapped. He was going to need extra room to maneuver the overalls. They were dark blue and stiff, with creases at the calf, thigh, waist and chest from where they had been folded when Linda pulled them out from under a pile of blankets in the van. She had also given him a stretchy, white cotton shirt with long sleeves, and a pair of workman’s boots that were a few sizes too large. All the garments were brand new, as though they had just come off the shelves of a department store, except that the places where the tags would have been, - at the back of the shirt collar, the bib of the overalls, and the uppers on the boots, - had ragged tears where the manufacturer information had been cut out.

Just in case anyone cared to glance at his feet under the wall that surrounded the stall, Max undid the second strap and pushed the overalls to his knees to pretend to urinate. He didn’t really have to go. He just needed a few minutes away from his two companions.

Joel had driven north toward Pennsylvania after they had whisked Max away from the mob, muttering and ranting the whole way. The lunatic act, it seemed, hadn’t been an act altogether. Linda was constantly on guard; ready to snap at Joel to keep him focused on the road. To make matters worse, the van’s heads-up display was out and the avoidance collision system was apparently malfunctioning, allowing Joel to take the van screaming up on other cars from behind, which would force him to pump the brake and holler obscenities at innocent drivers. Then he would pass, swerving across oncoming lanes to the left, or onto the shoulder to the right. Fortunately, the collision avoidance systems in all the other vehicles they encountered were working well enough to deal with even Joel’s erratic driving.

For the first half hour or so, Max had sat silently, wrapped in a blanket and wedged against the wall of the van as it rocked and jerked along the road. Linda watched him patiently, when she wasn’t chastising Joel, and occasionally raised her eyebrows or cocked her head in gestures that invited Max to speak up and ask the obvious questions.

The shock of the assault in the parking lot kept him quiet. When he finally spoke, he only mentioned the need to relieve himself. While Linda dug out the clothes and boots for him, Max decided to simply walk away once the van stopped. But as he stood in the urinal with his pants around his knees, he didn’t feel that he had the strength to take off by himself, in the middle of nowhere with no car, no plan, and no drugs.

He hitched up the overalls and opened the stall door. It closed automatically behind him. Water rushed in the self-flushing toilet, and the disinfectant spray hissed briefly before the stall door reopened to await the next patron. He passed his hands under the faucet to keep up appearances in front of another man who was entering the bathroom as Max was finishing up. He tried unsuccessfully to avoid looking at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He had aged a lot in the past few weeks. His eyes were bloodshot, and the bags underneath were deep and dark. There were creases around his mouth and across his brow that he couldn’t remember having seen before, and his hair was getting long and jagged around the edges where it was starting to grow down over the tops of his ears. The white shirt and overalls made him look more like a day laborer than a lab technician, except that he was too pale for a person who worked in the sun.

As he walked out of the restroom he found Linda and Joel sitting at a picnic table in the grassy stretch between the fuel station and the convenience store. He stuffed his hands into the deep, crisp pockets and wandered over to join them.

“Everything work out okay?” Linda asked.

“Yes,” said Max, “thanks.”

As Max approached, Joel stood and gathered the hem of his linen robe, revealing skinny hairless calves and filthy, sandaled feet.

“Alright then,” he said, “let’s go.”

“Hold on,” said Max, taking a seat at the picnic table bench. “First I want to know where we’re going. Where,” he corrected himself, “you’re taking me.”

“You wanna go dark, don’t you?” said Joel.

“Shut up and sit down,” said Linda to the lunatic. She turned to Max, “You were in danger, we’re trying to help you get away.”

“In danger? From who?” said Max. “Away from what?”

“From everything,” said Joel. “From everyone. That’s how you go dark, newbie.”

“Shut your trap.” Linda smacked Joel across the shoulder. “Look, Max, you closed yourself off in your apartment. . . .”

Max interrupted. “How do you know my name anyway?”

“I’ll get to that. You shut yourself off, dropped out, right in the middle of the town. We know a little about what you’ve been through, what you’re trying to get away from. But if you are going to do it for real, you’ll need our help.”

“Who are you, exactly?”

“That’ll take some explaining.”

Max shook his head. “I don’t care. I just want to go home.”

“No you don’t newbie,” muttered the lunatic.

“Joel,” said Linda, “shush. We’ll take you home, if you like. But you’re not safe there.”

“I’m safer riding around in a broken down van with you two?”

“Believe it or not,” said Linda, glancing quickly at Joel. “Yes.”

She had a look of sincerity and concern in her big, brown eyes that Max thought might have been intensified by her lenses. He wondered what she might look like without the glasses. Her brown hair, which almost exactly matched the color of her eyes, was straight and hung down just to the line of her jaw. Her skin was smooth and lightly tanned, and her lips were pouty and full with no sign of lipstick. Max guessed that she was in her late twenties at the oldest. She reminded him of the activist hippy vegetarians he had met occasionally when he was in school. If it had only been her, Max figured he would probably give in. But there was also Joel.

The lunatic even had trouble sitting still at the table. Every few moments he would open his mouth on the verge of speaking, and then shake his head as though some voice only he could hear advised him not to.

He traced the graffiti carved into the picnic table with his filthy thumbnail, and occasionally blinked at some small revelation he seemed to discover there. Twitchy Joel was more than Max could stand.

“I want to go home,” he said.

Linda pursed her lips and nodded soberly.

“Well now it’s my turn to pee,” she said. “Joel, start the van. I’ll be right back.” She stood and headed toward the restroom.

Joel hopped up and grumbled something under his breath, then tripped spastically toward the parking lot.

Max watched as Joel climbed into the van, which soon produced a puff of blue smoke and roared to life. I can’t believe that guy is driving, he thought to himself. He lifted himself off the bench. Rather than spending time alone with Joel in the van, he made his way to the convenience store to buy a soda, with the hope that it might help calm his stomach on the rough ride home. The clerk, a pudgy, pimply teen, sneered at Max as he perused the bottles in the refrigerated case. He chose a drink and avoided the clerk by heading to the self-service checkout at the front. He pressed his thumb on the biometric screen of the checkout counter. A computerized woman’s voice thanked him for the purchase and noted the debit to his account. Max declined a paper receipt and slipped the soda into a pocket of his overalls.

He wandered slowly to the van, hoping Linda was already inside. When he slid open the side door and found that she wasn’t, he leaned against the fender and waited. He could feel the van bounce slightly on occasion, no doubt due to Joel’s restless twitching.

When Linda finally appeared at the restroom doors, her hair was pulled up away from her cheeks, which were shiny and slightly pink. Max thought she must have washed her face and dried it a bit too roughly.

She smiled at him and winked before she climbed into the van. He almost bumped into her as he climbed in behind. The near touch gave him a minor, disquieting thrill. For a moment, he reconsidered going home, if for no other reason than to spend more time with her. He shook his head and took his place amid the blankets. He wasn’t her type anyway; too old, too nerdy, too tired. Although there was just the smallest hint in her gentle smile as she nestled in behind Joel’s seat that maybe he was her type after all.

Max could feel the blood rise into his cheeks at the thought. He was probably just misinterpreting her desire to help him, if she really was out to help. He reached over and slid the door shut. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the comparative darkness in the van. He hoped Linda couldn’t see him blushing in the dim interior.

She thumped the back of Joel’s seat and told him to turn back. Although Max couldn’t see where they were going, he felt the pressure of the blankets against his back as the van carved around what must have been a cloverleaf, taking them back to the highway heading south. He had a sudden urge to engage Linda in idle conversation. It wouldn’t be long before they got him home, and he wanted to make the most of his time with her, with anyone really.

“What?” asked Linda, when Max made a feeble attempt to speak.

“Nothing.” He cringed and wondered if he was starting to look a bit like spastic Joel.

“Are you thirsty?” he asked.

“No,” she said, resting her head against the back of the passenger seat.

“Okay,” he said, nodding and trying to smile. It felt more like a grimace. He fumbled for the drink in his pocket. The stiff denim made maneuvering difficult. He had to struggle to insert his hand. In the cramped space, he couldn’t straighten his leg enough to extract the bottle. Linda’s brow wrinkled quizzically as Max tugged. He had the sudden embarrassing revelation that it might look like he was groping himself.

“Sorry, it’s stuck.”

“Stuck? What’s stuck.”

“Hold on,” he kicked his leg out, and leaned back.

“Can I help you with something?”

“No, no. Just a second.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I mean, no.”

After a heave, he managed to free the bottle and held it up to show that there was nothing unseemly about his efforts.

“Just a drink.”

He had hoped that the sight of the bottle would relieve her, proving that the awkward acrobatics were innocent. It had the opposite effect. She leaned forward, her brow knitted in alarm.

“Where did you get that?”

“At the convenience store.”

“I hope you stole it.”

Max was aghast. “No. I paid for it.”

“How?”

“With the checkout ATM.”

Linda rocked forward onto her knees. “A biometric ATM?”

“Yes.”

“Thumb print?”

“Yes.”

“Give it to me.” Linda thrust out her arm. “Now!”

Max blinked and handed her the bottle. She grabbed the handle of the side door and threw it open. The rush of the wind was deafening at highway speeds, and the light of day blinding.

“What are you doing?” shouted Max over the noise.

She leaned precariously out of the opening and scanned the highway. “Slow down Joel!”

She appeared as though she might tumble out at any moment, and Max clutched at her ankle. As Joel slowed, a stream of traffic passed by. She peered at each vehicle in turn, until one that Max couldn’t see caught her eye. She leaned out still further, and tossed the bottle. It arced through the air and landed in the bed of a passing pickup truck. She hauled herself back into the van and pulled at the door. It was heavy and, with the wind rushing by, she couldn’t budge it. Max put his hand on top of hers and pushed. The door slid shut with a thud.

She scrambled to the front passenger seat.

“What the hell was that about?” asked Max, following her forward and wedging himself between the high-backed seats.

She ignored him, glaring at the pickup truck that was steadily pulling away from them.

Max persisted, “Tell me what’s going on.”

She let out a loud breath. “The UPC symbol.”

“What?”

“The bottle had a UPC symbol on it - a radio ID tracking label.”

“So what? Everything does.”

“Unless you take them off.”

Max didn't follow her drift. “So?”

“You’ve given yourself away,” she snapped at him

“What are you talking about?”

She nodded at the distant pickup truck. “You bought that with a thumb print access to your bank account. The system knows it was you, where you were, and what you bought.”

“So what?”

“If the system knows, then they know. So, now all they have to do is find the bottle.”

“They? Who are they?”

A speeding black sedan flew past the van on the right, tossing up a cloud of dust as its tires hung off onto the shoulder.

“Them.”

Max watched over Linda’s shoulder as the sedan closed on the truck. It swerved into the left lane, then back to the right, catching the tail end of the pickup, and sending it into a screeching slide. The truck careened left, overcorrected, and swerved back. It caught a guard rail, flipped into the air, and tumbled into a ditch, throwing up a cloud of debris and gravel.

The intervening traffic slowed and Joel slammed the brakes.

“Holy shit dude,” said Joel.

By the time they approached the accident, two men in brown pants and short-sleeved pastel Oxford shirts were standing at the guardrail, with their hands on their hips, studying the mangled pickup. The van inched by with the other cars that crawled past the scene. Max was stunned to see how threatening a pair of men in Hush Puppy footwear could be.

“Do you still want to go home?” Linda whispered.

Max swallowed hard. “Not just yet, I suppose.”

“Turn it around," she said to Joel. "Take the back roads”

At the next exit, the madman flicked on the turn signal and headed off the highway onto a rolling, vacant country road.
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Chapter 21. Flashmob

The lunch crowd was just starting to trickle into the cafe as Max waited for his muffin. He had hoped to avoid the rush, but it was beginning earlier than he'd expected. It was just past eleven and the tables on the sidewalk were rapidly filling. The crowd was young, primarily college age kids and a few professionals, and even some kids who looked as though they should be in high school.

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Listen to the Chapter 21 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

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Max lowered his head and studied the wadded bills on the table to keep from catching anyone's eye, in the unlikely event that any of the arriving patrons knew him from campus. He picked the bills apart slowly and spread them flat on the checkered tablecloth. It had been so long since he had used paper money that Max almost didn't recognize the currency. All four were ten-dollar bills. They were old, worn, and crinkled. Someone had written on the least crumpled bill. The handwriting was jagged and juvenile, and he was having a hard time making out what it said.

He could feel the numbers of the patrons swelling around him. He recognized the sound of one-sided conversations that meant many of them were chattering on cell phones. He glanced up briefly to see that others were gathered in small groups. There was an excited buzz in the air. Max had the impression that there was more to the activity than hungry people in search of lunch. As he turned back to the writing on the bill, a skinny kid engaged in an animated phone conversation bumped roughly against Max's table. He mouthed an apology and continued into the throng surrounding the cafe.

Every seat was taken at the outdoor tables, and more people were on the way, strolling down along the sidewalk or dropped off at the curb by cars on auto pilot. The flow of customers had turned from a trickle to a flood, and was still building. This was definitely not a normal lunch crowd. Max dropped the wad of bills the lunatic had given him on the table and began rapping his fingers lightly on his thigh. The crush of bodies was making it hard to breathe. Max tried not to think about it, but he was continuously being jostled as more and more people arrived. He placed his hands open on the table and pushed down as if, at any moment, it might fly away and carry him with it.

He stared at the bill in front of him, and struggled to stay calm until his muffin arrived. Someone, probably the lunatic, had written a across the president’s face. , "U r 6e1ng w4+ch3d." It was clearly a novice attempt at shorthand for "You are being watched."

It was just the sort of thing he would have expected to find on money carried by a guy who wore a metal hat. On the other hand, thought Max, it was possible that the note was meant for him.

"Nonsense," he said to himself, while glancing up at the wall of bodies that surrounded his table and slopped over into the parking lot. It seemed the lunatic’s paranoia was contagious. Surely the note wasn't for him. On the other hand, the man had insisted that he count the money, perhaps to get him to notice the message. Still, why should he worry about paranoid missives from a deranged fruitcake?

He covered the bill with his hand to hide it from anyone looking over his shoulder. After a few calming breaths, he lifted his palm enough to peek at the message again. A shudder ran through him when he found that the writing had changed. It read "\/\/3'r3 h3r3 2 h31p.”

Max snatched up the bill. It looked like plain old-fashioned money, as far as he could tell. But paper money didn't have shape-shifting messages on it. He was still trying to make out the new message when it shifted again. The writing, still in that childish hand now read "d0n+ f34r +h3 fl45hm06."

Max blinked and slowly translated the script. "Don't fear the flash mob."

He frantically scanned the wall of bodies that surrounded his table. Flash mob? What the hell is that? Somewhere in the noise of the crowd, amid the laughter and shouts, he imagined the waiter trying to make his way back with a muffin and coffee in a paper cup.

Forget the damn muffin, he thought.

The crowd's seething was pushing him ever harder against the edge of the table. It was getting dangerous to sit. He squeezed out of his chair and stood. Instantly, there were warm bodies on all sides of him. Only the expanse of the small table beside him remained clear.

A thumping noise was gradually rising in somewhere in the depths of the cafe. The rhythm grew more complex, syncopated. All around him, people began swaying and bouncing in time with the beat. Music erupted, and the mass of humanity gyrated to a frantic tune constructed of whistles, hoots, and squealing guitars.

Although he had no intention of joining in the dance, Max could not fight the collective motions of the masses that enveloped him. Hips, thighs, chests grinded against him, and he had no choice but to grind back. Other than those immediately in front of him, he couldn't even determine which of the bodies bumping against him were male and which were female. Briefly, a pretty young woman, with deep green eyes, dark hair, and glasses was pressed against him, almost nose to nose. She smiled and mouthed something that he couldn’t make out over the music and the noise of the crowd. The woman seemed on the verge of kissing him when the flow of bodies swept her away. She was replaced by a slender, androgynous person whose back was toward Max. He tilted his head back and concentrated on the awning above in an attempt to put the grinding of the androgynous buttocks against his groin out of his mind. While he was mildly disturbed by the intimate contact, it had at least erased the rising claustrophobia he had been suffering from a few moments before. It occurred to him that his own buttocks were similarly grinding against the anonymous stranger behind him. Max decided it was best not to think about it and instead just ride out the madness with the dancing mob.

The base line pounded, a lead singer wailed. Occasionally, the mob shouted unintelligibly in response to some equally unintelligible line from the song. The music was punctuated from time to time with a blast from an air horn. In the distance, a police siren screamed. Coordination in the crowd began to crumble as the siren’s volume rose. The mob seethed, and pitched to Max's left. If he hadn't been so firmly entrenched, he would have toppled over, but here there was no room to fall. The mob surged again, inching toward the parking lot. It, and Max, gathered speed. Soon they were walking as the mob shouted and hooted. Then they were jogging, and finally running. There were multiple police sirens now. The wails threatened to drown out the music as Max and the mob exploded into the parking lot.

They were racing through the rows of cars in the lot when Max was abruptly slammed against the side of a parked pickup truck. He felt a tug on his shirt collar. There was a rough jerk and the shirt was ripped from his back. He spun to spot the culprit, but couldn’t pick anyone out in the fleeing mob. Two athletic young men with silvery sun glasses leapt out of the masses and lunged toward him. One rammed him against the truck. The other reached for the waste band of Max’s sweats and pulled. Time stood still briefly as Max stared wide-eyed at his distorted image in the mirrored glasses of the man pinning him against the truck. Max saw a flash of metal. The other man had a knife.

“Please don’t,” Max begged.

The man pressing Max against the truck grinned broadly, revealing gleaming white teeth. Max twisted his face away to look at the other man and saw the knife swing down toward his belly. The tension in his waste band increased, and suddenly was gone. A ripping sound followed as Max’s sweats and underwear were torn from his body. The two men turned and dived into the crowd, with the ragged sweat pants fluttering behind them. With the exception of his shoes, Max was naked.

He dropped onto his heels to cover himself. Someone running with the mob collided with Max’s shoulder and sent him sprawling onto his back on the rough asphault. He rolled under the truck and peered out at the countless thundering feet. A wailing police siren deafened him, and he saw the tires of the passing police car roll slowly by, briefly stemming the flow of the mob. Then it was gone.

Max cowered under the truck. “Come back,” he pleaded to the police car. “Come back.”

A pair of bright red tennis shoes appeared beside the truck, inches from his face. The person in the tennis shoes dropped to their knees. There was a hand on the ground. Then there was a face. It was the dark-haired girl from the mob at the café.

“Max,” she said. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“What?” he tried to ask, “Where?” But the best he could do was a guttural croak.

“Come on!”

She reached under the truck and her fingers brushed Max’s arm. He flinched at the touch, and squirmed farther under the chassis.

“We’re here to help,” said the girl.

He twisted away to the other side of the truck, scraping his back against the rough ground and raking his belly on the dangling truck hardware. Pebbles dug into his knees as he struggled to his feet. The girl had made her way around the truck and approached him with arms outstretched and palms held upward.

“It’s going to be OK,” she said gently. “I promise.”

Max turned to run, but a battered white panel van pulled up and blocked his way. He was trapped between the girl and the van. The van’s sliding door shot open revealing piles of blankets and rusted walls with peeling white paint.

“It’s going to be OK,” the girl repeated. “Just get in and we’ll help you.”

Max looked back at the open van. Its interior, though dingey, offered a darkened haven from the madness of the flash mob that still rampaged all around him. It was a place to hide his nakedness.

The girl stepped closer. Her eyes pleaded with him. He nodded and turned to head for the open van.

“Wait,” called the girl. He felt her hand on his shoulder. “You can’t go like that.”

Max stopped and looked down at his naked belly with his genitals peeking out below. He covered his groin with his hands and turned back to the girl.

“Take off your shoes,” she said.

He shook his head in bewilderment. “What is wrong with you people?” he shouted at her.

“Just do it. I’ll explain later.”

“Dammit,” he snarled, kicking off his shoes and diving into the van. He clutched at one of the old blankets and wrapped it around himself. The van rocked slightly as the girl followed him and slid the door closed behind her.

The driver leaned over in his seat and asked, “All set?”

It was the lunatic with the aluminum foil hat.

Max stared blankly at the girl, and then rolled toward the front of the van, balled up his fist, and slugged the madman in the mouth. The lunatic’s head snapped back. He covered his mouth with his hand and stared at Max with wide-eyed shock. A trickle of blood oozed between his fingers.

“Man,” he said behind his hand, “that hurt.”

The girl crawled over a pile of blankets and inserted herself between Max and the lunatic. “Drive Joel.”

The lunatic straightened up in his seat, wrenched the steering wheel with his free hand, and punched the gas. “I told you,” he said through his fingers covering his mouth, “I want to be called ‘Chalk Warrior’ from now on.”

The girl reached back and smacked the lunatic’s shoulder. “Joel, Just drive.” She winked at Max, who pulled the coarse blanket tight. The engine revved and the van weaved though the lot, and the chaos of the mob slowly died away.
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Chapter 20. The Cafe

Max propped up the pillow on the mattress he had dragged out of his bedroom to replace the couch. He leaned his head against the wall as he watched the yellow glow of the morning sun gradually erase the blue-black night that leaked in through the slats in his blinds. The couch, the TV, and the piles of laundry that once cluttered his apartment were long gone. He’d laboriously hauled everything out the front door three weeks earlier and down the steps to the parking lot, where he left them in a heap - to the thorough annoyance of the building superintendent. After a few days pounding on his door and threatening to evict him, the super slipped an envelope through the mail slot. Max hadn’t bothered to open it, and instead tossed it onto the growing stack of pizza delivery boxes on the breakfast table in his kitchen.

