The Intruder (18 page)

Hanna had just stuffed her sausage muffin in her mouth and couldn't answer for a minute. "I've been so hungry," she said after a moment. "They didn't feed me very well, you know, and I think those drugs had some effect on my appetite."

"You don't look any worse for it," MacKenzie said, and Hanna smiled, "but it hasn't improved your taste in food." Hanna gave her a dirty look and took an over-large mouthful of hotcakes just for spite.

"Okay, okay," MacKenzie said. "Actually, I've got some theories I want to bounce off of you."

"Computers just aren't my thing," Hanna protested, taking another bite. "But go ahead," she mumbled through her food, forgetting her manners, and then giggled. MacKenzie glowered at her.

"Okay, first of all, why did that ghost thing, that 'net spy,' as Jeremy would call it, get behind me and look over my shoulder as if it were watching my implant desktop? I mean, it was acting as if my implant was really there, in front of me."

Hanna set down her fork, picked up her coffee and thought about that in silence for a minute. "The ghostie wasn't really 'there,' in any meaningful sense of that term," she said. "If you're on the right track with your research, then the 'net spy' is just some background noise that Jeremy can see, for whatever reason. So maybe we need to back up and ask why the ghostie appears in a particular place at all -- behind you, or anywhere else."

MacKenzie smiled. "You were always good at this kind of thing. Questioning assumptions, I mean. Let me see," she thought for a minute, but Hanna was ahead of her.

"Here's what I mean," Hanna continued. "If somebody has figured a way to crack the security codes on the hole, then it seems they should just be able to access that information at a terminal or something. They shouldn't need to be sending these images all over the place."

"But?" MacKenzie prompted.

"But what if they're not accessing the
data stream
itself? That's what you call all that glop that carries the information around, right?" MacKenzie tried not to be irritated when Hanna's silly side came through, but "glop" was annoying, and she gave Hanna a disapproving grin.

"Oh lighten up. I'm getting the theory right, and you know what I'm saying," Hanna said. "So here's what I'm thinking: the implants are in our eyes, ..."

"Connected to our optic nerves," MacKenzie corrected.

"Same thing," Hanna said, knowing it was wrong. She was in the mood to offend MacKenzie's technical sensibilities, and it was too easy when MacKenzie was in her hyper-analytical mode. "So maybe the feed works both ways," Hanna continued. "We 'see' the desktop that the implant feeds into our optic nerve, so how do we know that what we really see -- photons hitting our eyes, and all that -- doesn't feed back into the implant and onto the net?"

MacKenzie's trained response was to shake her head no. That was against all the canons of hole communications. But so were "net spies." She stopped shaking her head and looked back at Hanna. "It can't happen," she said, and Hanna couldn't tell whether she was stating that as a fact or trying to convince herself of it. 

MacKenzie continued. "I have to admit that your theory would explain what we know so far," she said. "The best way to process visual information is in 3-D. You just can't get it all otherwise, so if you had a huge database of visual information, the best way to analyze it would be through virtual reality. You'd suit up and just walk around inside the images, looking at things." She nearly choked on the last words.

"Looking at things," she repeated, "just like those things were looking at my desktop." MacKenzie's face turned white. "This contradicts everything I've learned about the implants, but it has to be right." She swallowed hard. "Hanna, this is terrible. This means that somebody has the capability of looking at anything and everything that anybody does."

"
Duncan
?" Hanna asked.

*
             
*
             
*

"Jeremy, it's good to see you again," Carl Lenzke said, standing in the doorway of his modest office, which was part a series of
row houses
converted into offices. The tone of his voice was friendly -- even cheerful -- but his face was somewhat grave. "I figured you'd get around to visiting me one of these days."

Jeremy was marching up the walk to the office like a man on a mission. Lenzke stood still, waiting to see what Jeremy was going to do. He walked up to the door and stood on the mat, being careful to stand a little too close to Lenzke, showing just a touch of belligerence and disrespect. They both stood eye to eye for a minute. Neither blinked nor spoke.

"Why did you lie to us?" Jeremy finally asked, spitting out the word "lie."

"I don't have to explain my actions to you," Lenzke said. Jeremy tensed up to spring at him, but Lenzke stepped back into the brick foyer of the office, opening the heavy wooden door wide and gesturing for Jeremy to enter. "By all means stay outside if you'd rather fight, but if you wish to talk about something, please come in. I am at your disposal, either way."

Jeremy was a young man, physically fit, agile, and hopping mad, but Lenzke, although more than 30 years his senior, was no slouch. He was powerfully built and had that calm, serious air of a man who knows how to handle himself in a fight.

Jeremy stepped in, once again careful to invade Lenzke's space just enough to be rude. Lenzke pointed him to a small, lounge-like room to the right and the two of them went in. The office was an old brick
row house
, tastefully decorated on the inside and out. Its formal look was designed to inspire calm confidence, but it wasn't having any effect on Jeremy.

"So you're above explaining yourself to one of your Community guinea pigs, is that it?" he asked. "What kind of an experiment were you working on, Mr. Lenzke?"

Lenzke looked up at a painting of a fox hunt that hung on the wall above the fireplace. He showed no sign of concern about Jeremy's remarks. He looked like a wise tutor who is saddened that he can't get through to one of his favorite students.

"All I can say, Jeremy, is that there were things going on that you don't know about; things I wish you would never, ever know about." A slight look of distant fear filled his eyes. "Or me, for that matter," he said with a lighter expression. "I wish I didn't know what I know. But every man has to do what he can with the hand he is dealt in life. I'm not playing this hand with you, Jeremy, so you don't get to see my cards. All I can tell you is that I did what I thought was best, and I still believe it to have been the best decision, just as I believe that you made the right decision."

