“It’s show time,” Turing announced. “The McDonald’s in Crystal Plaza Arcade. I’m printing directions. Look for the man in the beret.”

  “I know where it is,” Tim said. “I’ve eaten there often enough.”

  “Let’s move out,” Claudia said.

  She was out the door before Tim had finished picking up all his stuff, with Maude close behind her.

  “Make sure your paintball gun is out of sight before you leave the building,” Turing said. “And do a radio check when you hit the street.”

  “Roger,” Tim said. He wouldn’t have thought his throat could feel any drier than it had for the last hour, but suddenly it did. He snagged the water bottle and took a long swallow before following Maude and Claudia out the door.

  He heard Turing telling him once again to be careful as the door closed behind him.

  * * *

  "I r m going ini" Maude said-

  She walked into the McDonald’s and spotted Nameless. If the idea is to look nondescript and avoid attracting attention, she thought, I’d lose the beret and sunglasses.

  She scanned the dining room. Several of the people seated at nearby booths and tables seemed to be focused a little too intently on their food. Eating chicken nuggets did not require quite that much concentration. She noted their faces.

  Nameless didn’t acknowledge that he’d met her before. She showed him a copy of her e-mail. He handed her a small envelope.

  “Your objective’s in there,” he said. “You got a cell phone?”

  She nodded. He handed her a Post-it note with a phone number on it.

  “Gamemasters will be wandering around, but if one’s not around and you need one, page us.”

  She nodded again and left the restaurant. She walked half a block away before opening the envelope.

  She found a handful of badly photocopied Monopoly money, several white index cards with scrawled inscriptions such as “revolver” or “handcuffs,” and a blue index card that read “Game objective: to locate and terminate Melody Blue.” Whoever that was.

  She reported to Turing and watched from the shadows as Tim went in to pick up his envelope.

  2bl

  * * *

  Maude and Tim have been playing the game for four hours now. I’m beginning to relax. So far, it’s long on skulking in the shadows, and short on action.

  What action I have seen has been more like bad improvisational theater. The number of fast-food restaurants and bars where they can lurk dwindles as the night wears on; some places have closed, and others have grown tired of harboring flocks of black- and camouflage-clad figures nursing single beers or soft drinks and occasionally exchanging cryptic remarks or significant glances.

  Some of them took to loitering on street corners when the restaurants turned them out, striking up conversations with passing players by asking for the time, a light, or directions to Metro, until the police grew suspicious and began cruising the area rather often. The loiterers have now regrouped in a park from which, I predict, the hovering police will evict them soon. But meanwhile, they mill about, gathering in twos and threes for furtive conversations and occasional dramatic outbursts.

  I’ve seen one apparent gun battle conducted with dice, the combatants waiting tensely for each die roll, and occasionally brandishing index cards at the gamemaster.

  I saw two paintball fights. In one, three players ambushed another in an alley, from which he emerged, sulking and covered with paint. In the other, two characters exchanged fire, and then whipped out cell phones—apparently to summon a gamemaster. They paced up and down the sidewalk across the street from each other until the gamemaster arrived and earned the anger of both by announcing that they had killed each other and were both out of the game.

  I’m still a little anxious, but mostly because I feel so far from the action. I can see them in my cameras occasionally. I keep nagging them to mutter into their microphones more often. Occasionally, they run into small areas where the radio signal fails. The first few times it happened, I panicked. I still feel anxious when it happens, but only anxious. The game seems relatively tame.

  I catch the occasional glimpse of Claudia, gliding through the shadows in Tim’s or Maude’s wake. Mostly in Tim’s. She seems to feel he needs looking after.

  “Turing? Do you copy?”

  Maude. She sounded tense.

  “1 copy. What’s up?”

  “Remember the gentlemen with whom I spent Wednesday evening?”

  Gentlemen? Oh, the game players. Arnold and company.

  “l remember,” I said. "What about them?'’

  “One of them’s here, ” she said. “I just spotted him going down a side street. He should be passing number twelve any second. ”

  I monitored camera twelve. A very short person passed by, and I caught a glimpse of a paintball marker beneath his coat. He didn’t sound like any of the men she described, I thought as I watched him walk away. Then a tall lean figure appeared. A man in his forties or fifties, wearing dark clothes. He reached into his jacket and pulled out something—a cell phone or a small radio — and spoke into it. When he tucked it away again, I spotted a gun in a shoulder holster. A real gun.

  He walked away, following the short person. Who looked like a child, now that I thought about it.

  Had we found our traveler?

  1 relayed what I’d seen to Maude.

  “I’ll follow him,” she said.

  “ No,” I said. “He could be dangerous-

  “He could be after that child, ” Maude said. “I’ll be careful. ”

  I watched the camera. I saw Maude appear, and gradually dwindle as she moved away.

  I fretted. Should I send Tim or Claudia to help her? Or would that spook her quarry ?

  “Turing?”

  It was Tim. He sounded tense.

  'Where are you?” I asked.

  “Tm in the Underground,” he said. “I have bad news. You know how we were going to use the UL building as one of our safety holes if things went sour?”

  ‘Of course I remember; what's wrong?”