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Listen to the Chapter 20 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

A spot of sunlight crawled down Max’s chest as the usual morning concert of slamming doors and pounding footsteps grew. The staccato rhythm above his ceiling meant the yellow Lab upstairs was prancing in anticipation of its morning walk. A piercing series of beeps, like the warning of a delivery truck backing up, leaked through the wall from the apartment next door. It was followed by the loud blathering of shock Dee Jays, which meant he would soon hear the hiss of a shower, a pell-mell rush down the stairs, and the sputtering of a scooter coming to life and buzzing off up the street.

Max never heard the woman across the hall leave in the morning or return in the afternoon. He guessed that she wore the soft-soled shoes of a nurse or a librarian or bank clerk - something that required her to be on her feet all day. Other than the whispers of her television in the evening, or the occasional hallway conversation with a delivery boy, there was little evidence that anyone lived there at all.

In all the years that he had rented his apartment, Max had never bothered to learn much about his neighbors. When he bumped into them in the hall, or the trash room, or even at the annual get-acquainted cook out in the courtyard out back, he barely listened when they told him their names. And when he did catch a name here or there, he generally did his best to forget it as soon as possible.

But after three weeks holed up in his apartment, Max yearned to deduce as much about the people who surrounded him as he could, from the sounds they made throughout the day, the distorted glimpses of them in the fish eye view through the peephole in his door, and stolen glances through the slats of his lowered shades.

There was the old man with the yellow lab, who left each day at ten with his dog on a leash and an umbrella under his arm - regardless of the weather, the young dark-haired kid with the scooter; and finally the light-footed woman across the hall. There were others as well, but they lived in apartments too far away for Max to gather anything about them other than their schedules.

As the day's cavalcade of sound died down, he knew there would be little to look forward to until the afternoon, when the procession would reverse itself and his neighbors would come back to roost in their nests and watch TV or talk on the phone. Even the wrinkled, olive skinned old man who vacuumed the stairs and dusted the railings wouldn’t come by today. He apparently only attended to Max’s building twice each week, and he had taken care of his duties the day before. Traffic noise and the clatter of the mailman filling the boxes at the bottom of the stairs were all that was likely to interrupt the hours of solitude ahead of him.

Max rolled off the mattress, dressed in pin stripe boxer shorts and a white t-shirt, and headed to the kitchen. It was his custom recently to start the day with a bowl of cereal, but only after tugging at the oven door, which he had sealed with criss-crossing lengths of duct tape. It seemed tight enough, but he wished he had more tape just to make sure.

He took a bowl down from his cabinet and filled it to the brim with dull brown flakes, then opened the refrigerator and lifted out the plastic milk jug. It was nearly empty, just enough to cover his cereal. He would have to drink his coffee black this morning. He tossed the empty jug into the sink, spooned some instant coffee into a cup of hot tap water, and sat at the table to eat. He stared absently at the duct-taped oven as he shoveled cereal into his mouth.

He was going to have to pick up some milk. Otherwise, he would be eating dry cereal with his tepid black coffee tomorrow. On top of that, it was coming up to the point that he needed to refill his prescription. He had increased his dose since he went into seclusion, both to avoid any risk of a seizure and to take the edge off his loneliness.

Max scooped out the last of the cereal and poured the remaining milk into his coffee. Bits of cereal flakes floated on the surface, turning the brown liquid nauseatingly chunky. For a moment, he wished he hadn’t tossed out his laptop with his TV and couch. He could probably have found a grocery delivery service online to bring his supplies to him. The regret, however, was short lived. He’d had enough online excitement for a long, long while.

He put the bowl in the sink, swigged the last of his coffee, and went in search of something clean to wear for his first day outside in a week. There wasn’t much to choose from. Most of his wardrobe had gone out on the curb with his furniture. In the bedroom, he found a pair of sweats that were only a bit dirty at the knees, and a threadbare flannel shirt. He stopped in the bathroom for his daily dose of drugs. When he closed the medicine cabinet, he peered at his red-rimmed eyes, pale cheeks and forehead, and the grey-flecked stubble. He ran a hand over his chin and briefly contemplated shaving and showering. Why bother, he thought, if he was going to be a hermit, he might as well look the part. He raised and arm and sniffed his armpit, then wrinkled his nose at the musky stench. He certainly smelled like a hermit anyway.

He walked into the living room and slipped his feet into his tennis shoes, without bothering to tie the laces. Max suppressed the urge to giggle. The thought of stepping outside made him light-headed with nervousness and excitement, like a child about to walk on stage in a school play. As he placed his hand on the doorknob, he wondered what he would say if he ran into one of his neighbors or someone from the university. He convinced himself that the odds of meeting anyone at this time of day were slim, and he proceeded out the door and down the steps.

The street in front of Max’s apartment was lined with fruitless pear trees in full bloom. The pear tree flowers emitted a bitter fragrance that was a harsh contrast to their delicate white petals. Initially he had been startled to find that the trees did not have perfume to match their blossoms. Considering the fact that few people ever walked this street, Max supposed it made sense for the city managers to choose to plant trees that looked nice even if they smelled badly. These roads were built for cars, not pedestrians. It was a fact that was made even more apparent when he reached the intersection at the end of the street.

There was a button on the corner lamppost that was installed, according to the faded sign above the button, to facilitate the passage of bikers and pedestrians. As far as Max could tell, it didn’t do anything, regardless of how many times he pushed it. The lights would occasionally flash the signal indicating that it was time to cross, with no correlation to how hard or often he pushed the button, but the cycle was far to brief to make it to the other side even at a sprint. Fortunately, cars included detectors to avoid collisions, both with other vehicles and with humans foolish enough to stray into traffic. Once Max stepped off the curb, he knew he would make it across safely, although he would have to suffer the blaring cacophony of car horns and the crossing light’s prerecorded rebuke for lingering too long in the intersection.

“Screw you,” shouted Max to the bleating cars as he jogged to the other side of the street and into the shopping center parking lot. The lot itself was not much friendlier to foot traffic than the intersection. Driverless cars arrived and departed in rapid succession, with the arrivals having deposited their passengers immediately in front of whatever store they chose to visit first, and departing cars zipping off to pick up their owners, who stood with packages in hand at the curb.

With his head up and hands in his pockets, Max meandered toward the supermarket. Noise restrictions in the lot limited cars to muted beeps whenever Max got in the way of one coming or going, but they inevitably released a fury of alarms if he even brushed a fender in passing, which he did from time to time just for fun.

He stepped up onto the curb and joined the flow of customers trickling into the grocery store. He paused long enough to make sure he didn’t recognize any of the nearby shoppers, then touched the thumb-print scanner on the handle of one of the shopping carts in the corral just inside the door. The cart’s display screen indicated that Max had been identified and flashed the balance in his checking account. He pondered his remaining cash and did some mental calculations. He could probably last another few weeks before he would run out of money. Then he would have to return to work, if he hadn’t already been fired for taking unauthorized leave, or start living on credit. Better still, he could find a new job - one that allowed him to work with his hands instead of a computer. For now, all he really needed was milk, drugs, duct tape, and a few other supplies.

He started off down the first aisle. The cart glided out and followed along behind him, muttering about sales and specials as it went. Max paused long enough to punch the cart’s mute button and headed toward the pharmacy counter at the back of the store. The auto-pharmacist scanned his retina, confirmed that Max was due for a refill on his prescription, and sounded a tone to let him know his pill bottle was ready behind the dispenser door next to the scanner. The shopping cart screen briefly noted the debit for the purchase. He turned and headed for the dairy aisle for a gallon of milk, then picked up a box of cereal, toilet paper, the duct tape, and some new razors. He contemplated buying more supplies, but the thought of dragging everything up the hill to his apartment discouraged him. At some point, he would have to break down and drive his car to the store. For now, he’d make do with the bare necessities.

The cart followed Max to the exit. On the sidewalk outside, the cart’s screen flashed a message indicating its gratitude for being of service, and tumbled the items Max had purchased into a plastic bag at the front. He lifted out his groceries. The cart whipped around and puttered back inside to await another customer.

Max stood on the curb for a moment and soaked in the spring sunshine. He had intended to shop and head straight home to his dreary apartment. But the walk had given him a taste for the outdoors. He looked up the sidewalk toward the cafe with tables scattered out front. A cup of real coffee and a muffin would be a nice change of pace from his diet of pizza and cereal. And even better, it might be nice to speak to someone for a moment, even if it was only to place an order with the waiter.

He hefted his groceries and headed for the café. The outdoor tables were deserted. It was the slow time of day; after the breakfast rush and before lunch.

Max settled in at a seat with his back to the café door, leaving him with a clear view of the parking lot. He placed his elbow on the arm of the chair and rested his chin on his knuckles to watch the cars rolling into place on the grid of parking spaces. Eventually, a pimply-faced waiter in a green apron appeared at his shoulder with a menu tablet in hand.

“Good morning,” said the waiter. “Care to hear today’s specials?”

Max only wanted a blueberry muffin and an iced coffee, but he nodded anyway. The sound of a human voice was refreshing. As the waiter rattled off the list of drink choices and pastry options, a disturbance erupted through the café door. The waiter paused and Max glanced over his shoulder as a man with an aluminum-foil scull cap, dark sunglasses, and a robe of dirty linen stumbled out of the café waving a fist-full of dollar bills.

“It’s called cash, you tools,” shouted the lunatic. “Remember money?”

“We take credit and we take debit,” a voice shouted back from inside the café. “Order whatever you want, but no cash.”

The lunatic stuffed the bills into his robe, stomped past Max’s table, and turned to stand on the curb. His face was red with fury, and veins stood out on his neck and forehead

“All I have is cash.”

The waiter shrugged at Max in a “What can you do?” sort of way.

“You want I should starve?” the lunatic shrieked at the waiter.

Then he turned on Max

“How about you?” said the lunatic. “You think my money is no good?”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” said Max in as calming and even a tone as he could muster. “It’s just a bit old fashioned.”

“It’s legal tender.” The madman lunged halfway across the table to hold a bill in front of Max’s nose. “See, says so right there.”

“It might be legal, but you’re not likely to find a cash register anywhere around here. They can’t make change.”

“I don’t need change. I just want something to eat.”

Max blinked at the crazed man. He was gaunt and the skin on his arms, neck, and face was sunburned a deep red. He certainly looked like he could use a meal.

“Tell you what,” said Max, “I’ll put it on my tab. Place your order and you can give me the cash.”

The lunatic clenched his jaw and appeared for a moment as if he was going to spit. He lifted his sun glasses and squinted briefly at Max with piercing blue eyes. His rage seemed to ebb a bit. He pulled out the chair on the other side of the tiny table and dropped to his seat with a thump.

“I’ll take a bear claw, two plain bagels, a large coffee, and water.” He reached into his robe and slapped a crumpled wad of bills on the table.

“Should I make that to go?” the waiter asked Max, raising an eyebrow suggestively.

Max tilted his chair back on two legs. He didn’t mind having company, but this wasn’t really what he was hoping for.

“Yes, please,” he said. “That would be great.”

Max added his coffee and a blueberry muffin to the order, and the waiter escaped into the café. The lunatic adjusted his robe and apparently crossed his legs, although under the layers of cloth it wasn’t exactly clear if that was what was going on. He pushed his foil cap back on his head a bit, revealing bushy black eyebrows and a tan line across his forehead that evidently came from wearing the metal hat for long hours in the sun.

“So,” said Max, tapping the table. “Come here often?”

“Are you trying to be funny?”

“No not at all,” said Max, attempting a weak smile.

The lunatic rubbed his grimy hands together and winked conspiratorially.

"Do me a favor. Act like you think I’m crazy.”

Before Max could respond, the lunatic sucked in some air through his teeth as if he were trying to loosen a bit of food that might have been trapped there.

"Go ahead and ask.”

“Ask what?”

“Go ahead and ask why I’m dressed this way.”

“O K,” said Max slowly, “why are you dressed like that?”

The lunatic tilted his head and cupped his ear. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” said Max. "I thought you wanted me to. . . "

The lunatic leaned forward, still cupping his ear, and said in a stage whisper, “What did you say?”

“I said why are you dressed that way?”

“Come again.”

Great, thought Max, he’s hard of hearing as well as crazy. He cleared his throat. “Why,” he said,” louder this time, “are you dressed that way.”

“One more time. Didn’t quite get it.”

“I said,” Max shouted as the waiter appeared with a muffin and coffee on a tray in one hand and a paper bag in the other, “why are you dressed that way?”

The lunatic slammed his open hands onto the table and pushed himself to his feet. He screamed at the top of his lungs, “None of your goddamned business! That’s why!”

The waiter stopped so abruptly at the commotion that Max’s coffee sloshed onto the tray, and the muffin tumbled to the table.

“Sir?” the wide-eyed waiter said to Max, “Should I call security?”

The lunatic reached out and snatched the bag from the waiter’s hand. “Call the cops. Call the army. Call your mommy while you’re at it. Just tell me what I owe this man.”

“Sir?” said the waiter, blinking at Max.

“Yes, please. Tell me what he owes.”

“Thirty-three thirty-four, plus tip.”

The lunatic advanced on the waiter. “Thirty-three dollars and thirty-four cents? For a bear claw, two bagels, coffee, and water?”

“Yes. Plus tip.”

“Plus what?” screamed the lunatic inches from the waiter’s face.

“Forget it. I mean the tip. Forget the tip.”

The lunatic stuffed the bag under his arm and smacked his hand down on the wad of cash on the table. He picked up the money and counted out four, wrinkled bills.

"There’s forty. Keep the change or give it to him.” He jerked a thumb at the waiter. A dark spot began to form at the bottom of the bag. It seemed the lunatic had upset his coffee.

“Well?” said the lunatic to Max.

“Well what?”

“Count it. Aren’t you going to count it?”

Max looked at the bills and then back at the lunatic, wondering to himself how much damage he could do if he hit the man with the bag of groceries at his side.

“No. That’s all right. I trust you.”

“You should count it.” The lunatic wheeled around and strode to the curb, while clutching at his robe to keep from stepping on the hem. “I’d count it if I were you. You never know who to trust these days.” The bag peed brown liquid as the lunatic dashed maniacally into the parking lot.

“Thanks,” muttered Max, taking a deep breath and rolling his eyes at the stunned waiter. “I’ll do that.” He crushed the bills in his fist.

“I’m sorry, sir,” said the waiter, on the verge of tears. “I dropped your muffin.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’ll get you another,” mumbled the waiter, “on the house.”

Max decided he’d gotten his fill of human contact for one day.

“Make it to go,” he said as he pushed his chair back from the table and reached for his grocery bag.
Read the rest of the post . . .

Chapter 19. Training

The boy was too absorbed in the strange game he was playing with the colorful geometric solids to notice Max and Perske descending the steps to the arena. The people in the crowd gathered at the rope were too occupied with watching the child’s every move to care about anything else.

Max guessed that they were researchers like Perske, some even looked vaguely familiar, probably occasional visitors to the lab or people Max had seen at one conference or another.

---

Listen to the Chapter 19 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

Linus was the only one to acknowledge them as they crossed the grass, with Perske leading the way and Max trudging behind in his socks. Linus tilted his head and chattered his beak. He waddled over in excitement and nuzzled Max’s hand.

“Hey buddy," said Max. "Good to see you.”

They rounded one of the roped off corners of the area where the boy played, and joined the fringes of the researchers, who were whispering solemnly among themselves as Neumann rolled a yellow sphere from the far corner. None of them cared in the slightest about Max or his shoeless feet and bloody sock.

The boy returned from his mission with the sphere and stood patiently on the other side of the velvet rope separating him from the scientists. A youngish researcher wearing a vintage bowling shirt leaned forward to address the child.

“Neumann, please pick up a big red block.”

“OK,” said the child, who turned and found the block nearby.

“Grasp the pyramid,” said the bowling shirt man.

The boy, still holding the block, looked around for a moment with a puzzled expression and said, “I don't understand which pyramid you mean.”

Max frowned at the contrast between the toddler's voice and his mature grammar. It struck him as a poor interface design.

Nevertheless, an appreciative whisper rippled through the group of researchers in response to the child’s statement, and the bowling shirt man nodded wisely.

“Find a block which is taller than the one you are holding and put it into the box.”

“By, ‘it’,” said the child, “I assume you mean the block which is taller than the one I am holding. OK.”

The boy completed the request and waited for further instructions.

“What does the box contain?” asked the bowling shirt man.

“The blue pyramid and the blue block,” said Neumann.

The man continued, “What is the pyramid supported by?”

“The box,” said the boy.

“How many blocks are not in the box?”

“Four of them.”

“Is at least one of them narrower than the one which I told you to pick up?”

“Yes. The red cube. May I play chess now?”

The question startled the bowling shirt man, who sputtered briefly. “I suppose. Dr. Perske, what do you think?”

Max squatted down and patted Linus on the head. “Fascinating, isn’t it buddy?”

“Actually,” said Perske, “it is quite fascinating.” She waved dismissively to the researchers. “Take a break.”

A few among the crowd grumbled about the interruption as they drifted off in two's and threes to argue over what they had just observed.

The boy ducked under the low rope and scampered to a chessboard resting on the low wall bordering the oval arena.
Linus followed after and hopped up onto the wall to study the chess pieces.

“Neumann,” said Perske as she beckoned Max to come along, “I want you to meet someone.”

The boy remained intently focused on the board and only raised a pudgy hand in response to Perske.

He slid a bishop across the board and captured one of Linus’s knights, and then turned away from the game with the knight still clutched in his tiny hand. The child had large blue eyes and pink cheeks that were round with baby fat.

“Hello fish man,” said Neumann.

“What?”

“Hello fish man.”

Max raised an eyebrow. “Why do you call me that?”

“Linus says you’re the fish man. He says you’re very smart. You taught him chess. But you’re nice because you let him win and you give him lots of fish. You’re the fish man.”

“Linus doesn’t know how to talk,” said Max.

Neuman shook his head. “He says you don’t know how to listen.”

“Well tell Linus, I don’t let him win.”

Linus rattled his beak.

“He says you’re still nice,” said the boy.

“Well,” said Max slowly, “tell him thanks.”

“He can hear you.”

Max studied the penguin, and wondered what other things Linus had heard him say over the past months of training.

“Neumann,” said Perske, “the fish man’s name is Max.”

“Hello Max,” said the boy. “Do you want to play with us?” He held out his chubby hand.

Max sighed. He wasn’t particularly fond of children in general. He suspected he was even less likely to be fond of this precocious little algorithm child. He gritted his teeth. What the hell, he thought, might as well get it over with.

He took Neumann’s hand. There was something comforting in the grasp of the child’s tiny fingers. For a moment, Max almost forgot his desire to escape the virtual world.

“You can help me,” said Neumann.

“I’ll just watch, if you don’t mind,” he said as the boy sat cross-legged at the board, still holding Max’s hand. Max kneeled next to him on the grass.

“You’re turn Linus,” said Neumann.

The penguin delicately moved a pawn with his beak.

“What should we do now?” asked Neumann.

“I don’t know. . .” Max started to say. But suddenly, he did know. Linus clearly was too focused on the right side of the board. It made sense. He had boxed in Neumann’s bishop and queen, leaving the king
vulnerable to attacks from the side. But the aggressive strategy left him comparatively defenseless in his backfield.

Sacrifice the queen, thought Max, and in eight moves Linus will resign.

“That’s right,” said Neumann. He looked up at Linus. “Want to play again?”

Max squeezed the boy’s hand lightly. “Shouldn’t we finish this one?”

“It’s over,” said Neumann as Linus tipped over his king and resigned.

Max was stunned at the clarity with which he was able to see the outcome of the game. He had never before been able to think more than a few moves ahead. The boy and the penguin were right; there was no point in playing the game out. They all knew how it would end.

“O K, “ said Max. “One more.”

He watched with a distracted gaze as Neumann and Linus set up the board again. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“You can be white again,” Neumann said to the penguin. For a moment, Max had the distinct impression that Linus had answered, “O K.”

He squinted at the penguin, who was pondering his first move.

A wave of clarity washed over Max. Although he was looking at Linus, he was seeing much more. Opening chess sequences flashed through his mind. Even as Linus reached for his knight with his beak, Max had formulated half a dozen strategies, some of which he somehow knew were distinctly unconventional. How he knew such a thing was a mystery.

He gradually developed the sensation that he was floating above the chessboard, looking down on the boy, the bird, and himself hunched over the chess pieces. He could see, in his mind’s eye, Perske standing behind him proudly watching the events on the board unfold. Max’s perception gradually expanded. He was aware of every blade of grass in the arena, every stone and every step in the amphitheater. His view expanded still further, like a ripple spreading outward from a pebble dropped into a pond. Time slowed to a crawl as the horizon of his mind opened up to grasp the sky, the cobbles in the street beyond the amphitheater walls, the hedged courtyard, and the platform atop the acropolis.

Past the acropolis lay a glittering neighborhood of houses clustered around cul-de-sacs at the ends of arcing drives, which sprouted off of larger lanes in an artificially organic suburban style. If it weren’t for the fact that the houses were all made of gleaming white stone, Max could have mistaken it for any of countless bedroom communities across the country or around the world.

One house stood out in the vast sea of sameness. Unlike its companions, it featured a covered porch and a swing lazily rocking back and forth. He focused his mind and zoomed in on the anomaly.

There she was, sitting in the porch swing, intact and as brooding as always with her knees pulled tight up against her chest.

Is it really her this time, he wondered.

“Is it who?”

For a moment, Max thought the question had emanated from some distant corner of his mind. Then he realized that it was the boy. Neumann had brought him this vision, or at least allowed him to have it. It seemed that they must be having it together.

“Betty,” he thought at the boy.

“Are you going to marry her?”

What on earth, Max wondered, are they teaching this little monkey? Apparently it wasn’t all spheres and cubes, or pawns and bishops.