Jeremy looked at him with a confused expression. "In coming here?" he asked, continuing to look out the window and refusing to make eye contact, except to threaten.

"No, in leaving the Community. You would never have received a fair trial in there. The man you killed was too well connected, and Community justice has a very narrow view of justifiable homicide."

Jeremy looked at him sharply. The Advocate knew all about his case, of course, but Jeremy didn't like to be reminded of it. "The man I killed was a nut and a murderer. He should have been locked up years ago." He looked Lenzke in the eye now.

"Of course he should have," Lenzke replied. "If it makes you feel any better, I urged that myself, but the council wouldn't hear of it. His father wouldn't allow it, and his father exercised more power than you know." There was something in his voice, or his expression, that told Jeremy there was a deeper meaning to that remark. "It was only after his son killed your wife that the Community started to recognize how much control he had over them. But still, you would have been convicted of murder by any jury in the Community. You did the right thing to leave."

"And you want me to believe that you did the right thing in lying to us all those years? In telling us that Society was ready to storm in and take over?"

Lenzke didn't reply, he just looked at Jeremy, and his face said everything. He had no remorse, and he was confident he was in the right. For a second, Jeremy softened in his judgment. Lenzke seemed so sincere, and so empathetic. It was hard to believe that he was quite as bad as Jeremy had imagined. For a second, he almost believed that there were extenuating circumstances, but only for a second.

"I don't know why I came here," he said, and stormed off.

Chapter 12

"So what can I do for you today, young lady?" Dr.
Berry
asked after MacKenzie came into her office. The large, exquisitely decorated room was designed so that a guest's attention was drawn to the exact center, which is where Dr.
Berry
sat in her chair behind a large desk.

A doctor's ego,
MacKenzie thought.

She had seen Dr.
Berry
in the sociology class, but she hadn't paid her much attention. Here, it was unavoidable. Even the furniture had been altered to make Dr.
Berry
stand out. MacKenzie realized that her seat was several inches lower than Dr.
Berry
's, which, added to the fact that Dr. Berry was a fairly tall woman, made her dominate the room. 

"I'm a hole communications major," MacKenzie explained, "and I've been doing some research on how the implants interact with our brains. I have some ideas about ways to expand the range of things we can do with implants, but I need to know a few things about the connection between the implant and the optic nerve." MacKenzie was very nervous about this meeting and wasn't completely convinced it was the right thing to do. She needed some information about the implants to follow a few of her theories, and Dr.
Berry
was the most accessible local expert on the subject.

Dr.
Berry
nodded. "Haven't I seen you somewhere before?" she asked.

"You visited our sociology class when that guy from one of the Communities was there. Phyllis -- my teacher -- told me that you were an expert on implants." That was as close as she wanted the conversation to get to talking about Jeremy, but Dr.
Berry
wouldn't have it.

"Speaking of your class, have you seen Mr. Mitchell since then?" Dr.
Berry
persisted. "He seems to have disappeared." MacKenzie got a lump in her throat. This woman seemed to be the center of all the 'coincidences' involving Jeremy recently. It was hard to predict what she might know and MacKenzie didn't want to have to lie to her.

"Is that the guy from the class?" MacKenzie asked innocently. "I'm sorry, I'm not very good with names. I'm somewhat of a computer fanatic. I don't recognize people too well."

"You recognized me," Dr.
Berry
said, and MacKenzie felt she was being interrogated. She had to play to the good doctor's weakness.

"You're hard to forget," she said in a shy voice. 

"So what can I do for you?" Dr.
Berry
asked again.

"About the optic nerve, I don't understand how the connection with the implant works. Obviously the implant feeds visual information to the optic nerve for the visual interface, and we know there is some feedback from the optic nerve to the implant, but I'm curious how much."

"How much?" Dr.
Berry
asked. "Everything. When they designed the implant, they had two options for the connection with the optic nerve, exclusively one-way, or two-way. There was no sensible way to filter it, and no need. Since the implant needs some feedback from the user to be able to adjust brightness, sharpness and color, and to create the illusion of 3-D, the one-way connection was out of the question. So the implant gets everything the optic nerve has to tell it. But of course it isn't sophisticated enough to interpret that information the way the brain does. The microcomputer in the implant just disregards that part of the
data stream
."

But what if it doesn't?
MacKenzie wondered.

"That's great," she said aloud. "All of our computer simulations of the implants don't register that feedback at all. Somebody in class asked about it one day and the professor said that was a physiology question, not computer science, but it got me thinking. Maybe my project will work after all."

"What are you trying to do?" Dr.
Berry
asked with some interest.

"I want to design an implant utility that can take photos. I think it would be cool to be able to take a snap shot of what we see and send it as part of a message."

Dr.
Berry
shook her head. "Good luck. Nobody really knows how the brain processes all that information, so it's pretty ambitious to think that you could design an artificial system to do it. And besides, the implants aren't designed to do that. You'd need to design a new implant, and who would want to have a new one installed just to be able to take pictures?"

A new implant,
MacKenzie thought.
Maybe that's the secret.

"So why can we design an artificial system to give visual information to the brain, but we can't build one that uses the visual information the eye collects?" MacKenzie asked, wondering if she was playing this correctly.
Hanna's the one who should be doing this kind of thing,
she thought.