"Back Door Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

The client was Barbara Andresson, a communications technologist who had parleyed her point-of-presence frames B worn by compliant proxies, they allowed tourists to visit anywhere in the world without leaving their homes — into an empire. An old style tycoon. The ad Crane had seen from the taxi had been one of her company’s.

The secretary went off and had an argument down his phone with Crane’s company which he clearly lost, because he came back with a strained smile and explained that Dr. Andresson had been using her own stand-alone virtuality to test a new product and had failed to return. She was in a coma, dreaming deeply, unreachable by medical intervention.

Crane was surprised that no one had switched off the link. “If this is run off your own mainframe, you could shut it down. End of problem.”

“We are not sure how traumatic it would be,” the secretary said. “The virtuality is very highly detailed, as you will see. And the interface is novel. And it is possible that Dr. Andresson might not wish to leave. If so, you must persuade her.”

“I’m a lineman, not a shrink.”

“Your company has just told me that you are competent to deal with this situation. They will not send anyone else.”

“So no one has been in there to look around?”

“No. The insurance company would not like it.”

“In case anything went wrong. Could anything go wrong?”

The secretary’s smile was sharp-toothed. “We hope not, Mr. Crane. The penalty clauses on your company’s contract are very severe.”

Crane knew all about the penalties. He said, “Tell me about this novel interface.”

The virtuality was freestanding, not connected to the Internet but run by an isolated supercomputer. Crane was used to the arrangement. Most computers, such as Crane’s slate, were virtual machines, negotiating through the Internet for loan of memory and processing power from hundreds of sites. But the rich preferred to opt out of the Internet, used instead supercomputers which emulated the Internet’s complexity, updating sites not by direct connection but via filtered and compressed data loaded via zip drives. These days the rich bought supercomputers for the same reason that they had purchased islands in the Twentieth Century. For privacy. They maintained their own secure islands in a sea of mutable data, places where they could work and play without being monitored. Even the most case-hardened firewall could be breached by hackers with enough resources. And ordinary users of the Internet left traces everywhere they went. Every time they ported to a site; every time they downloaded data or used a service; every time they entered a virtuality. Their entire online lives could be reconstructed from these traces, just as their passage through a city could be reconstructed from frames of security videos; with everything connected to everything else, people lived as if on a movie set, every word, every gesture recorded. Only the rich could afford invisibility.

Barbara Andresson’s supercomputer was not much different from others Crane had worked on, but the human/machine interface was novel, radically so. Andresson had been working on a new kind of interactivity, where nuclear magnetic resonance transcribed Signal Transfer Point software into certain of the operator’s neurons, a kind of routemaster that directed sensory data to the relevant parts of the brain. A direct route from machine to mind.

“I understand,” the secretary said, “that it induces a particularly hallucinatory intensity.”

“Sounds interesting. Have you tried it?”

“Dr. Andresson was beta-testing it, Mr. Crane.” The man grimaced, and corrected himself. “Is beta-testing it, I should say. The virtuality is still running.”

Beta-testing. Great. Just the thing to make Crane’s day. Commercially released software was bad enough. Stuff in development, goofy prototypes which mostly never got any further than test rigs, were briar patches of dropped lines, strange attractors, bad loops, geeky quick fixes and worse. Crane had had nothing but bad experiences with them. He said, “How buggy is it?”

The secretary gave his sharp-toothed weaselly smile. “I wouldn’t know. It may not be a bug at all. That is why you are here.”

The technicians scanned Crane in a tomographic frame, laid him on a couch, dabbed electrolyte jelly in a hundred places on his scalp, carefully fitted a kind of skull cap. Crane submitted with growing curiosity. No earplugs or goggles or gloves, no bodysuit or treadmill, none of the usual paraphernalia needed to access virtual reality. The cap contained twenty million bacteria-sized SQUIDs, one of the techs said. Superconducting quantum interference devices that interfaced with specific neurons in the reticular activating system, the elaborate network in the brain that filtered sensory data, setting up a virtual model of the STP software and downloading data through it.

“It switches off your skeletal muscle activity, too,” the technician added. “As in REM sleep, you will think you are walking or running, but your spinal motor neurons are powerfully inhibited.”

“Sounds interesting. Just make sure that you download my toolkit. I’ll need it.”

“We will have to check it out first,” the secretary said.

“Then you’ll notice the company seal. It’s guaranteed to be virus-free, and has its own deletion routine. It won’t leave any trace when I’ve finished.”

“Even so, we must check it. Dr. Andresson is most particular about what gets into her system. Good luck, Mr. Crane.”

“Count backward,” one of the techs said.