“What is a monkey?” Neumann asked.

Never mind, thought Max at the boy. He tried to clear his head. This kid overheard everything. He let the focus on Betty slip and made a conscious effort to take in the whole expanse.

The suburban sprawl jutted into an endless, featureless brown wasteland, like fingers of mold spreading across a piece of old bread. If this was Perske’s plan, to build a virtual middle class paradise to raise Neumann, she certainly had plenty of room to expand. Other than Betty on her porch swing, however, no one seemed to occupy any of the other houses. It was a ghost town.

But it wasn’t completely still. Something was moving. There, on the acropolis. Max concentrated and zoomed in again. A dark shadow swirled on the floor where he had first arrived in the virtual wonderland. It flowed down the steps, and Max followed it in his mind, to the courtyard where it lingered near the surgical table, then surged through the gap in the hedge and down the street toward the amphitheater.

He struggled to bring himself back. He pulled his hand from Neumann’s, and the eye in his mind snapped shut.

“We have to go. Something is coming.”

“I know,” said the boy.

“What?” said Perske from behind Max. “What are you talking about?”

Max stood and pointed toward the arched entranceway. “It’s up there.”

Perske turned just as the hulking figure emerged at the top of the steps. It was tall and rotund; a bulbous figure that was almost too large to fit through the entrance to the amphitheater. It had the same sleek black color as Linus’s feathers, and a white streak on its chest that was stained with splotches of muddy brown. Even from across the arena, Max could see that its eyes glowed bright red.

“What have you done?” cried Perske to Max as she snatched up Neumann and raced past the chess board, scattering pieces on the grass.

“Me? Nothing.”

The giant creature reeled menacingly down the steps toward the arena floor, dragging a clanking chain attached to one foot. Three researchers who had made the mistake of gathering on the steps to talk were crushed under the monster’s bulk and lay still with their limbs bent at unnatural angles. Others stood frozen in shock or fled into the amphitheater seating.

“Minus?” said Max, standing helplessly stunned next to the chessboard. He felt Linus cowering against the back of his legs.

The creature roared across the arena and was nearly upon him before Max gathered his senses enough to turn, grab Linus, and run after Perske. There was an opening straight ahead of him at the bottom of the arena seating. He had only taken a few steps when he was halted by the searing agony of Minus’s beak burying itself into his thigh. Max wailed in pain and fell forward, spilling Linus across the grass. Hot blood spewed from his leg in pulses onto the ground. Max felt a wave of nausea wash over him. He rolled over clutching his leg. Minus reared back for another strike.

As Max cringed in horror at Minus’s glowing eyes, he felt his grip on consciousness begin to slip away. The world closed in. Is this, he wondered, what it’s like to die?

###

Max woke up screaming on the floor. He groped at his thigh, feeling for the ragged wound left by Minus’s beak. There was nothing; only smooth, unbroken skin.

He lurched to his feet and frantically scanned the room. There was no monstrous penguin, no chessboard, no arena. He was back in Herman’s home environment, with the chrome furniture and the sparkling disco ball above him. Linus was nowhere to be seen, but Betty, his Betty, was sitting at the desk tending to her nails. He saw the toy car on the carpet, still frantically flashing its headlights.

As he stood panting and shaky in the middle of the room, he could feel a warm dampness in the crotch of his shorts. For a moment, he feared it was blood, but when he saw the shiny trickle running down his knee, and the amber droplets spattered on his shoes, he knew it was only urine.

“Exit environment,” he said.

Herman’s room slipped away, and Max shuffled out of the lab to the restroom for some paper towels.

Read the rest of the post . . .

Chapter 18. Neumann

The opening in the hedge led to a narrow cobbled street, lined with pale stone buildings. Perske let her arm drop from Max’s waist and started off down the street. Max hesitated, and then turned back to look at the bushes. He plucked a leaf, pinched it between his fingers, and held it to his nose. It had a spicy fragrance of boxwood that reminded him of the smell of his grandmother’s yard, after a spring rain.

---

Listen to the Chapter 18 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

He felt the touch of Perske’s hand on his arm.

“It feels . . . so believable,” said Max.

He looked over his shoulder to see Perske smiling. He could not recall having seen such an expression cross her face back at the Institute. She was usually so stern.

“I’m very proud of it,” she said. “You’re lucky. Not too many people have experienced an environment like this.”

Max shrugged. “Unless you count life.”

Perske laughed.

“In a way,” she said, “what you’re experiencing here is more real than anything you might know in the so-called real world.”

Max blinked. “What on Earth are you talking about.”

She tugged at his arm and took a few steps down the cobbled street.

“Come on. We’ll talk while we walk.”

After a moment, Max followed, cupping the bruised boxwood leaf in his hand. They walked in silence for a while. The lumpy cobble stones hurt Max’s feet. Only Perske’s footsteps and the songs of what Max assumed must be virtual birds, disturbed the cool, still air.

“All experiences are transmitted to your brain through nerves connected to sensory organs," said Perske, "But nerves and sensory organs are not perfect. We have skipped past all that. In the supposed real world, you are lying on the floor of the lab, and the virtual reality you are experiencing is being directly fed into your brain.”

“Excuse me?” Said Max

“We have found a way to couple signals to the brain through the shortest route possible, other than sticking wires through the skull. We get in through the optical nerves. Your brain in turn produces signals that are detected with a technology called terahertz imaging. All of it is wrapped up into a package, which you may recall in the cave, resembling a small toy car with flashing lights.”

The Beetle, thought Max, that had whizzed around Herman’s room and frightened Linus.

“And all of this is an illusion,” he said, waving his arm at the street, the tidy stone buildings and the amphitheater up ahead, which loomed ever larger as they walked.

“It’s as real as the nerve impulses going to your brain,” said Perske. "No more, no less. I could say the same about anything your brain interprets as real. Only here, your imperfect senses don’t get in the way. This is as close to reality as you could ever hope to be; with signals transmitted as directly to your brain as possible, and no flawed sensory system to get in the way. What difference does it make whether the signals are generated by what you call the real world or by a computer system?”

Perske smacked her hand against the wall of the amphitheater. “This stone is hard and cold. That leaf is green. And the cut on your ankle caused you real pain.”

“But I’m going to wake from this dream sometime.”

Perske turned and walked through the entrance of the amphitheater and down the steps leading to the tiered seating.

“Perhaps,” she said over her shoulder. “Or perhaps not.”

Max crumpled the tiny leaf into a ball and tossed it at the wall inside the entranceway. It bounced off, leaving a small green smudge behind, and rolled into a crevice between the cobble stones. He squinted at the spot on the wall, and smeared it with his thumb. Perske was right, the wall was cold and hard. He wondered, assuming she was telling the truth, what his body was doing in the lab as his virtual self moved about in the virtual world. Not much, he imagined, picturing himself prostrate on the lab floor, still gripping the toy car.

Perske had taken a seat on the stone tiers that lay ahead in the amphitheater, and Max meandered down to sit behind her. At the far end of the arena, he could see a cluster of figures at the edge of a roped off section of grass. A dozen or so geometric objects were scattered around the roped area. There were cones, cubes, spheres, and shapes with names Max couldn’t recall, each decorated in one or another primary color. It appeared that the objects were placed there for the amusement of a small child, only a toddler really, who wandered among the objects.

On the far side of the roped area, Max saw a familiar bowling pin-shaped creature of black and white.

“Is that Linus?”

“Yes,” said Perske. “I brought him along to amuse Neumann.”

“The child?”

“Yes. He’s very good at chess.”

Max leaned forward to peer at the distant figures.

“You mean Linus is good at chess? Or the child?”

“Both actually.”

“Who, or what, is Neumann?”

Perske smiled bashfully. “That’s just his nickname. He’s a Dynamic Distributed Memory Hyper Organism, a D D M H Oh. He’s the reason we had to be so careful.”

“He’s a virtual assistant?”

“Virtual? Yes. Assistant? Hardly.”

Although it was impossible to make out exactly what was going on at the distant end of the arena, Max could see that the cluster of people were carefully observing the child. From time to time, one of the people in the small group leaned over the rope and seemed to give the child some instructions. After a moment or two, Neumann would wander off to tip a cube or move a sphere, and then toddle back again.

Max placed his elbows on his knees, knitted his fingers together, and rested his chin on his knuckles, as he watched. A bitter lump rose in his throat. It hardly seemed worth the trauma he had suffered since his kidnapping, to protect a computer program, regardless of how hard Perske might have worked on it.

“What’s so important about him?” said Max dryly.

Perske swiveled around on the stone bench in front of him. “Potential,” she said. “He has nearly unlimited potential to learn, to grow.” Perske’s eyes sparkled. She was beaming. “He has potential to live, as no other neural net algorithm ever has before.”


“So what?" said max. " Linus gets a little smarter everyday. And Betty3.5, as I imagine you know, is pretty damned sophisticated.”

“Yes," she conceded, "but Linus and Betty are limited by the power of the computer systems they run on. Neumann is different. He effectively has no limits.”

Max had a feeling he was treading on subjects far beyond his ability to understand. He doubted he would be able to grasp the answer to his next question, but he asked anyway.

“How so?”

Perske smiled demurely. “Do you know what DDM is?”

“Dynamic something, I think.”

“Dynamic distributed memory," Perske corrected him. "It’s a way of storing information in a network without using conventional memory chips, disks, or dedicated hardware of any kind.”

Max immediately regretted raising the issue. “It means nothing to me. I’ve never actually understood DDM.”

“It’s simple really,” she said as she crossed her arms.

He recognized the phrase. It was the way Perske often prefaced answers to questions posed by her graduate students. It was a semantic signal that usually sent Max scrambling to escape the lecture that was sure to follow.

“Imagine,” said Perske, “if you were to mail a letter that you had addressed with a nonexistent destination. What would happen?”

Max played along gamely for the moment. “The mailman would eventually return it.”

“Exactly. Now suppose you put some important information in the letter, and every time it returned to you, you sent it out again with another meaningless address. The information would be effectively stored in a letter perpetually sent out and returned to you.”

Max rubbed his forehead. “I guess, but it would cost a fortune in stamps, and it seems pretty pointless.”

“But," said Perske, "if you didn’t have to pay for the postage, you now have a way to save space in your file drawer by storing information in the network that is the US postal system.”

If there was a connection to the golden-haired boy in the distance, Max didn’t see it.

“If you put everything from your home filing cabinet into letters bouncing around in the mail system," said Perske, "you could do without a filing cabinet at all. In effect you have a filing system that is as large as the storage capacity of every mailbag and sorting facility in the country, and the world, if you include international mail. That’s much more than you could ever hope to store in a filing cabinet, or your whole house for that matter.”

“It sounds like more trouble than it’s worth,” said Max.

Perske rubbed her hands together. It was the sign that she was about to get to the heart of the matter.

“If you do the same thing with digital information transmitted through the Internet, you can store as much information as the entire global network can hold, on all the servers and fiber cables and microwave transmission systems in the world.”

“How much is that?” asked Max.

“Exabytes. Billions of times the storage capacity of the typical computer hard drive, and it’s growing everyday”

“O K.,” Max blinked.

“Listen," said Perske, "Linus is a neural network algorithm stored in a computer. Specifically, stored on a server at the university. The memory available to run him is limited by, among other things, the physical size of the memory in the server. Neumann’s algorithm is stored in DDM, which is limited by the size of the network he runs in.”

“So," said Max, "he’s got a brain the size of the Internet.”

Perske laughed. “It’s not that simple. Some algorithms run in computers. We can make them better by linking more of them together, but it’s still limited by the computers themselves. Neumann isn’t in the computers. He’s in the spaces between them, the connections that link them together. He’s not limited by the speed and power of the computers, he’s only limited by the speed of light in the cables and the ever-growing number of links.”

Max’s head was starting to hurt.

“The internet and the web that runs inside it are growing so fast,” said Perske, “that they essentially comprise a living thing. A super-organism. The Internet is the brain, and the Web is the mind. Neumann lives on top of all that. He’s a hyperorganism. The Internet grows as we add servers. The web grows much faster, as people add sites and data. Neumann grows faster still, as the links between sites and servers multiply.”

“I get it,” Max fibbed, in order to put a stop to the lecture. “He’s a bright kid.”

“Yes, of course,” said Perske, indicating that she realized she had said more than Max cared to know. “It’s a passion of mine. I get carried away.”

Max nodded at the boy. “You must be passionate about him, to have done such awful things to me. And,” he said, “to Herman.”

“I told you; what happened to Herman was an accident.”

Max shook his head. “But the accident was your fault.”

“We . . . I . . . " she stammered, "Yes, the virus that led to the accident was released intentionally. But it should have hit him in the lab. It was supposed to incapacitate him. He would have been here instead of you, if everything had gone as planned. I’m truly sorry.”

Max wasn't going to let her off so easily.

“Your little ruse on the operating table back there was no accident.” He reached down to touch the bandage on his ankle. “Neither is this.”

Perske avoided his gaze. “We had reason to believe that Herman had access to a device that could devastate a network, potentially bringing down the Internet.”

“And possibly," said Max, "destroying all your work on your Diddy Moe.”

Perske turned to look at the golden haired boy. “Neumann. That’s right. Believe me, I had no alternative.”

“There’s got to be an alternative to homicide and torture.”

Perske looked down at her hands resting in her lap. “I said I’m sorry. What more do you want from me?”

“I want out. Out of here and out of the lab.”

“Of course," She said. "I can arrange that.”

Max stood up. “Then do it.”

“Wait,” said Perske softly. “Come meet him first.”

“Who?”

“Neumann.”

“The boy?”

“Please,” she said.

Max stared at Perske. He had no desire to prolong the adventure any more than absolutely necessary. But he’d had ample evidence that he was out of his element and at Perske’s mercy if she decided to do something rash. It seemed safest to humor her.

“I guess it couldn’t hurt.”

Perske brightened. “Thanks. It’ll all be over soon.”

Max stepped into the aisle that led down toward the grassy arena below.

“After you, Elizabeth.”
Read the rest of the post . . .

The DarkNet FireFly Toy

Chapter 18 of The DarkNet is coming soon. In the meantime, I've built a toy to amuse readers who have a little time on their hands. (Click the image to the left if you want to download it.)

It's a widget toy I call FireFly. It's designed to demonstrate the emergence of complex behavior that sometimes results when groups of simple objects interact through a few basic rules. (You may not see the connection to the storyline in The DarkNet, but I hope you will soon.)

The toy consists of a 25 by 25 grid of artificial fireflies. A set of controls lets you adjust the average firefly flashing rate, the coupling that determines how the fireflies react to each other, and the amount of randomness in the toy that adds a touch of realism to the game.

I built this widget after reading about studies of fireflies that have been observed to synchronize their flashes. Heart cells synchronize in similar ways. Neurons in our nervous systems fire based on input from their neighbors, and epileptic attacks may arise when too many of them synchronize their firing.

If you want to try out the toy, but have never used a Yahoo Widget before, you'll first have to download and install the Yahoo Widgets 4 engine.

When you run FireFly, it loads with all the fireflies flashing at random times. Then you can start fiddling with the settings to search for interesting behavior. Here's a summary of the controls.

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Note: I improved the controls a bit. The changes are incorporated into the following information

Flash Period - The up and down arrows increase or decrease the rate that the fireflies flash.

Coupling - Coupling is set to zero when the toy loads. That means the fireflies don't care what their neighbors are doing. Turning up the coupling causes each firefly to try to flash at the same time as its nearest neighbors. You can also decrease the coupling until it's negative - that means the fireflies will try to avoid flashing at the same time as their nearest neighbors.

Random Noise - In the real world, fireflies, heart cells and neurons don't flash at perfectly regular intervals. The random noise setting lets you turn up the reality by adding random jitter to the flashing rates of the fireflies.

Reset button - Sets all the fireflies to their live status with their flashing rate initially synchronized.

Random button - This button randomly sets the timing of all the live fireflies. A firefly is live if it's flashing. Between flashes, it is dull yellow. A dead firefly is grey and does not flash.

Synch button - Synchronizes all the live fireflies to the same timing. (if you have coupling or random noise set to non-zero values, the fireflies will probably desynchronize quickly)

Clear button - This lets you turn off all the fireflies (they all turn grey). Then you can click individual fireflies to turn them on. This way you can make patterns that sometimes do pretty unusual stuff. Clicking a flashing firefly shuts it off.

Play and Stop icons - These should be obvious.

Data Bar - The settings, along with a generations counter that shows how long the toy has been running in a given configuration, are displayed at the top of the widget.

---

That's all there is to it.

So far, I've found settings that create endlessly changing symmetrical designs, strings of fireflies that flash in patterns that seem to orbit around loops of various shapes, and signs of a sort of memory that scientists call hysteresis.

Drop me an email if you play with it and happen to find anything cool.

I adapted this widget from one built by Lawrence Levinson. He made the best version of John Conway's Game of Life that I've found in widget form. If you've never played with the Game of Life, you should check it out.

Thanks Lawrence, I hope you don't mind me riding on your coat tails.

By the same token, if you want to modify my widget to make it better or completely different, feel free. But be sure to send it to me so I can play with your widget too.

-Buzz
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Chapter 17. The First Cut

The surgical instruments that he had gathered from the grass were piled up to Max’s side as he leaned back against the shrouded table that held Betty’s mutilated corpse. Several of the instruments were broken from his feeble attempts to pick the lock on the shackles. He had worked his way through them one at a time with no luck. Only some clamps, a heavy pair of scissors, and a bone saw remained intact. Of the three, the bone saw seemed most promising.

---

Listen to the Chapter 17 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

The tiny teeth on the saw were viciously sharp. Max pulled to tighten the chain that bound him, and drew the saw across one of the links. It left only a barely detectable scratch. It was clear that the blade would wear out long before he could do any damage to the heavy chain.

He rested the blade on his ankle. The points of the saw made small white spots where they touched his skin. He took a deep breath, drew the saw back in a quick, light stroke, and grimaced at the sting of the cut. It was a shallow wound, and for a moment, it didn’t even bleed. Soon a crimson line erupted along the blade’s path. A droplet of blood at one end of the cut slid lazily down toward his sock.

Max had once heard of a lone hiker who had gotten his foot trapped in shifting rubble while walking in the desert. Given the choice between life and his limb, the hiker had cut off his leg at the knee with a pocketknife, and somehow traveled miles to safety. He had been forced to amputate at the knee because there was no way he could have cut through his leg bones with a small knife. Max, on the other hand, had the relative luxury of a surgical saw designed precisely for hacking through bone.

He lined up the blade along the bloody cut and winced at the pain that came from even gently touching the steel to the wound.

“Come on,” he said to himself, “you can do it.” The bloody sheet that he could see out of the corner of his eye was a reminder that there were worse fates in store for him if he couldn’t saw off his leg and find some escape route.

This next cut, he thought, has got to be deeper. Max closed his eyes and gritted his teeth as he prepared for a second stroke. He breathed fast in an attempt to hyperventilate, and perhaps ease the impending pain a bit. He clenched the saw handle with his right hand, squeezed his ankle with his left, and pushed the saw teeth into his flesh. He leaned forward, took a final, deep breath, and let out a wail. "Oh please God!”

Just as he started to pull on the saw for a second cut, something snatched his wrist and wrenched the saw from his hand.

“Getting a jump on us are you, Alice?”

Spencer stood grinning down at him and smacking the bone saw against his chubby thigh.

“No fair going out of turn,” said Spencer.

Max made a lunge at the saw in Spencer’s hand, but the laundry monster reached out with a swaddled arm and blocked his way.

Spencer laughed. “So, what’s the good word? Is he being straight with us?”

The question made no sense. “What?” said Max.

He heard the hiss of the sheet sliding off the table behind him.

”He’s telling the truth. I think,” said a voice that sounded almost, but not quite, like Betty3.5.

Max craned his neck to peer over his shoulder at the table. Instead of Betty’s mangled torso, he saw Perske perched on the table edge.

“He doesn’t know anything,” she said.

Perske hopped down to the grass and walked over to stand next to Spencer.

“Sorry, Max. We had to be careful.”

“But what about,” Max stammered. “What happened to . . .”

“Betty,” said Spencer.

“She’s fine,” said Perske. “You can see her later.”

“But why did you do that?”

Perske glanced at one of Spencer’s lackeys and nodded down at Max’s leg. The couch creature unlocked the shackle. Perske bent down, reached for Max’s hand, and helped him to his feet.

“Let’s go for a walk and I’ll explain it all to you. But first,” she said, pointing at the scrape on Max’s ankle. “Let me put something on that.” She took the bone saw from Spencer, lifted a corner of the sheet that had previously covered the table, and used the sharp teeth to start a tear near one corner. She dropped the saw to the grass and ripped off a strip of cloth, then knelt and wrapped it over Max’s cut.

Perske stood up and placed a hand on each of his shoulders. “You deserve an explanation,” she said. “Come with me, and you’ll get one.”

She stepped forward and wrapped her arm around Max’s waist. She led him gently but firmly past Spencer and his lackeys toward the gap in the hedge.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

“Thank you, Dr. Perske.”

“Call me Elizabeth,” she said with a gentle smile.

“Yes of course," said Max, "sorry. Elizabeth.”

Read the rest of the post . . .

Chapter 16. Sacrifice

Max’s head hurt. It was making it difficult to think. He closed his eyes, pressed his hand against his brow, and tried to make sense of it all. From the moment the laundry monster and the couch creature had stuffed him into the oven, things had moved so quickly that he hadn’t had a chance to stop and figure it all out.

---

Listen to the Chapter 16 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

Here was Betty, sliced open like a cadaver in an anatomy class, still breathing, heart beating, and occasionally speaking. Of course, he thought to himself, this has to be a virtual environment - or a dream. After all, Betty could only exist as a computer program or as a figment of his imagination.