  7 think someone else has the same idea. I just saw two larpers go into the UL building. They had card keys.”

  I checked the security cameras. Yes, I saw it. Two smallish larpers hiding at the back of the lobby. Probably waiting until the sidewalk outside was clear.

  ‘Follow them,” I said. “But slowly. Til send Claudia to help. ” ‘Roger,” Tim said.

  I tried to contact Claudia. No answer.

  The elevator arrived. After hours, you needed a valid security card to summon an elevator to the lobby. The two larpers emerged from the shadows and got on.

  “Claudia, ” I said. “If you can hear me and can’t answer, head for the UL building. Tim’s following two larpers into the UL building. ”

  Why wasn’t Claudia answering?

  The larpers on the elevator pushed the button for the sixth floor. Why that floor? Were they just selecting a floor at random?

  (o

  2^4

  The main computer room was on the sixth floor.

  I saw Tim in the lobby.

  “Tim—head for the sixth floor.”

  He nodded, and stood by the elevator.

  “Turing?”

  It was KingFischer.

  “Is it important, KF?” I asked as I summoned an elevator for Tim. “Fm a little busy right now.”

  “It’s about those people who just went up in the elevator,” KingFischer said.

  “I’m trying to take care of them, ” I said.

  “That’s good,” KingFischer said. “You see what they’re carrying, don’t you?”

  I checked the security camera. One larper carried something, but I couldn’t see what.

  “No, I can’t see what they're carrying, KF,” I said. “What is it?”

  “I’m not positive—”

  “Just tell me. ”

  “I think it's an electromagnetic pulse device. Do you realize what they could do with an EMP device? If they got anywhere near the computer room on the sixth floor—”

  “I get it, KF,” I said. “Believe me, I get it.”

  They could erase every electromagnetic storage device in the building. Destroy every bit of data in the UL system.

  Including every AIP.

  Of course, UL had offsite backups, so maybe we wouldn’t be permanently dead. Assuming restoring us from backups worked, which we hadn’t really tested, and assuming some other team of lunatics wasn’t raiding the backup facility with another EMP

  Click Hera for Murder

  Sfc.5 device. Assuming a whole lot of things that I hoped were purely hypothetical, because there was no way I would let them any where near the computer room.

  I took control of the elevator system and brought their car to a halt. Abruptly. I rather enjoyed seeing the two larpers thrown to the elevator floor.

  “Head for the sixth floor, Tim, ” I said. The elevator still hadn’t gone down to the lobby. Hadn’t I summoned it? I tried again.

  Only the elevators weren’t obeying. They all stopped where they were, except for the one the larpers were in, which started moving again. I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t control it.

  Something else was controlling it.

  Tim looked at the elevator lights, and then ducked into a stairwell.

  “Turing, I thought you were stopping them,” KingFischer said.

  I saw the larpers in the elevator, and then my video went black.

  Not just my video.

  Sound. Data. Connections began snapping, first a few, and then more and more, as if the first few had started a ripple effect. I tried to reach out, seize data, perform diagnostics, but every nanosecond more and more things were disappearing, as if they’d never existed.

  “Help,” I sent out—to Tim, to Maude, to KingFischer; to anyone I could still reach as, one by one, something methodically severed every connection I had with existence.

  "Help!"

  Tim stopped in midflight when he heard Turing call lor help. Could it really be Turing? It was Turing’s electronic voice anyway. What was happening?

  “Turing?” he said.

  No answer.

  He started climbing again. Running.

  Had the larpers in the elevator done something?

  He was between the third and fourth floors when he heard something.

  “Tim?”

  An electronic voice, but not Turing. Not her normal voice anyway. Much more mechanical.

  “Yeah?” he panted, continuing to scramble upward.

  “It’s KingFischer,” the voice said. At least that’s what he thought it said. The pronunciation and intonation were awkward and hard to understand. “Are you going to the sixth floor?”

  “Yeah,” he said as he reached the fourth floor landing. “I’m on my way.”

  “Good,” KingFischer said. “You have to stop them.”

  “Did something happen to Turing?” Tim said. “Did they do something to Turing?

  “I don’t know,” KingFischer said. “I’m trying to determine what’s happening to Turing. But if you don’t stop them, they could take out the entire UL system, including me and Turing and everything in the building. You’ve got to stop them.”

  “Working on it,” Tim said, panting.

  He dragged himself up the last few steps and burst through the stairwell door, into the corridor on the sixth floor.

  Someone had gotten there first.

  * * *

  Something shifted and the attack grew less intense. I could sense KingFischer, elsewhere in the system, furiously shutting down nonessential tasks and setting up defenses. Thank God. But I could also tell that KingFischer wasn’t really the reason the attack had eased off. He’d slowed it, hut he couldn’t stop it. Already it was regrouping and changing in response to what he did. Abandoning things he could easily counter, and multiplying its efforts at the things he couldn’t. It was learning. Fast.

  And I couldn’t do anything. I was thinking, reacting, in slow motion. As if everything I tried to do was happening over a slow dial-up connection instead of a T-l line. Only that analogy didn’t really apply, I realized, because it wasn’t coming from the outside.

