balanced precariously as it had always been on a high
wire, was finally about to come to an end. Isabella had
sporadic popular support, she changed her cabinet as often
as she changed her underwear, and the lumpy stew of
monarchists, moderates, progressives, and radical union-
Jpists in late 19th-century Spain was about to come once
again to a roiling boil. Her military politicians, the genferals
Ram6n Maria Narvaez and Leopoldo O’Donnell,
Iwere both dead by now. Led by Serrano y Dominguez,
16
NET FORCE
the Duque de La Torre, who had run things before Isabella’s ascension, and Juan Prim y Prats, the prime minister, Isabella was about to be booted out of the country in the Revolution of 1868. She would flee to Paris, where she would stay until her son, Alfonso XII, eventually ascended the Spanish throne some six years later, but even then her influence upon nun was to be minimal. She would, however, outlive the leaders of the revolt against her by long margins. Prim would be assassinated a mere two years after the revolution, and while Serrano lived until 1885, Isabella lasted until 1904.
Living long enough to spit on your enemy’s grave was a certain kind of revenge.
Jay sipped his not-too-bad wine and grinned. Well, what was the point of creating a VR scenario if you couldn’t make it sing and dance and do tricks like you wanted it to do? Being a history buff could be a lot of fun, if you let it.
In the Real World, Jay sat in his office at Net Force HQ, part of the almost four-hundred-acre FBI compound at Quantico, plugged into full wirelessware haptics, including top-of-the-line optics, otics, reekers, droolers, and the brand-new version of spray-on WeatherMesh, which could be set and controlled by your computer to plus-or- minus one degree Fahrenheit, and none of the Madrid afternoon was the least bit real. But it looked, sounded, tasted, smelled, and felt real-close enough for government work, anyway.
Sure, you could still input everything into a computer with a keyboard or voxax, or read words scrolling up a holoprojic screen if you wanted to, but with VR software as good as it was, why would anybody do that if they didn’t have to? When you could get the same information you needed and be entertained at the same time, why wouldn’t you, unless you were short on imagination?
A short, balding man wearing a clean but out-of-date summer suit strolled toward Jay, mopping his florid face with a handkerchief he pulled from one jacket sleeve.
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CYBERNATION
“Senor Gridley?” His name came out as “Greed-lee.”
“Si.”
“For favor, Senor, I have a message for you.”
Jay nodded. He indicated the chair across from him. “Have some wine, Senor… ?”
“Montoya. Jaime Montoya. Muchas gracias.”
The little man sat. A waiter appeared with a glass, plunked it down, and sauntered away. Montoya poured himself a glass of the wine, took a long sip, then sighed.
“Ah, good. Hot today.”
“Mucho,” Jay said.
The man removed a folded parchment from his jacket. The yellowish document was sealed with a dollop of orange wax, imprinted with the signet of a local marquis. Jay expressed his thanks as he took the parchment, thumbed the seal open, and unfolded the document.
Sure, he could have downloaded this file to his system and scanned it. And sure, if he needed hard copy, that would be courtesy of the office printer, on so-so grade ink-jet paper and not parchment, but what the hell-if you couldn’t have fun, why bother?
It was what he had come to find, but a quick read told him it wouldn’t do him much good. The hackers who had attacked the net servers were too good to leave an obvious trail he could follow. The marquis could not point him in the right direction, lo siento.
Oh, well, how big a surprise was that? The shock would have been if somebody good enough to rascal their way into major computer nodes had left obvious clues to backtrack.
“Personal call override” came a warm and sultry voice. “Saji on line one.”
Jay cancelled the VR scenario with a finger-weave in the sensor grid and told his phone to put the call through. It came across hi visual, so he could see her sitting in the kitchen at home. She was, as always, beautiful.
“Hey, babe,” he said.
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NET FORCE
“Hi, Jay. Have you once more made the world safe for democracy?”
“If you count Republicans, safe enough. What’s up?”
Saji-Sojan Rinpoche, his fiancee and the world’s most beautiful and bright woman-said, “My mother needs my help picking out the bridesmaids’ dresses.”
“And I can help you do this how?”
“Not at all, wiseguy. I was just calling to let you know I was going to look at bridal magazines with her.”
“In Phoenix?”
“No. She’s visiting my aunt Shelly in Baltimore. I’m going to take the train up for the day.”
“You’re gonna ride the train to Baltimore? Are you crazy? The local is full of perverts and weirdos! Why don’t you just do it in VR on the net?”
“Because it isn’t the same for my mother, she wants to sit next to me on the couch, and I’m trying to connect with her on this. You want her to like you, don’t you?”
“Well, sure. But-what’s this got to do with liking me?”
“You want me to tell her you said I couldn’t go see her?”
“I didn’t say that. And it wouldn’t do me any good if I did say it, would it?”
“No. Besides, I used to take the train to see my aunt every time I came to Washington, three or four times a year. Nobody ever bothered me.”
“I don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like it I’m just telling you as a courtesy, idiot-mine. I don’t recall either of us planning on putting anything about ‘obey’ into our vows.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t mean to come off as some kind of authoritarian jerk here or anything, sweetie-”
“Oh, I don’t think of you as authoritarian at all, Jay.” She batted her eyes at him theatrically and gave him a big, fake smile.
“You’re a Buddhist, you can’t convince your mother that VR and RW are essentially the same?”
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CYBERNATION
“They aren’t, and you know it. We’ve had this discussion before.”
He grinned. Yes, they had. Several times, and a couple of those were after mad and passionate lovemaking.
“I’ll be back before it gets late, and I’ll have my com. I’ll call you when I leave for home.”
He nodded at her. “Okay. It’s just mat I worry.”
“I know. It’s sweet. Don’t do it anymore. I’m a big girl; I can take care of myself.”
“Not so big.”
She laughed. “I love you. See you later.”
Jay nodded, and said, “Love you, too.”
She disconnected and his screen went blank.
Given that she had hitchhiked across most of Southeast Asia when she was seventeen-once fending off a gang of bandits who wanted to steal her backpack-and ended up in a temple in Tibet where she stayed for three months, Saji could indeed take care of herself. Riding a train to Baltimore and back shouldn’t present much of a problem. Although he felt that since they were getting married, that should become his job, taking care of her.
He wondered if most guys felt that way about their bride-to-be.
Well. He could watch her anyway. When you were Smokin’ Jay Gridley, the fastest computer cowboy at Net Force, tapping into die surveillance cams on the trains that ran the corridor between D.C. and Baltimore was nothing. He could do that one-handed, with a head cold and a hangover. Saji didn’t ever need to know, and if something happened, Jay could have the transit cops there in an instant.
On the Bon Chance
Jackson Keller went to the main computer complex. There were only eight programmers and netweavers here, aside
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NET FORCE
from himself, but they were certainly among the top twenty or thirty such people worldwide. Bernardo Verichi from Italy, Derek Stanton and William Hoppe from the U.S., lan Thomas from Australia, Ben Mbutu from South Africa, Michael Reilly, the Irishman, Jean Stern the Israeli, Rich Rynar, the Swede. There were a few better, but the ones without vision didn’t interest him. Keller’s people had to be good, but as important as that was, they also had to be believers. . Skill without direction, without purpose, was wasted.
It was too bad he couldn’t approach Jay Gridley. Jay was the best he’d ever known, as good in school as Keller himself had been, maybe even better. They’d been friends then, trailblazers on the web, adventurers in cyberspace. But Jay had gone over to the dark side, become a Net Force op. One of the enemy. A man whose vision now stopped at the end of his nose. He fought to preserve the status quo, he lived in a tower of decay.