He raised his hand and looked at the scalpel that rested in his naked palm. In the environment of the lab, he couldn’t have felt the presence of something like the scalpel without the interface of the virtual reality gloves. And yet, here was a piece of metal, with weight and texture. He closed his fist around the handle and rested his thumb against the blade. If it was virtual, it couldn’t hurt him. He closed his eyes. He pressed on the razor edge.

It’s not real, he thought. As long as Betty is here, it can’t be real. He pressed harder, but he couldn’t bring himself to attempt the ultimate test of running his thumb down the blade.

“Dammit.”

He dropped the scalpel onto the table next to Betty’s head and bent down to grasp the chain clamped to his ankle. He jerked at the restraint and felt the sharp pain where the shackle pinched his skin. The links were heavy and cold, and absolutely unyielding. With a howl of frustration, he jammed the chain into his mouth and bit down. The crunch of teeth against metal, and the tangy electric steel taste felt undeniably real.

Max fell to his haunches, panting and slamming his fist into the turf. He rolled onto his hands and knees and crawled away from the table until he reached the end of the chain. With eyes closed and jaw clenched, he pulled until the pain in his ankle was too much to bear. He tore at the ground, pulling out fistfuls of grass and heaving it into the air.

The tantrum soon exhausted him, and Max collapsed onto his belly. With his face resting on the soft grass, he glared at the distant hedgerow. It clearly lacked the hyper-reality of a virtual hedge. If this was some sort of virtual environment, which it must be if Betty was on the table, it was far more advanced than anything Max had ever experienced before.

He clambered weakly to his feet and turned back toward the table that held the mangled body of Herman’s virtual assistant.

“Betty,” he said as he approached the table. Her eyes moved in jerks beneath the closed lids. "Betty. Are you in pain?”

“Yes,” she said in a whisper so soft that Max could barely hear anything more than a breath.

“How can I help you?”

She swallowed and said, “Give them the Doomsday device.”

Max studied her pained and pleading face.

“I don’t have it.”

Betty spoke again, but Max couldn’t make it out.

“What did you say?”

She licked her lips. “Then end it. Terminate me.”

“I can’t. I tried.”

“Yes," she said, "yes you can.”

Max looked at the scalpel next to Betty’s head.

“With this?” He picked up the scalpel and held it in a trembling hand.

“Yes. Please.”

He turned the blade point down and slowly inserted its tip between the ribs over Betty’s heart. It was close enough that it nearly touched the muscle with each feeble beat. He almost asked her if she really wanted to die, if there was something else he could do. But laid open as she was, he knew that there was no other choice. She was as good as dead anyway.

Max thrust the blade into Betty’s heart. There was a brief resistance before it plunged in and his hand struck her rib cage. She arched under him, as if she was pushing back to force the scalpel deeper. Her heart convulsed, then shuddered, and a gush of hot, thick blood enveloped his hand. She dropped back and lay still.

Blood was spattered on his hand up to the wrist. It was running from Betty’s chest and down amongst the exposed lower organs. Her face was frozen, with eyes wide as if in shock, but at least the grimace of pain was gone. Max staggered back to the end of the chain, blood dripping from his hand.

Whether she was virtual or not, he could hardly bear the thought of being trapped here, chained beside the staring corpse of Betty3.5. He snatched up the sheet that Spencer had pulled off of Betty earlier. Max frantically wiped the blood from his hand. He lunged forward and tossed the sheet over Betty. It was better than nothing, but now that he knew what was underneath, it was nearly impossible to look at the bloody shroud without envisioning Betty's corpse.

He wanted to scream. It’s not real. It can’t be real. Betty and the blood, and the chain, and the courtyard, and the beautiful blue sky. It’s all an illusion!

He kicked at the chain. Then he hurled himself toward the rack of surgical instruments and heaved it over, spilling the clanking, stainless steel pieces onto the grass. He wanted to do the same to the table that held Betty. But even through the haze of rage, he couldn’t stand the thought of seeing that horror again. Instead, he snatched up a metal syringe from the pile of instruments, and threw it over the nearby bushes. He did the same with a pair of scissors, a retractor, and a clamp. He tried to pick up the instrument table itself, but it was too heavy.

Panting with fury, he turned and sprinted to the end of the chain. The shackle bit into his ankle, and Max slammed to the ground in a sobbing heap.

If it was an illusion, it was one he was going to have to live with, at least for now.
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The DarkNet Widget

Click the image to download The DarkNet widget. It keeps you up to date on the five most recent DarkNet chapters.



If you've never used a Yahoo Widget, and you'd like to give it a try, download the Yahoo Widget 4 engine.

It should work on Mac OS X as well.

Check out the other widgets in the Yahoo widget gallery when you have a chance. Most are written by regular folks. Only a fraction seem to come from the Yahoo staff.

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Chapter 15. A Reunion, of Sorts

Max was literally going to pieces.

He’d been OK for a few moments after the laundry monster and couch creature shoved him into the hole where his oven should have been. There was no frame of reference to give him any indication of what was going on. He’d anticipated a screaming descent, tumbling through the void with turbulent wind battering his ears and face, ending with a violent thud on some invisible plane.

---

Listen to the Chapter 15 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

Instead, it had begun with nothing. No sound beyond the pounding pulse in his ears. No visible feature to focus his eyes. No indication of up or down. After the struggle at the apartment, it was actually a relief.

He knew it couldn’t last of course. Realistically, they wouldn’t have shoved him in here (or was it out here?) for his own good. Perhaps it was to be a sensory depravation torture. In a little while, he thought, the disconnection should drive him mad.

He might as well try to simply be in the moment. It was a little bit of peace before old man Insanity would knock at the door of his mind, and Max would obligingly let him in.

That was when Max started falling apart. He caught sight of something whizzing away into the distance. The object was too bright to identify, shining vividly against the jet black darkness. It was like a tiny meteor zipping away with a trajectory that seemed to indicate that it had either passed though, or originated from, the vicinity of Max’s left nipple. He was still firmly bound in laundry, but in his peripheral vision he could see other bright sparks zipping off just like the first. There was no question about it, they all radiated from Max.

Suddenly the tip of his nose began to glow. He closed one eye and squinted down at it with the other as best he could. Although he couldn’t focus at such short range, he could see what appeared to be phosphorescent dust accumulating at the very end. It built up like iron filings adhering to a magnet, except for the fact that iron filings are dull black rather than glowing specks. Just as the light grew to the point that it’s brightness was too much to look at any longer, the end of his nose simply snapped off and jetted away.

Max shuddered and waited for the pain that should accompany the violent removal of his nose. It never came. There was not even really the feeling that his nose was missing. But it clearly wasn’t there. He tried to scrunch it up as he would if he were suppressing a sneeze. Although he saw nothing, he had the sensation that the tip of his nose was dutifully wriggling in response somewhere far far away.

The sparks emanated from him at an ever-increasing pace. With one final flash, Max exploded into countless gleaming pieces. He felt as though he was no longer a single being, but millions of tiny packets all moving in loose harmony, like a swarm of bees or a giant school of fish. Some portions lagged behind, then raced to catch up. Others swirled from the inside of his expanded incarnation to the out, rolling and seething, and becoming hopelessly mixed up.

There was no way that Max could imagine, in his swirling billowy thoughts, that there was any way he could ever be put back in the proper order. For a time, he seemed to fill the entire sterile expanse. He was one with the universe, as he now knew it.

Then the bits began to contract, returning from their outer reaches in an implosion that mirrored his earlier disintegration, until Max reassembled into a solid whole that was now disappointingly small and insignificant.

He was wrapped again in the cocoon of laundry and lying face down with his cheek pressed against a cold, hard surface. Just beyond his nose, which had returned to its appropriate place on the front of his face, Max could see the mottled pink of what appeared to be a polished marble floor.

“Welcome to wonder land Alice. Did you have a nice trip?” said a voice above him. He recognized Spencer's squeaky tones.

Max’s cheeks puffed beneath the sock gag, but only a muffled rasp escaped.

“Pardon me,” said Spencer, “it must be tough to talk through that thing. Here, let me help.”

Max felt the sock loosen.

“Exit environment!” he shrieked.

“I’m afraid that isn’t going to work now,” said Spencer.

“Exit environment! Halt Program! System reboot!”

Max’s screams were stifled again as the sock tighten across his mouth. There was a rough jerk as he was rolled over onto his back. He peered at the arched ceiling far above, which was decorated with images of cherubs and angels, antiquated armies of foot soldiers, and lounging figures draped in flowing bolts of cloth. An upside-down face suddenly obscured his view. It was so close that Max could barely make out the glasses and the pudgy cheeks.

“It’s useless my friend,” said Spencer. “You’re on the inside now. You don’t have permission to shut down the system from here. You’re just going to have to relax.”

The sock loosened.

“Exit environment! Emergency shut down! Terminate program!”
Spencer clamped a pudgy hand on Max’s mouth, then he pinched his nostrils shut with the other hand. Max began to squirm. His eyes bulged and veins throbbed on his forehead.

“Why don’t you try, kill process," asked Spencer, "or ‘control alt delete’?”

Spencer lifted his hands from Max’s face.

He took a rattling breath. “F-user.”

Spencer grasped Max’s throat with a powerful grip.

“I can leave you here to scream all day, if you like. It’s not going to work.”

Max’s eyes filled with tears of pain as Spencer squeezed.

“Do you understand?” said Spencer.

Max nodded feebly. Spencer relaxed his grip. He leaned in so close that their noses nearly touched. “Now shut up and I’ll get you out if this stuff. Alright?”

Max nodded again.

Spencer stood up, and beckoned. The wrappings loosened, and then were gone. Max spread his aching arms and legs in relief, but he lacked the strength to do anything more for the moment.

“Take your time,” said Spencer, “I’m in no hurry.”

Max let his head loll to one side. He saw the laundry monster and couch creature waiting for Spencer’s orders. The dirty clothes that previously bound him stood in a pile beside them.

Beyond his captors, a series of stone pillars rose to support the outer edge of the arched ceiling. A cloudless sky showed through in the spaces between the pillars. Max rolled his head to the right. More pillars, and more sky. He heaved his left arm across his body and struggled to rise to his knees.

“Help him up,” said Spencer.

Max felt firm hands beneath his shoulders as the henchmen lifted him to his feet. He turned to peer at the couch creature, but could discern nothing from the paisley button eyes. The strain was too great for the exhausted muscles in his neck, and Max’s head dropped until his chin rested on his chest.

“Let’s go.” Spencer marched off across the marble floor, and the couch creature and laundry monster dragged Max after him. His head bounced with each step as they neared the soaring pillars, periodically giving him a view of rolling hills that spread below. The stone structure where Spencer had collected him was a sort of acropolis, on a hill rising above a village constructed of small, neatly ordered buildings that appeared to be made of limestone or marble. A courtyard bordered with bushy hedges opened up at the bottom of the stairs. His feet bounced against the stone steps as Spencer’s lackeys lugged him down to the courtyard. He was gradually regaining strength in his neck, although with each step his head threatened to flop first forward, then back.

They reached the bottom step, and continued onto the soft grass toward the far side of the courtyard, where a coffin-sized structure draped in a white shroud stood. The cloth covered an array of lumpy shapes that, to Max, resembled a work of art in progress, like modeling clay that a sculptor had left in the very early stages of creation. A shiny steel table to one side held an array of instruments that looked as though they might have been at home in a dentist’s office or a surgical theater.

Spencer approached the shrouded structure, and turned to wait for Max and the lackeys.

“Let him go,” said Spencer.

They released Max’s arms, and he fell to his knees.

Spencer pushed his black-rimmed glasses higher up on his bulbous nose.

“Can you guess what, or more precisely who, I have here?”

Max let his head drop, then swung it to one side to look at Spencer with eyes heavy from exhaustion.

“Reunions are always so moving,” said Spencer dryly. He reached out and pinched the shroud daintily. “This is a little project that I call ‘Deconstructing Betty.” He slowly pulled the cloth away, revealing a surgical table and much of Betty 3.5. “It’s sort of reverse software engineering. We’re really finding out what makes this young lady tick.”

Betty’s legs were missing, as were her arms. She was lying on her back with her head and face intact, but even from his vantage point on his knees Max could see that her torso was shredded. He choked down the bile that rose in his throat and turned away.

“Oh come on, she’s just code.," said Spencer. "There’s nothing I can do to her that has any real meaning.”

Max fell forward onto his hands and started to crawl backwards toward the acropolis.

“Bring him here,” said Spencer. The henchmen snatched up Max by the arms and carried him to the table. He tried to turn his face away, but Spencer grabbed a fistful of the hair on the top of his head and forced him to look.

Betty had been sliced down the front, from the nape of her neck to her pubis. Her skin was pulled back and clamped to the table like the wings of some exotic and gruesome butterfly, revealing her rib cage, organs, and intestines. Her lungs quivered beneath the ribs, and her heart was still beating.

“Say hello Betty,” said Spencer.

Her eyes fluttered slightly at the sound of her name, and opened just a bit.

“Herman,” she whispered. Max strained to turn away, but Spencer held him fast by the hair.

“No no, Betty,” said Spencer, “Herman is no more. This is our friend Max. He’s here to help you.”

Her eyes closed, and her mouth soundlessly formed the shape of Herman’s name.

“We’ve poked around just about everywhere, to make sure there’s nothing suspicious hidden inside,” said Spencer as he waved his hand toward Betty’s vivisected torso. “There’s only one more place to look.” He tapped Betty’s forehead. “But we thought we’d give you a few minutes with her first.”

Max gritted his teeth. The breath whistled through his nostrils as he glared at Spencer out of the corner of his eyes. Code or not, there was only so much suffering he could handle. He lunged for the table of surgical instruments, but he was no match for the henchmen and Spencer’s iron grip on his hair.

“Not yet, my friend.” Spencer’s grin faded. His eyes narrowed into a malicious glare. “You’ll have your turn at those momentarily, if you like.”

He released Max’s head and walked around to the other side of the table.

“Is there anything you’d like to tell me?” asked Spencer. “Anything that might encourage me to put her out of her misery?”

“I told you,” said Max through his teeth. “I don’t have the device.”

Spencer studied Max for a moment.

“OK,” he said. “I’m gonna leave you here with Betty for a while so you can think things over.” He nodded to the couch creature who in turn reached under the table. He pulled out a manacled chain that was hidden beneath and clamped it to Max’s ankle. The other end was fastened to one of the table legs.

“Visit for a while,” said Spencer. “If you feel like it,” he nodded at the surgical instruments, “put her down yourself.”

Spencer turned and headed toward the hedge that bordered the courtyard. The laundry monster and couch creature followed, leaving Max staring after them.

“I’ll be back shortly,” said Spencer over his shoulder as they disappeared through a gap in the bushes.

Max tugged at the chain around his ankle as he studied Betty’s beating heart.

“Terminate Betty3.5,” he said. The heart continued beating.

“Exit environment.” Still nothing.

He took a step toward the instrument table, picked up a scalpel, then moved back and held the blade over Betty’s chest.

“I’m sorry,” he said as he took aim.

“Herman?” whispered Betty.

“I’m not Herman.”

She opened her eyes slightly.

“You’re a shit head.”

Max pulled the scalpel away and dropped his hand to his side.

“I know.”
Read the rest of the post . . .

Chapter 14. Slash

Max often left the lab late at night. It was a short, ten-minute drive home, but he preferred to avoid the crush of traffic that packed the streets around campus when classes let out. Although he liked driving, even the scant distance home, he usually left the car in auto chauffeur mode in the evenings. It was easier and safer to let the car take over after dark.

---

Listen to the Chapter 14 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

Many nights, the trip was so uneventful as to hardly register in Max’s mind. Tonight was one of those nights. In fact, this time he could hardly recall even starting his car. One moment he was walking out of the lab, and the next he was stumbling through the front door of his studio apartment and collapsing onto the stained floral-print couch.

“Drugs,” he mumbled and lifted himself back to his feet. “Gotta have the drugs.”

He stepped over the perennial mound of dirty laundry in the hall and made his way to the bathroom. The medicine cabinet was crammed with empty pill bottles that bore testimony to the countless refills that he had accumulated with years of epilepsy medication. They were like his children, growing larger over time as his tolerance for Phenobarbital increased. He’d had two seizures already this month, and one the month before. At this pace, he’d have to bump up the dose again, which meant more pills, or larger tablets. Eventually his tolerance would get to the point that he’d have to switch to something else. Unfortunately, most other anticonvulsives tended to be more toxic to the liver than Phenobarbital, and his doctor recommended against changing medication until it was absolutely necessary. Epilepsy itself probably wouldn’t kill him, but the drugs to control it surely would, someday.

He scanned the cabinet and took down the one bottle that wasn’t empty. He placed four pills in the envelope in his wallet and cupped another two in his hand. He popped the pills in his mouth, stuck his head under the faucet, and washed them down with tap water.

He shuffled back to the living room, kicked off his shoes, and plopped onto the couch. He tried not to think about the events of the last few days. Betty, Linus, the cyber swinger, the chat room, and the broken down Army of Darkness headquarters were all just part of the virtual world. Although virtual reality was a huge part of his work, he tried to always keep it in perspective. This was real - his stinky little apartment, his shoddy old TV with basic fiber service, the filthy plates that threatened to overflow the sink in the kitchen, and the German cockroach infestation in his pantry that he could never quite seem to get under control. This was life.

He had known escapists who wallowed in virtual games and online communities. Max, however, preferred gritty reality. In part, his dislike of virtual environments was a reaction to the fact that he had no choice but to spend hours in them everyday at the lab. But mostly it was a result of his basic philosophy of life. In his mind, pain, hunger, loneliness, and filth were the things that put everything else in perspective and gave life meaning. Without them, how could anyone truly experience the good things? Virtual reality escapists fill in the voids and paint over the ugly parts of their existences with role-playing games and cyber sex. But eliminating the lows makes it impossible to recognize the highs, as few and far between as they might be.

That was why it was Max’s custom to put work out of his mind as much as possible when he was at home. The grimy apartment was his sanctuary from the virtual world at the lab.

Max felt for the remote in the gritty crevices between the couch cushions. He flicked on the TV, and ran through the channels in search of something to occupy his mind until the medicine kicked in. And yet, his thoughts kept drifting back to the puzzles that had confronted him at work. He ticked them off with each click of the remote.

Click, channel 106.

What was the device Spencer was after?

Click, channel 107.

Is there really a Doomsday Virus as Perske had claimed?

Click, 108.

If so, is it related to the device Spencer wanted?

Click, 109.

Where was Betty?

Click, 110.

Could he help her?

Click, 111.

Why was the login name ‘Patriot’ so annoyingly familiar?

Click, 112.

Since when could his TV get channels higher than 110?

He sat up on the couch and held down the channel button. 113, 114, 115. There was something on every station. Nature documentaries, home improvement, car repair, self help, religious programming, politics, sports, cartoons, porn, and more porn. By the time he’d reached 160, just about every channel was dedicated to porn. Max stopped for a moment to watch a slithering, slimy mound of mating flesh on channel 201. He tried entering a channel manually. 1111. Sure enough, it was porn, and the reception was great. 11111111. At last, something different; classic Star Trek.

The episode looked familiar. Spock and Kirk were locked in mortal combat, wielding absurdly impractical weapons that, even on TV, looked like cardboard and rubber props decorated with metallic paint.

Kirk managed to disarm Spock. Predictably, Kirk threw his own weapon away in a macho show of fair play. The fight entered the hand-to-hand combat portion as Spock and Kirk took turns throwing each other around on the dusty sound stage in a 1960’s interpretation of futuristic Judo.

Max watched as the actors beat each other into mock exhaustion, and then collapsed with arms entwined. They caressed each other, and kissed.

“Holy crap,” said Max as Spock stood and Kirk climbed slowly to his knees. This was not the episode that Max remembered. Clearly, it was some sort of perverse adaptation. Still, whoever had produced it had done an excellent job finding actors who bore stunning resemblances to the original screen stars.

Max was so horrified and riveted by the depraved take-off that he barely heard the phone ringing on the floor next to the couch. When the sound finally registered, he tore his eyes away from the scene on the TV, dropped the remote and fumbled for the phone.

“Hello,” Max rasped.

“So, you’re a fan of slash, are you?” asked the voice on the other end.

“What?”

“Slash, as in Kirk-Spock erotica.”

It was the squeaky voice Max had first heard in the Dark Net.

“Spencer?”

“No shit.”

Max wasn’t sure if he wanted to know the answer to the questions that were on the tip of his tongue, but he had to ask. “Why are you calling me? And how do you know what’s on my TV?”

“Your TV, my TV. Does anyone really own a television? You might say they own us.”

Whatever Spencer was trying to say, Max wasn’t getting it. “Why,” he asked again, “are you calling me?”

“We have some catching up to do. Don’t you remember Max?” said Spencer wryly. “Should I call you Max? Or would you prefer Herman? That's how Betty here knows you.”

"Listen Spencer. I don’t have whatever it is you’re after. And Betty’s just code. There’s nothing you can do to her that has any meaning.”

“Maybe we should do something to you then.”

Max whipped the phone away from his ear. He was on the verge of slamming it back into its cradle when the image of Kirk and Spock making love on the screen caught his attention. If Spencer knew who he was, and even knew what he was watching on TV, then the threats just might be serious. Max slowly lifted the phone back to his ear.

“What do you want from me?”

“You know what I want.”

Max nearly screamed, “I don’t have the device, don’t know where it is, and don’t even know what it is. So get off my back!”