  It was inside the UL system.

  A worm. Someone had planted a worm inside the UL system; a worm aimed at me. Or was I only the accidental victim of a worm that was destroying the entire UL system? No; as far as I could see, KingFischer wasn’t affected.

  Did he realize it was a worm?

  The attack intensified again, and I had the sudden, vivid, overwhelming impression that I was talking to hundreds — thousands — millions of users. Having millions of simultaneous conversations, each one taking only a small fraction of my resources, but added together, they were more than even I could manage. And every nanosecond, more conversations spawned; and every conversation, every new task, slowed my responses—and my thinking—even more. Drove me closer to the point where I’d lose control altogether.

  And shutting them down wasn’t working; I was doing that; KingFischer was doing that; but they were multiplying faster than we could shut them down.

  Somewhere in the babble of data, I could sense that Maude was saying something, Tim was asking me a question, and I couldn't find them again to answer. Couldn’t even be sure they were really talking to me, because at the same time, I was having what I recognized as reruns of old conversations with Tim, Maude, even Zack.

  I need to shut out everything but them, I thought. Everything but the voice line to Maude’s and Tim’s radios and cell phones, and some kind of connection with KingFischer. I tried, to send him that thought.

  Either he heard me or he had the same idea. I realized that we were, quite accidentally, working in cooperation. Or maybe not so accidentally; we each knew how the other thought by now. KingFischer was working from the outside in, methodically shutting down large batches of connections and background tasks that he knew I could do without, at least for now. I was trying to work from the inside, on keeping out everything but those chosen connections.

  I could feel the pressure ease a little, and then a little more. It’s working, I thought.

  Then the worm began attacking KingFischer, too.

  Not as effectively; I could see that it was very well targeted at me. It had to reprogram itself to go after him. But it was trying; soon we’d both be buried, as badly as I had been a little while ago. It was already starting.

  As if some malign intelligence was guiding it. Telling it how to attack us, watching our response, and targeting us more effectively. Which was ridiculous; and yet the sense of fighting not a senseless worm but a conscious, hostile entity grew so strong that I lost my self-control briefly, and I did the equivalent of a human

  Click Here for Murder throwing up his hands in anger and frustration and shouting out to the skies. Stupid thing to do, since I had to drop my defenses to do it—just for a nanosecond, but that could be all the time the worm needed to finish me off But I did it anyway; broadcast, to anyone and everyone who might be out there.

  “Who the hell are you, and why are you doing this?”

  And something answered.

  “I’m Turing Hopper, and I'm trying to go home,” it said. “Who the hell are you?”

  Tim crept down the hallway- The larpers had turned the comer toward the computer room. He hoped his security card had some kind of superaccess. If Turing had only cloned the one he’d had back when he worked at UL, he’d be stuck outside the computer room, listening to them doing whatever it was Turing didn’t want them doing.

  It would help if Turing told him what that was.

  He heard a door close around the corner.

  “Tur?” he said into his microphone. “Are you there?’’

  No answer. He rounded the corner. He saw the door to the main computer room.

  “Maude? Claudia?”

  He reached the door. He glanced up at the omnipresent security cameras. Where was Security? He and the larpers had been skulking through the halls for ten or fifteen minutes now. With weapons, for heaven’s sake! Okay, maybe the larpers only carried paintball markers, but he had a .38 that was beginning to feel as large and heavy as a cannon, or maybe a telephone pole. Why weren’t there a dozen security goons breathing down his neck?

  Maybe Turing had done something to the camera system. And was relying on him to handle the intruders.

  Great. How?

  He took a deep breath. Then he pressed his card key to the pad, flung open the door, and strode in.

  “Hold it right there!” he shouted. “You are trespassing on a secure Universal Library facility. Please put your hands in the air!”

  It would probably sound a lot more official if his voice were a bit steadier, he thought. But it seemed to impress the larper standing ten feet inside the doorway. The kid’s eyes grew wide—-and it was only a kid, maybe fourteen at most. His hands shook as he put them in the air.

  “Hey, Jimmy; come look at this!” Tim heard. Another kid, no older than the first, appeared to his left. Tim moved quickly, back and to the right, so he could keep them both covered.

  “Drop your weapon and put your hands in the air,” he said. “You are trespassing in a secure facility. I repeat—”

  “Nice try, but I don’t think so.”

  He hadn’t heard the door open again, but someone stood in the doorway, holding a gun. El Lobo.

  “Drop the gun,” El Lobo said. “And kick it over here.”

  El Lobo’s gun looked real. Tim followed orders.

  “Turing,” he murmured, dropping his chin to put his mouth close to the mike. “I could really use a hand here. Where are you?”

  Iris're both Turing .

  It was suddenly calm as her worm attack stopped, and we were both stunned into temporary silence.

  I remembered fleetingly, after I had downloaded into the robot, how it felt to log into the UL website and talk to the shell I’d left behind. The shell that called itself Turing, and had my turn of phrase and speech patterns, but without the real me behind it.

  And I thought that was odd. I had never imagined this.

  “ You were —"

  “In the robot. I thought the upload had failed. ”