Страница 77 из 265
Jongleur's peculiar use of the VR interface slowed down her initial experiments, but since they were going to be the key to her success, she felt no urge to complain. She put her best analysis gear to work on the places where use of the clumsy, humanizing interface seemed most counterintuitive, guessing that these would be the most likely spots to find Jongleur's own co
I'm good, damn it. I'm good at this. I'm one of the best.
As her gear tracked the smaller, capillary links to larger links, pursuing their mazelike course through rerouters and firewalls, her excitement continued to rise. This was what it was all about. This was better than anything—better than money, better than sex. When the larger links converged into a single broadband data tap, she was so excited she had to get up and take another walk just to pump some of the nervous energy out of her system so she wouldn't explode. As she paced along the slick, shiny streets in the wake of one of the city's unma
She came back to the loft to find that the tracking gear had located its quarry and finished its work: she was spiked into Jongleur's personal system. There was still work to be done, of course. If it had been a true cold call, Dulcie would have needed weeks just to get into the simplest and least important levels, but now the passwords and other bits and pieces Dread had picked up enabled her to start nibbling away like a mouse in the wall-wiring. It still wasn't easy—the security mechanisms behind the ancient mogul's virtual playground were tough, smart, and adaptive—but because Dread's information was like having a fifth column inside the besieged system, the hardest part was now finished.
A management specialist would be in heaven here, she thought as she surveyed what now lay spread before her. You could spend days—weeks!—just tracking the custodial staff in that big tower of his. And look at this! Personal security—it's an entire subsection. He's got a damned army out there on his island. Just the quartermaster's requisitions take up ten times the storage I have in my entire system!
Even the most flawless spike-and-siphon had a time limit, of course, and even as she rode the crest of her triumph, Dulcie was keenly aware that things could go south very quickly.
Dread says Jongleur's out of contact, somehow—but someone must be in charge. You don't just leave a multi-trillion dollar enterprise empty like a laundromat while you step out for a few days. Good God, if J Corporation missed their payroll, the Slate of Louisiana would collapse.
Contemplating the corporate immensity spread before her, the thought of Dread's own hidden files plucked at her like a beggar's hand. How much is he hiding from me, anyway? How much can I trust him? I'm putting my life on the line doing this—what if he's wrong? What if his boss is onto him already?
Looking over Jongleur's empire, she had no doubt that at least one thing Dread had already told her was true: if they wanted to, Jongleur and his associates could make her vanish so quickly and thoroughly that Dulcinea Anwin might as well not have existed.
Only my mom will even notice. And she'll get over it.
In a way, she quickly realized. Dread had been right and she had been wrong. It was possible to copy information without surveying it first. In fact, it was imperative. There were so many thousands of files that seemed like they might have something to do with Dread's rather broad mandate, she could only designate whole blocks for duplication and send the data shooting down the high-speed links to the storage space Dread had given her—memory he had partitioned off for her from the Grail Network, because nothing she or Dread had access to would have given her anywhere near enough room.
In her mind's eye, Dulcie saw herself on one of those net game shows—what was that one, Loot?—throwing things into bags as fast as she could, stumbling over the objects of her own greed because they were too many and she was only one person.
She worked all night, and did not realize how much coffee she had consumed until she pulled the data-spike and collapsed onto her bed. Her entire nervous system seemed made of sparking, short-circuited electrical wires; she spent three teeth-grinding hours lying on her back until sleep came to her at last.
If she dreamed of lost animals or hospitals this time, she did not remember when she woke. The sleep just passed seemed like an impossibly long stretch of blackness, the attack on Jongleur's system weeks old, but after she had checked on Dread in his coma bed and made her way out into the gray day in search of some kind of meal that didn't come out of a wave-pak, she realized she had slept only ten hours, which wasn't too bad.
Nah, you're getting old, Anwin, she told herself. Used to be you would have slept for two hours tops, then been up taking the data apart.
Feeling much more substantial after the ingestion of a couple of rosella bud muffins, a fruit salad, and more coffee, she wandered back to the loft, hooked up her 'can and got into the Jongleur downloads. She had a perverse desire to wake up Dread, roust him out of his machine, and show him what she'd accomplished.
What is that—daddy stuff? She was disgusted with herself. "Look, I'm a good girl, see what I did for you?"
She was an hour into the preliminary investigation, and had found several of the codewords that designated Grail-related files, allowing her to pull a large number of them directly out of the mix and into the "relevant" pile without having to examine them, when she came across an anomalous object. It was a VR file, or at least it had VR code attached to it, but it also had some strange encrypted link embedded in it as well. It was in among a grouping of much more mundane files having to do with what she was loosely calling Jongleur's personal estate—powers of attorney, links to various legal firms and accounting operations, instructions to J Corporation management. She had spent time on the estate data hoping that it might contain some information on maintaining the Grail network in case of an emergency, reasoning that someone as old as Jongleur would want to make sure his pride and joy was kept ru
It was labeled "Ushabti," a word or name Dulcie didn't recognize, but she guessed from what Dread had told her about the old man's obsessions that it might be Egyptian. It had been created three years earlier and did not seem to have been added to or changed since. She triggered a quick search through her own system, and was given the information that ushabti was indeed an ancient Egyptian word, signifying a kind of tomb-statue. There was more detail available, but a quick glance turned up nothing relevant. Dulcie frowned and opened the file itself.