“Hey, Max,” said Spencer, “I believe you. I’m just that kind of guy, you know, trusting. But I have a friend who is a bit more skeptical. So you’re going to have to prove it to him yourself.”

“What the Hell do you want me to do?”

“Talk," said Spencer, " just talk. Only I’d prefer that we do it face to face. So, I’m sending over a few fellows to pick you up.”

“I’m calling the cops,” bellowed Max. “And if anyone else shows up here, they’d better watch it, ‘cause,” Max lied, “I’ve got a gun.”

“See you soon, my friend.”

The line went dead.

Max pounded the phone on the cradle, and then put it back to his ear. There was no dial tone. He tried again. Still nothing.

“Dammit.”

He jumped from the couch and raced to the closet where he piled things he had no use for but didn’t want to throw away. He pulled over the stack of boxes at the front to get to the junk that had accumulated behind. He didn’t have a gun, of course., but somewhere in here was a bat. At least he thought there was one. Max waded past sweats, running shoes, a deflated volleyball, and an empty toolbox. No bat. The closest he got was a dry-rotted baseball glove.

“Shit,” he snapped. Then he noticed something long and slender under his faded trench coat in back. He snatched the coat out of the closet and tossed it to the floor behind him. Still no bat. The shape was only the careworn Gibson electric guitar he picked up at a pawnshop and never learned to play.

It would have to do.

“I’ll put a Pete Townsend hurt on their asses,” snarled Max. He hefted the guitar by it’s slender neck, backed away from the closet, and took a few practice swings. For the first time, he understood why some rockers call guitars axes; they have good balance for hacking.

Max headed for the front door, wielding the guitar like a mace. He checked the dead bolt and locked the knob, then peered through the peephole. Nothing. But what about the windows? Max shook his head. All the windows were locked, he was certain of it. Not only did he keep them latched, but the one time he’d tried to open them, he’d found that they were sealed with several layers of paint. If anyone was coming through a window, they were going to have to smash it in. That gave Max an advantage. The windows were small, and an intruder entering through one would have to squirm in headfirst. If he heard a window break, Max could meet the bastards as they were crawling through, and take them out one at a time with the Gibson.

Counting the window in the kitchen, the ones in the living room, and the tiny bathroom window, he had four altogether. What if they came in more than one at a time? His best bet, he figured, was to get to the center of the apartment and be ready to sprint at the first sound of breaking glass. They’d have to be very lucky to synchronize themselves well enough to get multiple people in different windows simultaneously. Max was sure he had the upper hand.

He ran back to the living room, and made a mental estimate of the most central point relative to the apartment windows. With his back against the living room wall, in the same place he had soiled the carpet during the taping of his seizure, he was less than a half dozen steps from each window. Almost as important, he could see three of the windows from this spot. Only the tiny bathroom window was obscured by a jog in the hallway, and that one was a long shot for an intruder, considering its small size.

He crouched by the wall with the guitar at the ready, like a batter looking for a fastball. As he waited, he planned his attack for each window. The kitchen was a straight shot to his left. If they came in through either of the living room windows, he’d have to go over the couch. As long as he didn’t trip on the way, launching off the couch back might even be helpful. He could get some altitude, and bring the guitar down like a sledgehammer. The bathroom would be trickier, both because he wouldn’t be able to size up his opponent until the last moment, and because there would be little room to maneuver in the cramped space. Guitars, he thought, are weapons best built for battle on open ground.

Max’s heart was pounding hard enough that he could feel it in the seething pulse in his neck and face. There was a roaring in his ears. But now that he was prepared to defend himself, there was little to do other than wait.

The pause gave him time to wonder if what he was doing made sense. Should he stand here and let them make the first move? Or should he try to make a break for it out the front door? Maybe he should have left the moment he realized the phone wasn’t working. If he could have made it to his car, he might have been able to get to a police station, or at least to a public spot where he would have been able to avoid abduction. The guitar grew heavy as the doubts crept in. His arms began to tremble under the strain.

“What an idiot,” he said. Max let the Gibson drop, and rested its heavy body on the floor. “I should have left when I had the chance.” For all he knew, the moments he’d spent dashing around the apartment had given them time to set up. He chewed at his knuckle and listened for any sounds coming from outside the apartment. He could hear nothing, other than the struggles of Kirk and Spock making rough masculine love on the TV. Max wished he had turned it off earlier. Now that he was parked against the wall, he didn’t want to risk the few steps it would take to reach the remote. Fortunately, he couldn’t see the screen from where he was standing.

Max waited. For what seemed like an eternity. He looked at his watch. It still red twelve past ten, just as it had when he’d checked it at the lab. It must be dead, he thought.

The action on the TV reached a crescendo, then died down into post-coital murmurs which were, in a way, more disturbing than the previous throes of passion.

He took a deep breath. Maybe Spencer had lied when he said he was sending people to get him. His pounding heart quieted some. Maybe it was just an idle threat.

He leaned against the wall, tilted his head back toward the ceiling, and ran his hand through his hair. He covered his eyes with his forearm. “It’s all a lie,” he reassured himself. “It’s just a sick joke.”

That’s when he heard the noise. Max snatched up the guitar and scanned the windows. “Who’s there?” he blurted. All was still, except for the cooing on the TV. It had sounded like something had moved. Not outside the windows or door, but inside the apartment. In the jumble of furniture and scattered articles of clothing, it was impossible to tell what, if anything, had shifted.

There it was again. A soft rustling. Max looked down the hall past the pile of laundry toward the bathroom. Something was definitely there. He couldn’t move. This was the part where he was supposed to charge to the bathroom and clobber the intruder with the guitar. But he was frozen in place with fear.

He heard the rustling again. It was right there, in the hall. As Max watched with wide-eyed terror, the laundry pile began to seethe. The sound hadn’t come from the bathroom after all. The pile rose up in a pillar of dirty socks, shirts, and towels, and took on a vaguely humanoid form. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the cushions tumble off the couch. He jerked his head around in time to discover another figure surging from beneath the cloth couch backing. With a heave, it ripped away from the couch, leaving a layer of yellowed and pitted foam behind.

The monsters closed in, one a walking mound of laundry and the other a ghoul wrapped in the stained floral print of the couch fabric. Max heaved the guitar and it landed squarely on the laundry monster with a silent, harmless thud. The creatures enveloped him in an embrace of fabric. The guitar was wrenched from his grip. His arms were pinned to his side, and a grimy sweat sock wrapped itself across his face, gagging him with the humid stench of his own feet. The brutes moved back and Max fell to the floor with a thump, bound in a cocoon of dirty clothing. His struggles were useless. Every twitch and jerk only tightened the cloth around him. The laundry monster and the couch creature bent down and lifted Max, then carried him into the kitchen in the same way that two men might carry a rolled up carpet.

Max tried to scream, but the sock muffled the sounds of his agony.

The couch creature, who held Max around the upper torso with one floral-print arm, reached out with the other arm and flipped open the oven. Instead of the grimy racks and greasy oven walls that should have been inside, there was just a gaping black hole. Max realized what they planned to do. His eyes bulged as the beasts aimed him head-first at the oven. He strained to kick and twist, but he was so firmly bound that he could barely manage even the most meager twitch. The beasts advanced, and slid Max into the hole like cordwood into a potbelly stove. The couch creature stepped aside. The laundry monster gave Max’s wrapped feet a shove, and Max sailed into the Dark Net void with a final, stifled shriek.

****

Once Max disappeared into the oven, the couch creature bent forward and was on the verge of diving in after him when the laundry monster turned back toward the living room.

It raised one swaddled arm and pointed ominously toward the television.

“Hey,” it said with a voice that was muffled by mounds of dirty cloth. “Check it out. Vintage slash.”

The couch creature straightened up and leaned back to look at the TV. “What?”

“It’s Kirk-Spock slash,” said the laundry monster as it strode into Max’s living room and plopped onto the floor.

“You’re into that?” asked the couch creature from the kitchen.

“Come on Bob. It’s classic. Kirk-Spock is the slash that started it all.”

The couch creature shuffled to the kitchen doorway, leaned against the door frame, and crossed it’s fabric arms over it’s chest. “Eddie, come on. Let’s go.”

“Hold on a sec. You see, Spock has to mate every ten years, or else he’ll die. But Kirk and Spock are trapped on this deserted planet, I can’t remember why just now. Anyway, Spock is history unless Kirk helps him out. Which he does, if you know what I mean, reluctantly. Only he finds out that it’s not so bad after all, and he saves Spock’s life to boot.”

The couch creature sighed. “This stuff is sick.”

“No, listen. So the Enterprise comes back and picks them up, but now Kirk has these issues he needs to deal with. And Spock isn’t the most demonstrative guy, but he eventually learns to express himself.”

“Jeez Eddie,” said the couch creature in exasperation. “You are such a freak.”

There didn’t seem much chance he could get Eddie the laundry monster going until the episode was over, so Bob the couch creature slid down the door jam onto his haunches to wait. He idly pondered the cloth on his arm. “You know,” he said to himself, “this is really a pretty nice pattern.”








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Chapter 13. Beware of Attachments

A few blocks away from the imploding chat room, Max and Linus caught a cab back to the university system. When they entered Herman’s room, Max collapsed in the lawn chair as Linus ambled around the carpet, occasionally stopping to peck at a desk leg or taste a scrap of paper.

---

Listen to the Chapter 13 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

Patriot, he thought as he mulled over the last words Cathy spoke before she was snatched away by the chain around her neck. Where had he seen that login before?

Perhaps it had been the login to the Dark Net entrance to the NSA storeroom that Spencer had given them. He couldn’t recall if Spencer ever mentioned it aloud. Damn it, if only he had looked at the note Spencer had written he might know for sure.

Max chewed his nails and wondered what to do next.

“Load Betty 2.0,” he said.

After the standard confirmation chime, Betty entered dressed in the same tight skirt she’d worn the last time she assisted him. Max cringed. “If you don’t mind Betty, could you change into a different outfit?” She didn’t mind, of course, but the vague command had no meaning for her, and Betty stood waiting for an order she could act on.

“Why don’t you put on some sweat pants and a sweat shirt? Large ones.” She obligingly stepped out of the room and returned almost instantly, dressed in loose fitting sweats. That was better.

“Betty, please scan Herman’s files for the word ‘Patriot.”

If Herman was a former Army of Darkness member, thought Max, it was possible that he had the NSA login and password somewhere. Drawer by drawer, Betty ran her fingers through the remaining files.

“There are no instances of Patriot,” she reported.

Max ordered her to expand the search to include hidden files.

Again, she found nothing. It wasn’t too surprising. Max had disposed of many files already, and he guessed that there was at least a fifty-fifty chance, if Herman had saved an unencrypted copy of the password, that it was now permanently deleted.

“Damn,” Max said, kneading his brow. It would have been too easy anyway, had Herman left the password lying around.

He looked at the opening to the Dark Net behind Herman’s filing cabinet. Somewhere out there was the route to Spencer’s black market porn site, and the NSA storeroom. He shook his head. There was no way he would be able to find his way to either place without Herman’s Betty to show him the way. He would literally be poking around in the dark.

That was it then. He might as well finish the job Perske had sent him to do.

He looked at his watch. He had been gone for nearly four hours.

“Betty, did I get any email while I was out?”

Betty stepped through the door to Max’s home environment and returned with his mail. It was, as always, mostly junk, except for a note from Perske and a small box.

“Speak of the Devil,” he said, “What does old Elizabeth want?”

“Dr. Perske requests an update on the status of Herman Grunding’s account.”

“I imagine she does,” said Max. After all, four hours should have been plenty of time to clear everything out. He was late again.

“There’s an attachment to the message,” said Betty tapping the box. “Should I open it?”

Max glanced at the package. Perske rarely included attachments with her messages, usually preferring to hand him any materials she had for him in person.

“No thanks Betty. Just give it to me and compose a reply to sender.” Betty handed him the box, pulled a notepad and pen from the waistband of her sweat suit, and sat at the desk.

“Dr. Perske,” he began as he studied the box, “No delete that . . . Elizabeth.” Betty crossed out the salutation and started anew. Perske had asked him to treat her less formally, but it didn’t feel right. “Change the salutation back to ‘Dr. Perske’.” Betty dutifully made the correction. Max turned the box around. It had the standard warning against opening attachments from unknown sources printed in red letters across it.

Max dictated as he ripped the tape from the box. “I have cleared out approximately half of Herman’s account. I anticipate finishing this afternoon, and will subsequently remove the account, as requested.”

Max contemplated explaining why it had taken so long to fulfill Perske’s request, but it seemed too involved to get into in an email message, and he wasn’t sure what she would think of his adventures anyway. On the other hand, Perske might like to know that at least one former AOD member believed that the Doomsday Virus, which Perske speculated had attacked Herman, was no more than a myth.

“No,” he said aloud, “it’s too complicated.”

Betty wrote on the notepad.

“Hold it,” said Max, “Don’t include that last part.”

Betty scratched out a line.

Max shook his head. It was sometimes tough dictating to a mindless virtual assistant.

“Read the message back to me as it stands now.”

Betty put down her pen. “Reply to sender P 8 3 8, alias E. Perske,” said Betty. “Dr. Perske, I have cleared out approximately half of Herman’s account. I anticipate finishing this afternoon, and will subsequently delete the account, as requested.”

Max composed the next line in his head as he folded back the box flaps and lifted out a toy car. It was a miniature Volkswagen Beetle about the size of Max’s fist.

“Stop for a moment Betty.”

She put down the pen. Max turned the toy car over and flipped the switch on the bottom. The wheels began to spin and the headlights flashed. He set the toy on the carpet and it zoomed off, tracing circles and figure eights around the room, occasionally ramming into a piece of furniture, backing up, and racing off again. It was, to say the least, an oddly whimsical attachment, coming as it did from the cold hearted director herself.

“Read the header to me one more time.”

Betty recited from the notepad, “Reply to sender P838, alias E. Perske.”

“P838,” Max echoed. The toy car whizzed toward Linus, who tumbled backwards to avoid it and squawked in dismay. After the car passed, Linus hopped up and waddled frantically to the lawn chair. He squeezed between Max’s calves and peered out as the Beetle popped a wheelie and spun in place. It dropped back onto all four wheels and headed full tilt toward the lawn chair. Just as it was about to ram into Max’s foot, it turned hard and flipped onto its side, with its horn tooting and lights flashing. Linus hunkered down between Max’s legs, and Max reached out to pick up the toy.

“P838,” mused Max, peering at the flashing headlights. They were flickering frantically, and the car let out a series of high-pitched beeps. Max felt the muscles in his forearm twitch. The spasm in his arm reminded him of the time he’d inadvertently slipped his finger into an electrical socket while changing the bulb in his kitchen, only without the hot, fuzzy electric caterpillar that had crawled to his elbow. His grip tightened on the little car. He couldn’t look away from the lights.

“P8 . . . 38,” said Max as his eyes rolled back in their sockets. He slipped off the chair, tumbled to the carpet, and passed out.

***
He lay face up on the floor, eyes fluttering sporadically, when the dream began. Two clouds floated in the open door of the browser. They hovered over him. One of them drifted down toward his face and hummed. It reminded Max of the sound a barber’s electric razor makes when trimming the hair above his ears. The other cloud hummed as well, but the sound was more distant, and higher pitched. Every now and then the humming was interspersed with something like an intelligible word.

The clouds were becoming more defined. The one closest to him took the shape of a huge soft balloon with painted-on eyes. When it hummed it let out a hot blast of moist, foul air.

The bulbous balloon drifted away, and the other one floated down. It was more elongated than the first. It too hummed at him and drifted off.

Then everything went black.
***

Spencer leaned against Herman’s desk and sneered at Max’s prone, unconscious form. Perske, with her hands on her hips, also pondered the insensible technician.

“How long will he be out?” Spencer asked with a growl that sent Linus scampering under the desk. Betty sat in her chair, calmly inspecting her manicure.

“I don’t know,” said Perske, “minutes, hours, days even.”

“If he moves," said Spencer, "kick him in the head.”

“We don’t want to leave any evidence behind. And particularly not signs of physical abuse.” Perske bent over and pried the Beetle from Max’s fingers. “Anyway, it won’t be necessary,” she said holding up the toy car. “If he stirs, we can just hit him with this again.”

“Won’t that leave a mark?”

“I didn’t mean it literally.”

“Oh,” said Spencer glancing at Max’s inert form, “too bad.”

Perske knelt down next to Max and searched his pockets. Spencer turned to the filing cabinet. “How do we know what to look for?”

“Anything from text instructions to unusual, probably small, applications.”

Spencer peeked in the empty top drawer, then closed it and moved onto the second one down. “Wouldn’t it be encrypted?”

“It’s possible, but I doubt it.”

“Why?”

“For one thing, because of this.” Perske held out the technical note cover sheet that Max had picked up at the Army of Darkness site.

Spencer reached over and took the slick, blue sheet from her.

“If Max found it in here,” said Perske, “it’s unlikely that Herman went to any great lengths to disguise the rest. He was relying on the guard to keep it safe.”

“So where do you suppose it is?”

Perske shrugged. “My guess is it’s either still lying around somewhere, or Max destroyed it with the other documents he was deleting.”

“And if he did delete it, what then?”

Perske rocked back on her heels. “Good enough. At least it’s gone.”

“I’d much rather destroy it with my own hands. Then we’d know for certain.”

“In either case, we have to be thorough.”

Spencer returned to the cabinet and pulled the drawer out to its full extent. “So we have to sift through all this.”

Perske nodded and stood up. “Let’s get started.”

“What about those two?” asked Spencer, jerking his head to indicate Max’s Betty and the cowering penguin under the desk.

“I’m guessing they’re clean,” said Perske. She squatted down beside the desk and pulled out Linus by one orange foot, and lifted him into the air. ”But I’ll run a scan on them just in case.”

“That’ll do I suppose,” replied Spencer, as he turned back to the file drawer.

***
Max felt an oppressive weight on his stomach. An acid lump was rising in his throat. Velvety blackness obscured his vision and he had the sensation that his ears were stuffed with cotton. He briefly wondered if he’d had another seizure. If he had, it felt different than the ones he experienced in the past. For one thing, he wasn’t particularly hungry or tired, and he had never before recalled a dream after a seizure. This time, he distinctly remembered humming clouds and balloons with painted on eyes.

The weight on his stomach bounced, forcing him to exhale with a rasp. Something hard thumped against his forehead. Max winced.

The weight slid off of him. But a few moments later, it was back. Again something small and hard hit him in the face.

“Dammit.”

Max’s vision began to clear. He was staring up at the disco ball hanging from Herman’s ceiling.

He lifted his head to look down toward his feet, and saw Linus perched on his stomach.

“Get off me,” said Max as he heaved upward, flopping Linus onto the carpet. The penguin scampered out the door leading to the adjacent Antarctic environment. Max propped himself up on his elbow and peered around intently. There was no sign of the buzzing balloons, if they even existed, or of the flashing and beeping toy car. Two backgammon pieces, one brown and one white, were on the carpet next to the place where his head had been a moment before. A ruckus near the door caused him to look up to see Linus struggling to drag the backgammon board across the black carpet, trailing backgammon pieces as he went.

“Jesus, you little monster,” sighed Max. “You’ve got a one track mind.”

Max checked his watch. It red just past ten o’clock, but the second hand was frozen. He lifted the watch to his ear. Nothing. “Betty, what time is it?”

“Ten twelve,” she said without looking up from her nails.

“PM?”

“Yes.”

He lifted himself to his knees and pulled his wallet from his pocket. It was well past the time to take his drugs. He normally took two half-grain pills each morning and night. There was only one left in the package in his wallet. Max recalled that he had taken an extra from his stash a few days ago and hadn’t replaced it. If he was going to keep his pheno-barb levels up, he would have to get home soon to the supply in his bathroom medicine cabinet. Max climbed wearily to his feet. Perske would have to wait one more day for him to finish emptying Herman’s account.

“That’s all for today folks,” said Max to Betty and Linus. “Save environment. Exit.”

Herman’s room disappeared and the lab rematerialized. Max patted his shorts pockets. “Now, where the hell are my keys?”







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Chapter 12. All in the Game

Linus wasn’t too fond of the Green Hornet, based on the way he pecked vigorously at the superhero's shiny emerald green shoes. The scowl on the Hornet’s face made it clear that the scuffmarks on the patent leather weren’t winning any points for Max and Linus either.

Max’s attempt to butter up the Hornet by complimenting him on his choice of such a sharp dressing character only made matters worse, particularly because his job at the Funny Pages Multi-User Game seemed to be simply doorman. Eventually, the Hornet let them through, but not before submitting Linus to a multi-pass virus scan and including a detailed description of the penguin’s code in Max’s profile.

---

Listen to the Chapter 12 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

---

Once inside, Max had to stop at an antechamber where roles were assigned. A woman behind the desk asked him what character he wanted to take on for the game.

“What’s available?” asked Max.

“Beetle Bailey, Nancy, and Garfield,” said the woman, who was dressed as Olive Oil.

“Do I have to be a character? I’ve never been here before, and I’m really just looking around.”

“If you’re only going to observe,” said Olive, “you can wear this.” She handed Max a simple black mask that covered the upper half of his face, but left his mouth and chin exposed. “You’ll have to wear a name tag too, so that they’ll know what to call you.”

“Fine,” said Max.

Olive pulled a sheet of white paper stickers out of the drawer in her desk. “And who shall I say we are today?”

Max contemplated using his real name, but thought better of it. If he was going to try to track down some old AOD members, perhaps they’d recognize Herman’s name.

“Just write Grunding.”

“You wanna spell that?”

Max did, and Olive filled out the tag.

“Put it on, read the disclaimer,” she pointed to a sign on the wall next to the desk, “and go on in.”

He stuck the tag to his shirt and pretended to study the notice on the wall. “Come on Linus,” he said and headed to the frosted glass doors that led to the game.

“That’s a cute sidekick you got there,” called Olive as Max reached for the door. “Is he listed in your profile?”

Max said he was, and Olive let them go.

They entered the arena to find a raised platform that extended into the depths of the warehouse. It was surrounded by a curving glass wall. A handful of characters in the midst of play were scattered across the platform. Others lounged in chairs gathered around tables that were arranged in the space that ringed the playing field. Most of the tables were unoccupied. It was clear that the game was designed to accommodate many more players than were present. A group of characters were gathered around one table chatting and bickering.

The PA system announced, “Grunding has entered the arena.”

“Grunding?” said a young man at the crowded table, looking at Max and Linus. The man was dressed in a short sleeve checkered shirt, narrow cut jeans, and tennis shoes. A camera hung on a strap around his neck. “I’ve never heard of Grunding. Solomon Grundy, sure, but not Grunding.”

Max wondered who the young man was impersonating. He wasn’t wearing a bow tie, so it couldn’t be Clark Kent’s little buddy Jimmy Olsen.

“We’ve already got an Opus,” said a man dressed as Dilbert, nodding at the playing field. Max saw a pudgy black and white figure sitting in a patch of clover.

“His name,” said Max, reaching down to tap the penguin on the head, “is Linus, He’s with me.”

“Look Grunding,”said the checker-shirted fellow, “this ain’t no graphic novel. You gotta pick a comic strip character.”

The sole woman at the table reached up and touched the young man’s arm. “Leave him alone Peter,” she said.

Of course, thought Max, Peter Parker; Spider Man’s alter ego.

“He’s obviously a newbie,” added the woman. “Let him watch.”

Parker shook his head and fiddled with the settings on his camera. “I hate newbies.”

The woman stood up and approached Max. “Come on Grunding.” She waved a stapled sheaf of papers at him. “I’ll fill you in on the story.”

“No thanks,” said Max, “I’ll just watch for a while.”

"Oh, come on. You’ll enjoy it more if you know the plot.”

“Forget about him Cathy,” said Parker. “He’s clueless.”

Cathy ignored him. “Let’s talk Herman,” she whispered, and then winked, “It is Herman, right?”

Max studied Cathy for a moment. “Yah, sure, let’s talk.”

She led Max out of earshot of the group and sat down at a small round table. Max took the seat opposite her as Linus wobbled along after them.

She smiled and said in a voice that was suddenly masculine and baritone, entirely at odds with her Cathy costume, “You’re not Grunding.”

Max was startled by the rough male voice coming from the feminine form. “And you’re not a woman.”

“Nope.”

Max looked back at the crowded table. “Do they know?”

“Some of them. Dilbert does, I’m sure, but not Parker, Ranger Rick, or Sarge. I don’t think the Boy Wonder knows, but it probably wouldn’t matter to him anyway.”

Max nodded wisely.

“But I know you’re not Herman Grunding.”

“How?” asked Max.

“Well, for one thing, Grunding would never come in here using his real name. And,” she said in a gruff whisper, “for another thing, Grunding’s dead.”

“How did you know?”

“Word gets around.”

“Do you know how he died?”

Cathy shrugged. “I might.”

“Wanna talk about it?” said Max.

“Nothing’s free my friend.”

Max scratched his chin. He could think of nothing to offer the comic strip transvestite.

Cathy grinned. “I might make a deal for that,” she nodded at Linus, who had pushed some chairs into a bunch and found himself trapped among the legs.

“You want Linus?”

She nodded. “He’s a nifty little bit of code.”

Linus jammed his head into a narrow space between two of the chair legs and fluttered his stubby wings in minor panic until he managed to pull his head back and plop gracelessly onto the floor.

“Sure,” said Max, “pretty nifty alright.”

“Is it a deal?”

Max pondered Linus. “If you’ll take a copy of his raw code, it’s a deal.”

Cathy shrugged. “I’d prefer the fully trained version, but that’ll do, I suppose.” She pushed back her chair and said in the feminine voice, “We can’t talk here. Let’s go for a walk.”

She stood, went back to the crowded table, and whispered something that Max couldn’t make out. Parker didn’t seem too happy about it. “Hey newbie,” he sneered at Max, “Nice of you to drop by. Don’t do it again.”

Max waved nonchalantly to Parker, who responded by flipping the bird. It was a gesture that seemed completely wrong for the Peter Parker that Max remembered from the comics.
Max followed Cathy out of the arena to the street, dropping his mask at the desk on the way. Linus tripped over the threshold, then popped up and rambled after them.

“I was just wondering . . .”, Max began as they approached the curb.

Cathy shook her head and shushed him. She hurried across the street to a chat room with a flashing neon sign that promised online romance to 30-somethings. Max sprinted after her, and Linus waddled along as fast as his stubby legs could carry him.

The room they entered was noisy and packed primarily with men who gathered in groups around the few women who had dared to venture in. A bar ran the length of the wall to the right, and booths lined the wall to the left. People were crowded at small round tables, only slightly larger than serving trays, that were scattered around the chat room. A single couple swayed on the minuscule parquet dance floor near the back. Here and there, he caught snatches of lewd comments and poorly disguised innuendo. It reminded Max of one of those public television programs about the mating habits of beetles, or lizards, or any of countless other creatures who are driven by their hormones to mindlessly compete for mates. Max wondered how many of the women were, like Cathy, men in disguise.

As they wended their way through the throngs, men beckoned to Cathy in hopes of drawing her into conversation. A man dressed in a silk shirt unbuttoned to his navel, tight silk pants that revealed the outline of his obscenely large genitals, and tasteless gold chains around his neck, blocked Cathy’s progress and invited her to join him in something that sounded like a ‘Catherine the Great.’

“Back off,” said Cathy in her undisguised baritone.
“Shit,” said the silk shirt swinger, “what a creep show.” He retreated a step, and then stopped and said, “Hey, you know, I’m into it if you are.”

Cathy brushed past him, careful to avoid the bulging crotch, and led Max and Linus to a row of doors at the back of the chat room. “We can talk in here.”

She closed the door behind them, locked it, and reclined on a paisley print chaise. In front of the chaise was a low, oblong coffee table, and on the other side of the table stood a squat, overstuffed love seat with cloth that matched the paisley chaise. Max lowered himself onto the love seat. Linus scooted under the coffee table.

“So, what are you looking for Herman? Should I call you Herman, or do you have a real name?”

“You can call me Max.”

“And you can call me Cathy.”

Max shrugged. “If you like.” Although Max would have preferred a name that matched the gender revealed by Cathy’s gruff voice. Something like Chuck, or Frank.

”I’m looking for someone,” Max began.

“You got a screen name or something you could tell me?”

“She's Betty.”

“I know a few Betty Boops I could introduce you to. A couple of them are even women.”

“No, no. It’s not a real person. She’s a virtual interface to a neural network, like Linus.”

“A virtual babe? Plenty of guys have one. Why don’t you just copy someone else’s?”

“I’m not trying to get her back, so much as shut her down.”

Cathy raised an eyebrow. “Why bother? If someone hijacked your code, I mean it sucks I guess, but what do you care? Just install a new copy and start over. Surely you have a backup somewhere.”

“It’s more complicated than that. The last time I saw her, some people were doing pretty nasty stuff to her.”

Cathy smiled. “Shit, you’re one of those bleeding heart types, aren’t you? Look pal, it’s just code. Move on.”

“I have other reasons.” Max put his hand in his pocket and felt the folded piece of paper he’d discovered at the decrepit Army of Darkness site.

“It’s your call. As long as you follow through with your end of the bargain, I don’t care what you have in mind. Any idea who lifted her?”

“The AOD, I think.”

Cathy adjusted her cleavage and tugged her skirt down over her knees. “Haven’t you heard? There is no AOD anymore. We lost.”

“We?”

“Hey," said Cathy, "I admit it. I was a member of the AOD. So was Herman. The Feds rounded us up with everyone else. I did my time, and now it’s over. Half the guys went legit and joined net security companies.” She stretched out on the chaise. “But I’m no sell out, so I just keep to myself.”

“You said you knew about Herman, about what happened to him.”

Cathy shrugged, “I’ve heard stuff.”

“Such as?”

“You owe me a penguin right?”

“Sure.”

She stood up and checked the lock on the door, and then returned to the chaise. “You’re gonna say I’m some kind of conspiracy freak, but I hear someone with a grudge hit him with Melissa2.”

“What's that?”

“The virus. Look, it’s just a rumor. I don’t know if it’s even possible. Yet.”

“That a computer virus can kill a human.”

“Yep. Have you ever heard of the original Melissa virus?”

Max shook his head.

“Come on,” said Cathy, “sure you have. Melissa was a computer virus that made headlines about a decade ago. It infected thousands of machines and slowed the Internet to a crawl for a few hours.”

Max recalled the incident vaguely, and nodded.

“That was an AOD project,” said Cathy.

“So listen,” she continued, “back in the nineties there was this TV cartoon with flashing lights in Japan. It sent a bunch of kids into convulsions.”

Max nodded again.

“Well, Melissa2, according to the rumors, was a modified version of the original Melissa virus that was inspired in part by that cartoon. It was designed to induce seizures in computer users when it hit, through modulations in screen images. In theory, it would seem like nothing but a screen flicker until it whacked you out. Supposedly, Melissa2 was part of a covert program to develop cyber weapons twenty-some years ago.”

“The government?”

“Good lord you’re simple. Never even heard of the Jasons, I bet. The NSA, CIA, Department of Defense, their all just tools of the Jasons. But they had a problem. Bio-weapons were outlawed, and they had to find something else to focus their brilliant minds on.”

“So it wasn’t the AOD that hit Herman?” asked Max

“I told you there is no AOD anymore. But there are former members in the government, or at least with ties to it. Folks who could get their hands on prototype cyber weapons. Word is, Herman was spilling his guts to the Feds. And I think maybe someone was covering his ass before Herman rolled over on him.”

Cathy squinted at the door. Some sort of commotion had started in the chat room outside. Linus crawled out from under the coffee table. The penguin cocked his head and nervously rocked side to side on his rump.

Max rubbed his face with both hands. “Is it possible that this had something to do with the Doomsday Virus.”

Cathy laughed in her deep, masculine guffaw until she nearly choked. “Holy shit buddy. The Doomsday Virus? No way. As if Melissa2 isn’t far out enough.” Cathy shook her head. “There is no Doomsday Virus. And if there was, do you think it would just kill Herman? That’s the whole point of the Doomsday Virus myth. Turn it loose and wham, it’s the stone age baby. Everything from the Net to the power grid to GPS comes down.”

“That so?” Max pulled the folded sheet out of his pocket. “What do you think about this?”

He handed Cathy the paper. She read it and shook her head.

“This means nothing. There were a lot of nuts in the AOD who dreamed about stuff like this. But look at the title, ‘System Independent Network Weaknesses,’ there’s no such thing. A flaw in DOS won’t affect a Unix machine, and a Unix weakness won’t turn up in a Mac. Besides,” she said as she sat up, “even if it were possible, which it isn’t, the AOD is probably the last group in the world who would release such a thing. Man, we lived to be online. The Doomsday Virus would ruin all our fun.”

“I thought the AOD was constantly attacking networks.”

“Oh yeah, absolutely. The one way to get us to take a system down was to publicly claim it can’t be done. But what happened after we did? They’d bring it back up, build in another layer of security, and if they were stupid, start bragging again. In the long run, anything we did to attack the Net ended up making it stronger. That’s just the way it worked. It was a challenge to us.” She handed the paper back to Max. “And, frankly, I miss it.”

The noise in the chat room was growing, and Linus began inching backwards toward the coffee table.

Cathy looked at the nervous bird. “Now what about your end of the bargain?”

“In a minute,” said Max. The commotion in the room outside the door had developed into a rumble. Max raised his voice so that Cathy could hear him over the ruckus. “Do you know a guy by the name of Spencer? I think he’s a former AOD member.”

Cathy frowned, “I might.”

“Can you tell me where to find him?”

“Probably not.”

The noise on the other side of the door was building. Shouts and occasional screams were mixed with sounds of breaking glass and overturning tables.

Max pressed her. “Why not?”

Cathy stood up and went to listen by the door. “I think we better get out of here.”

Max had no intention of leaving just yet. “Why can’t you tell me where to find Spencer?”

“Look,” Cathy hollered over the noise that leaked through the door, “he was one of the first to get busted in oh 1. Last I heard, he was working with the NSA. Come on man. We have to split.” Cathy turned the knob a fraction and the door burst open, knocked wide by a flying chair. “Crap!”she shouted.

Max slammed the door shut, “Tell me how to get into the NSA to find Spencer.”

“There’s not much time,” said Cathy. She tried to squeeze past Max to the door, but he wasn’t budging.

“Tell me.”

“Come on, man.”

“Tell me!”

“All right,” she bellowed, “Listen, There used to be a back door into the NSA system. I don’t know the password, but the login was ‘Patriot.’ That’s all I can say. I swear.”

A crack raced across the ceiling over their heads. The room was splitting in half.

"OK,” said Max. He opened the door. “Let’s go.”

Cathy stepped into the doorway and looked for an escape route, but before she could move a chain whipped out of the chaos, wrapped around her neck, and jerked her out of sight.

“Fuck,” said Max, snatching up Linus. He crouched down and raced around the door jamb and along the wall. A table lobbed out of the darkened corner of the room just missed them as he dashed behind the bar and ran toward the exit. Shards of glass from the mirror on the wall above the bar exploded as they struck the floor and a chair crashed down. When he reached the end of the bar, Max peeked out.

A hulking figure thrashed among the screaming patrons at the far end of the bar, near the private room he had just fled.

“What in hell?” Max ducked and sprinted to the front door.

He could barely keep his grip on Linus as they squeezed through the crowd that packed the doorway. Patrons streamed out onto the sidewalk. Cathy was nowhere to be seen. Max loped across the street and turned around in time to see the building that housed the chat room implode, sending up an enormous cloud of dust.

Someone behind Max muttered, “Damn.”

He turned to find the silk-shirted swinger from the chat room standing at his elbow. “Firewall musta failed,” said the swinger soberly. “You gotta hate seeing all those profiles corrupted. That’s a lot of CPU time down the drain.”

A flash lit up the swinger’s face and Max glanced over his shoulder in time to see chunks of the chat room sail skyward. He wheeled around and ran down the street with Linus still tucked under his arm as debris rained onto the street behind them.

Read the rest of the post . . .

Chapter 11. AOD HQ

Max stood on the curb and soaked in the visual chaos that surrounded him. The broad thoroughfare was lined with gaudy shop fronts. He turned up the street and strolled along past music stores, bookshops, bargain basement clothes warehouses, and luxurious department stores. The roadway extended before him as far as he could see.

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Listen to the Chapter 11 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

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A Rolls Royce dealership offered virtual rides in the lap of luxury, and a plastic surgery clinic next door promised to make over customers so that they would look like they belonged in the Rolls.

The sky overhead was an unbelievably vivid shade of azure. Max was always reminded, when he entered the Web, of the moment in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy stepped out of the gray tones of the farmhouse and into the surreal, Technicolor brilliance of Munchkin land.

He raised his hand and whistled. A yellow search engine cab whipped around a corner and screeched to a halt in front of him. For the most part, it was a classic cab with rounded fenders and bulbous balloon tires. An absurdly huge hood scoop, red flames over the wheel wells, and a throaty rumble suggested that it was a particularly fast search engine. Max sneered - he’d seen this sort of ploy plenty of times. Chances were that it was all show. Just about any search engine would have done anyway.

The driver slid across the seat and popped open the back door from the inside.

“Hop in, buddy,” said the cabby. His hair was slicked back and black, like a 50’s greaser, and he wore a leather jacket that squeaked against the seat when he leaned over to catch Max’s eye.

Max climbed in the back and pulled the door shut.

“What about your friend?” the cabby asked.

Max peered out the window. Other than a storefront covered in flashing neon signs listing cheap airfares, he saw nothing. The cabby nodded downward at the sidewalk. Max leaned toward the door and discovered Linus, with his head tilted to one side, eyeing the side of the cab.

“What the Hell,” said Max opening the taxi door, “Linus, what are you doing here?” The penguin hopped forward, and struggled to climb onto the seat.

“You little pecker head.”

Max sat back and Linus lunged into the cab and over Max’s lap, sliding across the seat on his belly. “And where do you think you’re going?” he asked as Linus wriggled to his feet and spryly studied his new surroundings.

The cabby looked over his shoulder. “Where to, fellas?”

Max pondered Linus for a while, and then pulled the cab door shut. “I’m not sure yet. Just drive around a bit.”

“You’re the boss,” said the cabby as he accelerated the taxi away from the curb. “There are a couple new chat rooms we can swing by, if you like.” Officially, cabbies didn’t charge fares for hauling people around the Web. They earned their keep by directing their passengers to sponsored sites; chat rooms, department stores, bookshops, and music stores.

“If it’s girls your after, you can pick something from the menu.” The cabby’s jacket squeaked again as he reached back and tapped a screen mounted on the seat back. It displayed a scrolling list of porn sites.

“No thanks,” said Max. “Maybe next time.”

“Hit the button at the top if you’d rather see twinks or tranny’s,” said the cabby.

“Thanks. I’ll pass.”

Linus plucked at the seat back with his beak until he noticed the dynamically updated ad pasted to the inside of the cab door. Every few seconds, it flashed a different pitch for some Web business or other, from financial services to online degree programs. Linus was riveted by the constantly changing colors and patterns. He arched his neck to one side, as if the images might make more sense to him viewed sideways. He tried flopping onto his back and studying them upside down and rolled off the seat to the floorboard where he flapped his wings in excited agitation, and then struggled back up to start the process over again. Max watched Linus fall from the seat three times. “Brilliant,” he said, and turned to watch the storefronts passing by outside the window of the speeding taxi.

The cab slowed occasionally at random sites selected from the cab company’s sponsors. Each time Max declined to visit, the cabby would zoom off to another.

“Tell you what,” said Max, “take me to the Army of Darkness web site.”

“Army of Darkness,” echoed the cabby. “There are forty-three cult film sites referencing the Army of Darkness, seven hundred and nine sites mentioning the words ‘Army’ and ‘Darkness’ include lists of veteran’s groups, twelve mention hacker groups, six have references to . . .”

“Take me to the top-listed Army of Darkness hacker site.”

“It’s old. Hasn’t been updated in a couple years, and most of the links are dead.”

“That’s fine,” said Max. The cab sped up until he could make out nothing through the window other than a stretched taffy blur of color.

The cab squealed to a halt in front of a stone building with a crumbling gothic facade. A torn paper banner fluttered across the building’s arched entryway, which housed massive wooden doors that looked to be twelve feet tall at least. At one time they must have been imposing and even a bit frightening, but now the doors were weather beaten and splintered. Max stepped out of the cab and Linus hopped after him. “Wait here,” Max called to the cabby, and climbed the cracked granite steps leading to the doors.

He pulled down the remains of the banner. It read “The Army of Darkness Rises Again.” Judging from the banner’s rips and smudges, Max suspected the Army had fallen again shortly after the banner was put in place.

He pushed against one of the heavy doors. It swung open, revealing a dim hallway lined with doorways and cluttered with heaps of trash. Many of the doors were open and some were barely hanging on their hinges. Linus squeezed past Max’s calf and hopped down the hall, stopping here and there to probe trash piles with his beak. “Hello?” said Max, but the echo of his voice was all that came back to him.

Max gingerly made his way into the littered hall. The first door on the right was labeled “Phreaks” in plain white letters He opened it and saw nothing but a blank section of moldy plaster wall. He continued down the passage, opening doors as he went. They were all like the first; obscurely labeled doors to nowhere. Only the final door at the end of the hall, which was marked “Message Board,” opened into a room. Max felt the wall just inside the entrance and flicked the light switch. A bare bulb hanging from a wire in the center of the ceiling glowed to life. The room was cramped, only a few meters on a side. Thousands of paper scraps obscured the floor. The walls were lined with cork boards riddled with pin holes, and in a few places thumb tacks still secured scraps to the boards. The pinned messages that remained were arranged in branching patterns, beginning from points near the ceiling and spreading out in multiplying paths as they extended down toward the floor.

Linus dived into a scrap pile as if it were a mound of freshly fallen snow, and poked his head out the other side to look expectantly at Max with one twinkling black eye. Max gathered an armful of the messages from the floor and dumped them on the penguin’s head. Linus let out a squawk and squirmed deeper into the mound.

Max turned to the wall beside the door and squinted at the longest continuous message trail left on the boards. He stood on his toes and plucked the topmost message off its tack.

“Feds Bust Key AOD Figures,” it read, “From the Sunday Post, October 29, 2001: The FBI netted twenty-three senior members of the infamous Army of Darkness computer hacker group in an international sting on Friday, according to Bureau officials. The loosely knit computer crime gang is alleged to be responsible for software thefts and malicious Internet-based attacks leading to losses that could total in the tens of millions of dollars. “We’ve been on the trail of these outlaws for over two years now,’ said FBI agent David O’Brien in a press conference today at Bureau headquarters in Washington, DC. . .”

Max pinned the message to a blank spot on the cork, then ran his fingers down the wall, following the main thread in the message trail. Most of the messages were comprised of lists of cryptic names like ‘CmasterJ’ and ‘b3atnick’. A few included snatches of text bemoaning the capture or conviction of more AOD members. Max bent down and ripped the last message off the wall. All it said was “It’s over. The AOD is dead. Long live the haxr5. See you guys in the Funny Pages.”

Max stood up, crumpled the note, and dropped it onto the floor. If the AOD is dead, thought Max, someone should tell Spencer about it.

“Come on Linus, let’s get out of here.”

He walked into the hallway and Linus poked his head out of a scrap pile. When Max reached the front door, Linus raced down the hall and launched himself onto his belly, sliding a few feet in the paper and plowing up a mound of trash in front of him. Max bent over and lifted Linus to his feet, then picked up a handful of the papers and rifled through them. Most were rants about civil rights on the Internet. A few claimed to detail techniques for disrupting phone service or cracking copy protection software. And one or two outlined schemes for breaking into credit card databases.

“Alright, that’s enough playing around,” Max said and he stood to go. As he did, he noticed a shiny booklet pinned beneath the penguin’s rump. He knelt down to peer at the booklet, then pulled it out from under Linus, sending the bird sprawling. “Sorry, buddy.” Linus rolled over on his belly and scooted across the floor.

The cover was glossy and thick. Max held it up to the light shining through the open door behind him to inspect it.

“AOD Technical Journal,” he read to himself. “Tech note 11: Oak Toabark’s Blue Box Telephone Tone Generator.”

He rifled through the pages, which were filled with electronic schematics and component lists. Max flipped to the first page. A short introduction explained that the Blue Box referred to in the title was designed to produce tones that could manipulate telephone systems - to place free long distance calls, evade telephone surveillance, and crash phone banks.

He squinted into the darkness and saw a jumbled pile of booklets with similar blue covers. There were hundreds, some intact but mostly crumpled and torn. Max waded through the trash to the pile. He picked up a handful, reading each title in turn and tossing them to the side. It seemed that they had been the source of much of the paper bits on the floor, with titles that revealed a compendium of hacker techniques and tips. Most appeared to be relatively benign instruction manuals, but a few - like the Blue Box booklet - outlined methods for identity theft and high tech fraud.

Max pushed over the tallest stack, sending the booklets sliding across the hall. There had to be a quicker way to search through them than looking at the covers one at a time. He turned back toward the hallway entrance, and peered at the wall beside the massive doors.

There were buttons with labels that read “Links,” “Contact Us,” “Search the Site,” and “About the AOD.” The “Contact Us” button was dark, but the others glowed red. He pushed the search button and a small doorway opened at the base of the wall near his feet. It reminded Max of the pet entryway his grandmother had in the back door of her house to let her cats come and go by themselves. Instead of a cat, a small robot rolled out on clanky tank treads. It was a box about a foot on a side that sprouted a pair of long, jointed limbs with delicate pincers at the ends. There was a keyboard on the front of the robot, and a small screen that flashed the message “Enter Search Term.” Max started to bend down to reach the keys just as the keyboard and screen rose up on a telescoping pillar. He stood back to wait. There was a grinding noise as the pillar rose, and it froze when the keyboard and screen were at the height of Max’s thigh. It was an awkward height - too low to type while standing and too high to use sitting down. He knelt on the floor, which put the keys at the height of his chin, and rested his fingers on the keys.

He paused for a moment to think, then typed “Doomsday Virus” and hit the enter key. The keyboard dropped into place. The robot turned and shot off down the hall, at a surprisingly brisk pace for the creaky tank treads, sending a flurry of paper bits into the air behind it. Hardly an instant passed before it was back. The pincers were empty, and the screen message read “0 documents found. Search on another term, or choose Advanced Search options.”

The telescoping keyboard complained again as it rose once more.

“Hmm,” said Max. He typed “DOS, Unix, Mac, Linux, virus, universal.” This time, when he hit the enter key, the robot whipped down the hall and rammed against the blank walls behind several of the doors Max had opened. It paused for a moment and squealed at one point, and Max had the impression that the robot had broken down entirely. Then it turned and headed back, snatching a blue sheet out of the pile of booklets on its way.

“One document found (incomplete, cached), out of 4312 searched,” blinked the message screen.

The sheet was only a front cover to one of the tech note booklets. It read “Tech note 113: Exploiting System Independent Network Weaknesses in Cross-Platform Virus Design.”

Max whistled tonelessly. “So maybe Perske was right.” It didn’t say “Doomsday Virus” explicitly, but that’s essentially what he guessed a cross-platform virus would be.

He carried the paper out of the building and read the title over again. He looked back into the darkened doorway and contemplated going back to search for the rest of the document, but there was too much trash and it was unlikely that Max could do a better job at finding it than the local-search robot had. He folded the stiff paper and slid it into his pocket.

“Come on, Linus,” he called and walked down the steps to the waiting cab. There was a ruckus in the hall behind him. After a moment Linus shot through the door, tumbled over the steps, and rolled against the side of the cab with a thump. As Max helped the penguin up he heard what sounded like a brief clanking emanating from deep inside the Army of Darkness headquarters. He looked at the building’s open doorway and saw only papers rustling in a slight breeze, nothing more. It was probably just the robot returning to its home behind the pet door. He shook his head, pulled open the cab door, and ushered Linus inside.

As they settled into the back seat, the cabby asked, “Where to now?”

Max chewed his lip in thought. He recalled the final note on the AOD message board. ‘Try ‘Funny Pages.’”

‘There are more than ten-thousand sites that come up in a search on ‘Funny’ and ‘Pages,” said the cabby.

‘Try a search on the exact phrase.”

“Still more than ten-thousand ‘Funny Pages’ sites, mostly with links to comics.”

He tried to picture the kinds of people who would have been members of the AOD - the hackers Perske had described - and what sorts of things they did to pass the time online.

“How about,” said Max, “‘Funny Pages’, exact phrase, and ‘chat’?”

“Nothing.”

Max slouched in his seat. He recalled that a few of the grad students were obsessed with online roll-playing communities.

“Try ‘Funny Pages’, exact phrase,” said Max after a few moments, “and ‘Multi User Game’, exact phrase.”

“Four sites. Three are dead, but one’s still up.”

“Take me there,” said Max, and the cab sped off.
Read the rest of the post . . .

Chapter 10. The Worm

Stephen was sitting at the desk outside the lab hunched over a newspaper when Max arrived Thursday morning.

“Where you been, dude?” asked Stephen without looking up from his Sudoku puzzle. He slid a greeting card across the desk. “Here, sign this.”

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Listen to the Chapter 10 podcast with roboreader Sangeeta.

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Max presumed it was a condolence card for Herman’s family.

“Later,” said Max, striding past Stephen toward the lab door

Stephen shrugged his bony shoulders and jotted a number on the puzzle.

Max slammed and locked the lab door behind him, then sat in the lawn chair. Although Perske had asked him to delete Herman’s account first thing when he returned to work, he was in no mood to deal with it at the moment.

I’ll get to it when I get to it, he thought to himself as he slipped on the gloves draped across the lawn chair arm.

“Open new backgammon training session,” he called to the processor and the room transformed itself into the Antarctic environment.

“Load Linus.” As requested, the penguin appeared at Max’s feet, and began to waddle about cheerfully. “Load Minus.” The second penguin materialized, anchored to his usual spot on the ice.

Max opened that backgammon case that had arrived along with the riding crop and herring bucket when he’d loaded the penguins. He placed the board within Minus’ reach, then picked up the crop with one hand and pulled a herring out of the bucket with the other. He tossed the herring to Linus and brandished the crop at Minus.

“OK boys, I’ve got work to do, so let’s get this game underway.”

Linus gulped down the herring and eagerly made his way to the game board. Minus cowered at the end of his chain.

Max laid out the pieces in their starting positions.

“You both know the rules. Roll to see who starts.”

Linus picked up a die and tossed it onto the board, but Minus hesitated. When Max raised the riding crop, Minus snatched up the other die and rolled it across the board. Max inspected the dice.

“Minus wins the toss.” He nodded to the chained penguin. “You go first.”

As the play commenced, Max leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and placed his forehead on his hands. There wasn’t really anything for him to do while the penguins battled it out. His only function when they played each other was to dispense the appropriate punishments and rewards once the game was over.

The penguins were well matched, and when Max looked up after a time he saw neither bird had made much progress, despite some evidence of heated action. It was still anyone’s game, but Minus frantically plucked at his chest feathers anyway as he scanned the board. Linus, on the other hand, gleefully rolled the dice when his turn came up, and occasionally squawked with joy at the result.

Max sighed to himself, “It’s going to be a long day.”

He stood up, placed the fish bucket on the lawn chair to keep it out of Linus’ reach, and stretched his back.

“Open a new window,” he said to the processor as he turned away from the birds. He opened Herman’s account and peered in at the mess in the dead student’s room. After his adventure two days ago, he was disinclined to log into the environment as Herman, and chose to open a door instead so that he could enter the room under his own screen name. The door, like the levitating window, was out of place in the icy terrain, and in conjunction with the lawn chair and the penguins playing backgammon, it gave the environment the appearance of some absurd, surreal artwork.

“Eat your heart out, Salvador Dali,” he said as he surveyed his surroundings.

“I’ll be right back,” he said to the penguins embroiled in their game. Linus glanced at the herring bucket on the chair. “You,” Max warned, “keep your mind on the game, and your nose out of the bucket.” Linus cocked his head to peer at Max with one shiny eye, then picked up the dice in his beak and pitched them onto the board. Minus tugged absently at the chain attached to his leg, but remained riveted to the game.

Max turned to open the door and entered Herman’s room, leaving the penguins to their own devices.

Nothing had changed since Max’s last visit. The guard dog was still an inert heap on the dark carpet, the message light on the phone was still blinking, and the piles of papers and mini-DVD’s still threatened to slide off the desk in an avalanche of garbage. He eyed the mess and contemplated loading Betty - his version, not Herman’s - to help him clean out the account. He shook his head. “I’ve had enough of you ladies for a while,” he said to himself.

“Empty trash,” he commanded the processor, and the garbage in the overflowing trash bin disappeared. He picked up the empty bin, held it next to the desk, and swept an armful of papers and discs into it. When it was full, he ordered the processor to permanently delete all items in the trash, and then he swept in another armful. After he finished with the desk, Max turned to the filing cabinet. He closed the partially open middle drawer and started at the top. He dropped handfuls of files into the bin, periodically emptying the trash as he went. When he’d finished with the top drawer, he put his hands on his hips and took a breath. “Man you had a lot of junk in here, Herman.”

Just as he was turning his attention to the middle cabinet drawer, Max caught sight of a file lying on the floor next to the defunct guard dog. He shuffled over to pick it up. It was the file labeled “Betty3.5". He smacked it against his open palm. “Betty, Betty, Betty,” he said, “it’s been fun.” He turned to toss the file into the trash can, then stopped. He pondered the file a moment, opened it, and studied Betty’s sulking image. “Fun, I guess, isn’t the right word.”

Max closed the file, dangled it over the trash bin, and let it drop. When it fluttered into the bin, Max ordered the processor to empty the trash. The file lay at the bottom of the bin, but did not disappear as ordered. A blinking, green cursor appeared in the air above the trash. A line of text scrolled out as the cursor flickered. “Error,” it read, “Cannot delete active application.”

Max’s brow wrinkled. “Active application,” he whispered. Betty3.5 was still running.

He rubbed his fingertips on his stubbly chin. “Active application,” he said again and bent to retrieve Betty’s file from the trash. He held it at arms length. “Terminate application: Betty3.5,” he called out to the processor. Another cursor appeared, this time in the cover of the file itself. “Permission denied,” scrolled the text, “Cannot terminate application active in remote environment.”

He set the file on the empty desktop and backed away toward the open door. He wasn’t sure what to do. He couldn’t delete Betty’s file without retrieving her from the Dark Net, and he was fairly certain he could never find his way back to the NSA storeroom through the labyrinth of passages, assuming that she was even still there. Max grimaced at the thought of Betty lying on the storeroom floor, spouting blood from her mangled hand as the AOD goon brandished his shears. Max gnawed his lower lip. She was just an illusion, just an interface to a neural net. She wasn’t even his virtual assistant. She had belonged to Herman.

God dammit, he thought to himself, it’s not my problem. In Max’s mind, the whole episode with Spencer and the AOD had been staged for Herman’s benefit, not his. Besides, torturing a virtual assistant was absurd. It was like someone kidnapping a word processing program and threatening to disable the code bit by bit. There are always other copies of the program. Who cares if one copy is destroyed? No matter how gruesome the process appeared to be.

Max decided to wash his hands of the whole thing. Perske would have to deal with this herself, or bring in the system administrators, for all Max cared.

He looked over his shoulder at the penguins in the Antarctic training environment.

“I don’t have time for this crap,” he muttered as he turned and headed back through the door and onto the ice. He lifted the herring bucket off the lawn chair, placed it on the ice, and sat down.

He squinted at the backgammon board. All of Linus’ pieces were neatly nestled away, and a few of Minus’ pieces remained on the field of play. Minus had lost, but just barely.

“All right fellas, now for the moment of truth.” He glanced at the open door leading to Herman’s room. He could see the corner of Herman’s desk, but Betty’s file was out of sight. With some effort, he turned his eyes away from the scene next door.

Max struggled to pull himself together. “Let’s see,” he said, “Where were we? Linus, you win so here’s your payoff.” The penguin danced in giddy anticipation as Max reached into the bucket and grabbed a handful of herring. He tossed the fish onto the ice, and turned to Minus. “As for you,” said Max as he picked up the riding crop lying on the ice next to his chair, “I believe that means you get five strokes.” Minus strained against his chain, eyes wide in fear. When Max stood to approach him, Minus fell backwards and swatted at the ice with his tiny wings desperately trying to escape the blows he was doomed to receive. Max straddled the thrashing bird, pinned its neck against the ice, and raised the crop above his head. When the first stroke fell, Minus whimpered and arched his back in pain.

“That’s one,” he said, and he raised the crop again. Minus snapped at his gloved hand. “Stop struggling,” said Max through his clenched teeth, “You’ll only make it worse.” The bird froze, closed its eyes, and quivered as it waited for the next blow. Max hesitated, and then reared the whip back further. His arm trembled. He couldn’t do it. It was too cruel. Neural net or not, Minus was in agony. Or at least appeared to be in agony, whatever the hell that might mean for an algorithm.

“Shit,” said Max. He released the penguin and threw down the riding crop. He straightened up and returned to his chair. Minus lay immobile for a moment before picking himself up off the ice.

Max leaned forward and rubbed his eyes. “This job sucks,” he said. He looked up at Minus, who was swaying slightly and still shaking. Max reached into the herring bucket and pulled out a fish. He tossed it toward Minus. It fell at the penguin’s feet, but Minus made no attempt to eat it.

“Don’t you want it?”

Minus flinched at the sound of Max’s voice, but still didn’t acknowledge the herring. Eventually, Linus waddled over, picked up the snack and gulped it down, and then waddled away again.

Max picked another herring out of the bucket and stood up to hand it to Minus directly. The penguin cowered. “I’m trying to be nice, you little nitwit.” He held the limp fish under Minus’ beak, but the bird twisted away. Max grabbed the penguin’s head with one hand and thrust the fish at him with the other. Minus craned his neck to avoid the herring. He snapped his beak at Max’s hand. “Dammit,” said Max, lurching back. The bird had only clipped the tip of Max’s gloved finger. There was no way for a virtual penguin to injure him, but he had been startled nevertheless.

“You freakin’ lunatic.”

He knew it wasn’t really the penguin’s fault. The creature had been tormented day after day since the moment it had been created. For months, Minus had suffered as much as Linus had been pampered. Now he was a neurotic mess. This, thought Max, is how you make the neural net equivalent of a psychopath.

“It would be better for everyone if we put you out of your misery,” said Max. “Mostly, it would be better for you.”

And it would be better for Betty if she where put out of her misery. The thought startled him. He sat back in the chair staring at Minus, and wondered if Betty was still suffering at the hands of the AOD thugs. “Crap,” said Max. He picked up the bucket and scattered its contents on the ice in front of Minus. At the sound of the fish smacking the ground, Linus peeked around from behind the lawn chair where he had been amusing himself by poking at the vinyl webbing.

Max stood up and headed through the door to Herman’s room. “Knock yourselves out, guys,” he said to the penguins without looking back.

When he reached Herman’s desk, Max stared at Betty’s file.

“I don’t even know where you are,” he whispered. But maybe, he thought, I can find someone who does. “Open a browser,” said Max, and an arched doorway appeared in the middle of the far wall. The door was built of silvery metal inlayed with gold filigree. An etched crystal globe served as a knob. Elaborate script written across the door read “Welcome to Phoenix Version 7.2 - Your Doorway to the World Wide Web.”

Max crossed the room, reached for the knob, and opened the door. It revealed a broad thoroughfare lined with libraries, museums, shops, and cyber café’s. He blinked at the virtual festival of color and noise. It always took him a few moments to get his bearings when he set out to browse the Web.

Max had no idea how to begin his search for Betty, and wasn’t even entirely certain that he wanted to find her, or what he would do if he succeeded in tracking her down. Oh well, he thought, sometimes the best plan is to have no plan. He squared his shoulders and walked out onto the Web, failing to notice the chubby little penguin who plodded along after him.

***

It hadn’t taken Linus long to finish off the herring Max had scattered on the ice, even without the help of Minus, who viewed the fish with the same wide eyed terror that just about everything inspired in him.

Naturally, Linus followed him because Max was, after all, the source of all that was good in the penguin’s virtual world. Which is to say: fish.

Minus alone was left on the ice.

Comfort was an alien sensation to Minus, but solitude at least brought him respite from the games and the whip. He tugged at the chain attached to his ankle. Minus had long ago learned that the chain was indestructible, and he had no hope of ever breaking free, but he had developed a habit of moving as far away from the spike as possible and stretching the chain out to its full length of about a meter or so. He lived perpetually at the very edge of his miserable little world.

Minus stood quietly and took no interest in his surroundings. He flinched only slightly at the soft creak of the filing cabinet drawer in Herman’s room. It was not a sound he associated with Max, his tormentor. But the soft thud that followed caused Minus to pluck at the feathers on his breast. And when the worm inched its way onto the ice, Minus began to pull frantically on the chain.

Although the worm was blind, it sensed the subtle vibrations of Minus’ struggles. It slithered across the ice, probed briefly at the anchored spike, and made its way along the chain to Minus’ foot. It slowly curled around the terrified penguin’s ankle, inching upward and wrapping itself around his torso in a rigid spiral, much as a python envelopes its prey. When it reached for Minus’ head, instead of devouring him as a snake might, the worm prodded the bird’s beak. Minus let out a squawk, and the worm plunged its narrow tip down his throat. Minus’ eyes bulged as the worm forced its way into his belly.

When the worm had entirely disappeared down his throat, Minus began to twitch, then tremble, then thrash about at the end of his chain. The fury of his spasms ripped loose the spike, and the chain whipped through the air, scattering backgammon pieces and sending the empty herring bucket spinning away.

Minus lay gasping on the ice. After a time, his breathing quieted. He stood up, and limped to Herman’s room, across the carpet, and through the browser door, dragging the rattling chain and spike behind him.
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Chapter 9. Turing's Test

There were often times at the Institute holiday parties and such that the theorists would have too much to drink. Generally, the combination of alcohol and pseudo-intellect was enough to cause them to delve into the deeper questions underlying their work on artificial intelligence. One subject that inevitably arose involved the Turing test.

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Many decades before, when computers as powerful as hand calculators filled galleries the size of Max’s entire lab, the mathematician Alan Turing had proposed that the true test of artificial intelligence would be an experiment in which a person conversed with either human or a computer. If the computer program was sufficiently sophisticated that it could not be distinguished from a human, then the test would show that true artificial intelligence had been achieved.

These days, the theorists argued, it appeared that the science of neural nets had reached, or would soon reach, the point of passing Dr. Turing’s test. Inevitably, one of the drunker theorists would follow up on the Turing test question by asking, now that we have learned to build truly sentient machines, what does that make us? Gods?

Max usually listened to these sorts of debates in silence, choosing instead to drink to excess and keep his opinion of the theories and the theorists to himself. Max was a quiet drunk, as a rule.

Although it was his job to help train neural nets, he was convinced that no computerized system could ever pass the Turing test if he were asking the questions. How could a machine duplicate a lifetime of experiences? If anything, neural nets learn slower than humans. Even the best program would need decades to develop the equivalent of a few years of human sophistication. He was pretty certain he could trip up any artificial intelligence system.

Sure, Linus, was an intricate creation for a computer program. But he was a pale shadow of a real penguin, and could never fool another penguin. And the same must also be true of Betty, even Herman’s Betty - surely she couldn’t pass for a human in a Turing test.

And yet, Max was racked with guilt for running out and leaving her with Spencer and the AOD. At one level he realized that the pain she displayed when her fingers were severed was just part of her programming. What on Earth could pain mean to a neural net? Computers and programs only simulate sensations, and affection, and anger. But in the past hours, Max had found that a simulation, when intricate enough, certainly gave him the impression of the real thing. That’s what virtual reality done well is all about - fooling the senses.

In the light of day, he might have dismissed the whole thing. Standing in the darkened lab with the image of Betty’s prostrate form still fresh in his mind, he couldn’t shake the sense of responsibility he had for the suffering he had witnessed, virtual or not.

OK, thought Max, they weren’t out to damage Betty so much as they wanted something from him or, more precisely, from Herman.

The device. That was what they were interested in. And unless they were simple sadists, exiting the environment was probably the best thing he could have done for Betty at that moment. After all, he was truthful at the time when he told Spencer that if he had the device, or knew where to find it, he would have gladly handed it over.

Now that he had exited the environment, he knew that it must also be what Dr. Perske was after. There had to be something Perske could tell him to help understand exactly why it was so important.

Max looked at his watch. It was nearing six in the morning. He had spent the entire night skulking through the Dark Net with Betty. He was suddenly exhausted, and realized that he had better take his drugs before he collapsed altogether. He shuffled to the lawn chair and dropped into the seat. He reached for his wallet and took out two pills. Max worked up as much saliva as he could and popped the pills into his mouth.

Dr. Perske generally started her day early, but even she wouldn’t be in before sunrise. He removed his gloves, and kneaded his temples. As the Phenobarbital began to kick in, the adrenalin that had surged through him during Betty’s torture subsided. He needed to rest until he could talk to Perske. She was expecting to get Max’s report on the contents of Herman’s environment today.

“You’re the one who’s going to have to answer some questions, Perske,” Max muttered, as he closed his eyes, and fell into a dreamless sleep.

***


Max was shivering when he awoke. He slipped on a lab coat that hung by the door to warm his stiff muscles.

“Processor,” he ordered, “finger Perske.”

A line of text appeared in the middle of the room. It read. “User P838, E. Perske, logged in at 07:27 hours.”

She was online, probably at the computer on her desk.

The halls were empty as he plodded to Perske’s office. The grad students and postdocs in the Institute were late risers, but a light shown through the gap of Perske’s partially open door. As usual she was one of the first researchers at work in the morning. Max pushed the door far enough to see her hunched over her keyboard and squinting at her monitor.

“Max,” she said when she looked up, “You’re in early.”

“I worked late.”

“All night?”

“Essentially.”

“Well, what do you want?” she asked, leaning back in her chair.

“That’s what I hoped to ask you.”

She squinted at him “How so?”

“What did you want me to find for you in Herman’s account?”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “Anything unusual, anything out of place.”

“Uh huh. That describes just about everything in Herman’s account. Everything is out of place, and a shit load of it is damned unusual.”

Other than raising one eyebrow slightly, Perske seemed inclined to ignore the coarse language. “Sit down and tell me about it.”

As he made his way to the chair in front of Perske’s desk, he thought back to the struggle with the tentacle thing that had pursued Betty, the hole behind the cabinet, and the cloaks on the coat stand. He imagined that any one of them would qualify as something Perske might want to know about. For now, he decided to keep them to himself.

“Well,” Max replied. “Our boy was awfully security conscious.”

“What makes you say so?”

“His guard dog.”

“His guard dog,” Perske echoed.

“It’s a security device that . . .”

Perske cut him off. “I know what a guard dog is. Tell me about his. What’s it like?”

“It’s broken, actually.”

She pushed the keyboard away and rested her hands on the desk. “Really?”

“I, uh, I guess I broke it?”

“Why would you do that?”

Max shrugged, “It was a mistake. I fiddled with it a bit and broke it.”

“I see.”

The blood rose into his cheeks in embarrassment at the confession of his clumsiness. “I don’t know why a kid like him would need such a thing anyway, or where he would get it . . . other than stealing it from the National Security Agency.”

Max had hoped mentioning the NSA would get a reaction out of Perske, perhaps indicating that she knew more about what went on in Herman’s environment than she was letting on. She did nothing more than lean back in her chair and purse her lips slightly. It was an expression that reminded him of Betty3.5 as she had been perusing the shelves in the NSA warehouse. The grad students had done a good job capturing Perske’s facial character when they built the virtual assistant.

“There’s a good chance it was stolen,” said Perske. “Look, Max, do you know why Herman was here?”

Max thought he did. Herman was just another undergrad grunt helping out around the lab.

“Herman,” Perske continued, “was here as the result of a plea bargain.”

“A plea bargain?”

“Yes,” said Perske. “It was part work release and part protective custody. Have you ever heard of the Army of Darkness or a group called Drink or Die?”

Max recalled Betty’s severed fingers. “I know a thing or two about the AOD.”

“They’re loosely organized groups of hackers, the bad kind, black hats. The AOD, Drink or Die, and others like them traffic in black market software and stolen credit card information. They’ve been known to attack phone systems, including 911 emergency banks, and release viruses, that sort of thing. Herman was one of the last AOD members to be caught in an FBI sting called Operation Buccaneer. You may have read about it in the news a few years back.”

“I don’t keep up with the news much.”

“Herman turned state’s evidence to avoid jail time. He was working off his probation here. You know that he was part of the Continuously Connected Human project?”

“Sure,” said Max, “He wouldn’t shut up about it, if you ever made the mistake of mentioning it.”

“It’s a legitimate research program, but it was also a good way for the FBI to keep tabs on him. As long as he was connected, they knew where he was, and at least generally what he was up to. You could think of it as a kind of cyber house arrest.”

Sure, thought Max, and Herman was an obliging captive, except that he had found a back door that the Feds probably weren’t aware of.

“I was hoping that he had given up hacking entirely.” She shook her head and frowned. “I guess I was wrong.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter much now. Herman’s not going to be hacking anymore.”

“It’s not that simple. One of the things Herman told the government about during the investigation was some sort of super virus he was working on when he was part of the AOD, he called it the Doomsday virus, and I’m afraid that there might be a copy of it in Herman’s account.”

“So why didn’t you tell me about it? I could have just run a virus scan and found it.”

“Not likely,” said Perske. She stood up and turned away from Max to face the window. “It’s never been detected in the wild, and no virus scan is likely to find it. It was designed to bring the entire nation’s communication network down. The phone system, the power grid, air traffic control systems. Everything from emergency response systems to the nuclear defense grid would malfunction.”

“So why ask me to look for it? Why not tell the FBI?”

“For one thing, I don’t know if it’s there. And if it is, the last thing we should do is let the word get out. The AOD is very secretive. Even the FBI only knows of a tiny fraction of the members, and most of them only by their aliases. But they do know that there are members scattered everywhere. There are believed to be a few on countless college campuses worldwide, and even some in the FBI, the CIA, and even the NSA.”

The NSA, thought Max, that’s probably why we got in so easily. “That still doesn’t explain why you would pick me to find it.”

“Well,” said Perske slowly, “one thing about these hackers is they tend to be young, intelligent, computer aficionados. Basically, they fit the profile of the typical computer whiz system administrator. I couldn’t afford to let one of them find the virus before we did.”

“So you’re saying you chose me because I’m not too bright, and . . .”

“Hold on,” Perske tried to interrupt.

“. . . and so I couldn’t be a hacker. I’m too old and stupid to fit the profile.”

“Not too old.”

“I see,” Max snorted.

“Don’t take it personally. I know you’re bright, just not in that way. But this is important. I think it might have had something to do with Herman’s death.”

“You said that was an accident.”

“It probably was. But there’s a possibility the virus may have infected him, and ultimately killed him.”

“A computer virus?”

“Yes.”

Max’s head was beginning to throb. “How can something that attacks a computer and, at worst, crashes your hard drive, possibly injure someone?”

Perske turned to face him, and bit her lower lip as she pondered her response. “OK listen, our brains are neural networks, only much more complex than the ones you work on in the lab. The virus is designed to disrupt networks of all sorts. As part of the Continuously Connected Human project, Herman was perpetually exposed to the virus, if it was in his account, and I think it might have found a way to disrupt his neural net. Which is to say, his brain.”

“So you put me at risk by sending me in there.”

“No, no,” said Perske, “Herman was connected all the time, and you would only be exposed for a short while. Besides, the virus couldn’t have killed him. Not directly. It might have disrupted his neurons, disoriented him enough that he tripped down the stairs. It’s unlikely that it would have affected you at all. The human brain has much better inherent safeguards than a computer network.”

“So,” said Max, “it was an acceptable level of risk. Thanks for the consideration.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I think it’s best if we just delete his account and leave the rest to the authorities.”

He slumped in the chair.

“Can you do that for me?” Perske asked.

“Yes,” grumbled Max.

“Thank you.”

“So it’s back to penguin backgammon, then?”

“If you don’t mind,” she said in a way that made it clear that she couldn’t care less whether Max minded or not.

Max stared at Perske and thought about telling her everything he had been through the previous night. But he wasn’t sure if it would be wise to let on that he had, among other things, gone poking around in an NSA storage site. He’d have to mull it over before he said anything further, and he was both too tired and too angry to ponder it at the moment.

“Linus and Minus will have to wait until tomorrow,” he said dryly, “I’m going home to sleep. I’m not feeling well.”

Perske made an attempt at a sympathetic smile. “Yes, do that. Take some personal time. You deserve it.”

“You bet I do,” said Max as he stood up, turned his back to Perske, and walked out. He was halfway down the hall before he heard the click of Perske gently closing her door.

“Maybe I’ll take two days,” he grumbled, and stomped his way back to the lab to look for his keys.
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Chapter 8. The Warehouse

If Betty was impressed with the way Max had handled the fat porn dealer, she showed absolutely no sign of it.

“Hey," he said while she read over the instructions jotted on the slip of paper Spencer had given them, "you know that was pretty clever, the trick with the crab. Don't you think?”

“Sure,” Betty replied absently.

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“I thought of it 'cause, you know he had all that stuff lying around and I figured . . .”

“Uh huh,” she said.

“I figured if it got loose see, it would go tearing around and probably . . .”

Betty turned to face the blank wall at the end of the tunnel.

“You know,” Max stammered, “make a mess.”

Betty ran her hand along the wall. “You have a talent for making messes.”

Max stammered, “If you . . . if you mean the guard dog, it wasn't really my fault.”

“And so," said Betty as she peered up at the low tunnel ceiling, "who's fault was it then?”

“OK, I broke it. But it was like this. I was thinking . . . ”

Before he could finish, she found the spot she was looking for and gave a shove. The wall ahead melted away and Betty strode forward into a large gray room that opened up beyond the doorway.

She turned to face him and flipped back her hood. “You were saying?”

“Forget it.”

He shuffled through the doorway after her.

Metal racks extended in parallel rows tens of meters long. Boxes and bins were neatly arranged on shelves along the racks, which rose up to a featureless grey ceiling that must have been three times as high as Max was tall. A yellow stripe ran the length of the floor between the racks. He peered at the nearest boxes, but there was nothing to identify their contents other than bar codes that held no meaning for him.

“What is this place?” he asked.

Betty had marched off down the aisle, running her fingers along the rack shelves as she went.

“It's an NSA storage facility.”

“NSA," asked Max, "as in National Security Agency?”

“That's right,” she called back over her shoulder. “Don't touch anything.”

“Are we really supposed to be here?”

“We're not really supposed to be anywhere in the Dark Net. That's why it's dark.”

Max sprinted to catch up as she rounded a corner.

“What if we get caught?”

“If you don't make a mess," she said dryly, "then maybe we won't.”

By the time he got to the end of the aisle, she had disappeared.

“Betty?” There was no reply. “Hey Betty!”

“Shush. Over here.”

He peeked around the next row and found her mulling over a collection of gadgets, some of which were mildly similar to the machine that Max had broken in Herman's room.

“Guard dogs,” he said.

“Brilliant.”

For the most part, they were in better shape than Herman's, with knobs of bright red, yellow, blue, and black plastic. Levers here and there gleamed in shining chrome, where Herman's had been pitted and scratched. One of them was even decorated with baroque, curving scrollwork and gleaming brass knobs that clearly were designed with art, as well as function in mind.

Max reached out for one of the levers.

“Don't,” Betty snatched his wrist, “don't touch.”

She released him, and he dropped his hand to his side. “Sorry.”

“We need to be careful. One of them could be a honeypot.”

“A what?” said Max.

“A honeypot. A booby trap set to catch intruders like us.”

Max squinted at the row of guard dogs. “How can you tell which one might be a trap?”

“I can't, but I'm guessing it could be that one.” She pointed to one of the gadgets made of a metal with an irridescent sheen that shifted from purple to green to yellow and back, whenever Max moved his head. It was a little under a third of a meter tall and shaped like a bullet. It had no mechanical levers or buttons - only portions that changed color, slightly out of sync with the rest of the metal, hinting at controls rather than displaying them outright.

“If something looks too good to be true," said Betty, "it probably is.”

She inspected a model that resembled an old, mechanical typewriter, except that it had about half as many keys as it should, and sprouted return levers in a dozen places. Like Herman's guard dog, it appeared as though it could have spent time kicking around a back alley thrift shop.

“I like this one.” She poked it hesitantly with her finger. Nothing happened. She hefted it off the shelf with a grunt and tilted her head expectantly. Still nothing. “This is the one. Let's go.”

Max contemplated offering to carry the guard dog for her. He dismissed the idea almost immediately - he'd already caught plenty of flack for breaking the other one. He thought he might as well let her take the risk with this one. Besides, she didn't seem to be having any trouble, even though he would have guessed that it weighed ten or fifteen kilos.

He turned away from her to head back down the aisle, and nearly ran smack into a boxy robot that was passing the intersection at the end of the next row.


"Look out!” he shouted and lurched back toward Betty, who in turn juggled the awkward guard dog.

“Dammit,” Betty growled at him. The robot continued by without pausing. “It's just taking inventory.”

The robot, which to Max looked like an air conditioner unit on wheels, rumbled on, following the yellow line that he now realized snaked up and down the rows in one continuous path. It tottered slightly side-to-side, almost as if whoever built it had intended to add a touch of comedy to its wanderings. Or perhaps, thought Max, its wobbling was the machine equivalent of a warehouse clerk humming to himself to ease the tedium of an endless chore. His cheeks burned in embarrassment at the fact that he had nearly panicked at the encounter with the ludicrous box.

They were about to set off again when Max stuck out his arm to block Betty's way.

“Put it back,” he said.

“Why?” she rasped at him.

“Judging from the path it's following," Max explained, "it'll pass this way in a moment.”

He pointed at the yellow line on the floor. “I'm guessing it will set off some sort of alarm when it finds that one is missing. If we're going to snatch it, we should wait until our buddy here finishes checking this row. That'll give us the most possible time to get out.”

Betty closed her eyes for a moment and Max could see the venomous anger well up in her face. She contained herself and glared at him for a moment.

"Good point.”

She returned to the spot where she had taken the guard dog and hoisted it back onto the shelf. They moved to the end of the aisle where the robot had just passed and slipped into the shadows to wait. Sure enough, the robot rounded the far corner and ambled down the row, aiming an array of lasers at the bar codes on the various items that lined the racks.

“Saved us again, didn't I?”

Betty was silent.

“A little gratitude would be nice.”

“Thanks,” she muttered.

“See, that wasn't so bad.”

“Now shut up.” She leaned back against the wall, and Max smiled to himself.

The robot was halfway down the row when something wiped the grin off of his face. A shadow flitted past the other end of the row.

“What was that?” he asked, reaching for Betty's hand.

“What?”

“Someone's here.”

He looked to his right, and caught the motion of another shadow in the corner of his eye.

“There it is again.”

“Fuckin' Spencer.” She clutched his hand and pulled Max into the aisle. “Let's get out of here.”

“What about the guard dog?”

“Forget it. Let's split.”

They sprinted to the main aisle that led back the way they had originally come. As they turned the corner, Betty skidded to a halt and Max pulled up short behind her. An enormous figure blocked their way. Max and Betty turned to run the other direction, and another gargantuan figure stepped out of the shadows, cutting off their retreat.

“NSA?” asked Max.

“Worse,” Betty said as she squeezed his hand, “the Army of Darkness.”

A voice from the distance called out, “You're a tough man to keep down Herman my friend.”

Max recognized the squeaky tone. “Spencer,” he said, struggling to hide the tremble in his voice, “how you doin'?”

“Better than you I'm afraid.” The figure in front of them stepped aside, revealing Spencer's stubby frame.

“We need to talk.”

“I'm in a bit of a rush, if you don't mind Spence. So Betty and I will just grab a guard dog and be on our way. Maybe you and I can hook up in a chat room some time for a little heart to heart.”

“Oh I think we can catch up right now.” Spencer smiled humorlessly. “Gentleman,” he ordered the figures near him, “the lady.”

One of the ghouls stepped forward and pealed Betty away from Max.

“You have something we want,” said Spencer.

“Sure, anything,” replied Max as he watched Betty struggle with the ghouls. “Anything for you buddy.”

“We want the device.”

“The guard dog? It's back on the shelf where it belongs.”

Spencer nodded to the figure holding Betty. He grabbed the hood of her cloak and pulled down, ripping the garment off her with a violent jerk. He spun her around so that her back was to Max, and twisted her arm behind her. The other one stepped forward and lifted his sleeve to reveal a vicious pair of shears where his hand should have been. They looked like a kitchen tool Max had seen a chef on the cooking channel use to snip the bones of chickens.

“It's just around the corner. I'll show you where it is,” said Max.

“I'm not talking about the guard dog, Herman.”

“Well just say it, and whatever you want, it's yours.”

“Really?” asked Spencer slyly.

“Sure Spence. Like I said, anything.”

Spencer's eyes narrowed. “Where is it?”

“Well now, Spencer, that's where you're going to have to be a wee bit more specific.”

Spencer flicked a pudgy finger toward Betty, and the figure armed with the shears reached out, grabbed her hand, and snipped off her pinky. She fell to her knees with a shriek. Blood spurted from the stub, in pulses.

“Oh my God!” cried Max. “Are you insane?”

“Please,” moaned Betty between agonized sobs, “Herman. Help me.”

Spencer sauntered toward Max. “No more games my friend. Are you going to work with us?”

“Of course,” Max croaked. He felt his legs weaken and did his best to retain control. “All I need you to do,” he said, “is tell me exactly what device you're talking about.”

Spencer nodded at the figure with the shears, who in turn lifted Betty's ring finger.

“I told you Herman. No more games.”

“Herman please!” Betty cried. She screamed as the shears snapped shut a second time.

“For God's sake,” Max sobbed when her finger hit the floor, “I'm not Herman!”

“Take the rest,” Spencer ordered.

The figure with the shears leaned over Betty, who was now flat on her stomach on the ground. Max buried his face in his hands and called out in desperation, “Exit environment!” The warehouse, Betty, Spencer, and the cloaked thugs melted away.

Max peered through the slits between his trembling fingers at the familiar jumble of equipment in the lab.

“She was only an algorithm anyway,” he said as he feebly groped in his pocket for the cigarettes that were no longer there.
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Chapter 7. Spencer's Lair

Betty's hand was cool and her fingers, though strong, were slender and delicate. But as the tunnel narrowed Max was forced to let her hand slip from his. He slowed briefly and allowed Betty to move ahead a bit in the tight space.

Listen to the podcast of The Dark Net, Chapter 7 by robo-reader Audrey.

He squinted in passing into a cramped passageway that branched off the main tunnel. Like many of the forks and detours they passed, there was a dim glow far off in the side passage. Faint muffled sounds emerged from others. They were, Max suspected, the comings and goings of other prowlers in the Dark Net - slipping through the myriad back doors scattered about the legitimate Internet.

He occasionally heard a bit of hubbub as a distant door opened onto the Web proper. Now and then, he caught a glimpse of a shady figure crossing the tunnel ahead of them. He increasingly had the feeling that they were being watched from the recesses they passed.

Max hoped they would not meet anyone up close, and he suspected that other travelers in the Dark Net felt the same about them.

Betty turned into a narrow recess.

"We're here," she said.

Max stepped in close behind her. She pointed to the faint outline of a doorway. An unintelligible hieroglyph marked the center of the door. Betty tapped softly. After a moment, a slot at eye level shot open.

Who is it," a voice squeaked through the opening.

"Open up Agatha," said Betty.

"Let me see your faces."

Betty pushed back her hood and Max followed her lead.

"Grunding?" asked the squeaky voice. "Herman Grunding."

"Yes," Max lied.

"You're looking well - I'd heard you had gotten into a bit of trouble.”

"Nothing I couldn't handle."

"I can see that. What do you want?"

"We need some merchandise," said Betty. "Open up."

The slot snapped shut. After several moments the door creaked open a scant few inches. Betty squeezed through and Max followed.

Agatha was a genteel woman, perhaps fifty or sixty, wearing a light blue dress with lacy white cuffs and a high lace collar. Her sweet smile crinkled the faint crow's feet at the sides of her twinkling blue eyes. She stood next to a plush paisley rocker set up beside a black velvet curtain.

"It's nice of you two young folks to stop by," she said, laying a hand softly on Betty's wrist. "We're not really open for business of course, so you know the rules. It's cash and carry. No receipts." She scrunched her nose in matronly impishness. "And no guarantees, expressed or implied, regardless of what anyone tells you. Just between you and me Herman, there's a special on phishing supplies at booth five - a free key stroke recorder with all purchases over a hundred dollars. It's just the thing for collecting those lovely little passwords, very discrete."

"Thanks Agatha," said Max.

The old woman drew the curtain aside and ushered them through with the same sort of gentle insistence that a grandmother might employ in herding children into her kitchen for afternoon cookies. Instead of a painted tin, table heaped with fresh-baked treats, they found themselves at the end of a narrow walkway lined with booths. Each booth was jammed with merchandise.

Betty set off down the aisle, paying no attention to the vendors she passed. Max tagged along behind, but fell further and further back as displays on one side or the other caught his eye. It looked at first glance as if all the booths were stocked with essentially the same things; stacks of diskettes, PC hardware, and colorful software boxes. Most of the items were slightly ragged around the edges, which Max suspected meant that the merchandise consisted primarily of used, stolen, or overstock items. Upon closer inspection he discovered that although the wares from booth to booth were superficially identical, each vendor appeared to have at least one or two distinguishing items.

One merchant displayed a kiosk for assembling false identification from a selection of stolen birth certificates and driver's licenses. Anotheroffered kits for creating educational credentials complete with diplomas and transcripts that could be uploaded to legitimate university databases, which meant that they were truly as valuable as the real thing. There were vendors specializing in network sniffers, penny stock investment scams, and firmware codes for hacking embedded processors in everything from microwaves to commercial aircraft.

In just about every booth, it seemed, a brooding attendant perched on a stool while waiting for