Tyro is a present-day story of bullets, binary and thunderously loud music. Set in Silicon Valley, it follows the Nash brothers' efforts to create sapient artificial intelligence - and to keep the lid on some terrifyingly dangerous side-products...

I wrote Tyro when I was in secondary school. Looking back on it now I see nothing but flaws in the plot and poor storytelling - if I was to go back and fix it up to my own standards now, it'd take a complete rewrite, which I honestly don't have the energy for. Nevertheless, people I've shown the story to have been very supportive (and have also pestered me to finish it). And it has some good ideas. So here is what will probably be the last version of the story. Hope you like it.

Contents

Monday

It was eight o'clock, and already the air was hot enough to be called a Summer's day back home in England. But this was California, where the chief export was sunshine, and the temperature would be ten or twenty degrees higher by noon.

Young, up-and-coming professional men in braces and convertibles cruised to work with the hood down and the sunglasses up. Some were lawyers, some were businessmen, and a small but ludicrously highly-paid proportion were genius software engineers who were heading for Silicon Valley, home and cradle of the very highest of the high-tech.

Glancing aimlessly over the early traffic, let the eye of the imagination alight on a silver BMW, cruising to the thunderously loud melodies of Oasis. There is a man in the front, singing enthusiastically along to his favourite tune - he looks like all the others, shades, braces, laptop on the passenger seat, slick hair, flash tie. He is in an unusually elated mood considering today is Monday. But for him, life is about as perfect as he ever imagined it could get. He is rich, he is young, he has a dream job and he loves every minute of it. His name is Gareth Nash, and at only twenty-five years old, he is one of the youngest millionaires in the Valley, the world even. He owns half of a software startup called Heuristic Algorithm Technologies, which he founded with his elder brother Bobby.

He pulls off the freeway and cruises down the blisteringly bright road into the outskirts of the town of technology. The HALtech building, coming up soon on the right, is modern, low, spacious, well lit, and is bristling with antennae and satellite dishes. It is built of yellow bricks, and is the architectural equivalent of a BMW - expensive, elegant and stylish. It is very high-tech - the walls are crammed with technology.

Gareth parks in the space next to his brother's Merc, grabs his jacket and laptop, and walks in. He has no briefcase: all the work in this company is electronic. "Paperless office" does not mean "office with just as much paper but more computers" in this company. Inside, Gareth follows the well-lit corridors and arrives at his cool, air-conditioned office. He puts down his laptop and hooks it up to his desktop PC. He sits down to begin the day, but something is missing. He stands up and leaves the office briefly.

A few minutes later he returns from the coffee machine, cup in hand. Now he is in the mood to begin the day for real. He begins to type a message to one of his employees.

From: Gareth Nash

To: Mark Quimby

Subject: Bert and chatterbots generally

I said I'd better sleep on your idea about getting an English specialist to work on Bert with us; having slept, my response is go for it. The company will be happy to pay him for the duration of the project, but we don't intend to employ him full-time unless we decide to make an upgrade or something - which may be possible, but don't get the poor guy's hopes up by telling him that. Feel free to arrange transport as you see fit.

I've found that you're letting Bert listen in on IRC conversations to build his vocabulary - I'd be very interested to see the algorithms you're using to do this, especially as many chat rooms have more than one conversation going on at once. Also, beware of the appalling spelling-punctuation-grammar levels you'll get from that source. Though I can imagine a bot that communicates like a net-head wouldn't be totally unacceptable to most of the folks on there.

I expect to see a list of recommended specialists in the near future, and keep me updated on Bert's code, as I'd like to compare it with current chatterbot programs.

He clicks, and the message zooms across the LAN to arrive, a quarter of a second later, at the back of the list of messages that are waiting on the mail server for Mark Quimby to answer them. Glancing over this list, Gareth observes that most of them are from overnight, but two are from early this morning, before Mark has arrived at work. One is his, sent a good four seconds ago now, the other is from his brother, who arrived in the office fifteen minutes before him. Gareth decides not to exercise his powers as all-powerful LAN master and read the message himself as that would not respect Mark's privacy and maybe spark a lawsuit. This is California, after all. Besides, Gareth notes with interest before he closes the list that the message is doubly encrypted, and Heuristic Algorithm Technologies is popularly believed to use the same encryption system as the US Army.

This is, of course, an urban myth, even though Gareth and Bobby encourage their employees to answer all questions concerning said encryption with the response "I can neither confirm nor deny this rumour," which merely serves to encourage gossip, because it is, of course, well-known that there's no such thing as bad publicity.

HALtech's encryption is, in fact, much, much better than the US Army's. Bobby was surprisingly insistent on having good crypto when the company founded its Californian base, and personally located the world's best cryptographer to do the job for them. The result of the cryptographer's efforts are that HALtech's LAN is protected by a very simple and impossibly difficult-to-break encryption scheme. All information used by the company is kept hidden and encrypted unless it is in immediate use. Screens turn themselves off automatically if there is nobody sitting in front of them. Employees also have the option of doubly encrypting internal messages so that nobody in the company except the recipient can decode them. Even Bobby himself cannot decode his message to Mark, though he of course knows what was in the message when he wrote it and can simply delete it if he wants.

It's for a very good reason.

***

With ordinary computer software, there are bugs. Always bugs. A bug is when a piece of software does something it wasn't designed to do, or doesn't do something it should, and in all cases the problem is not with the computer but with the programming. A computer will always obey, 100% accurately, the instructions it is given. Problems arise when the instructions, or the interpreter that turns the instructions into machine code, or the interpreter that turns the machine code into ones and noughts, or the layout of the silicon in the computer's microchips, contain flaws. The electrons always flow like they should, no matter what stupid things you accidentally ask them to do.

The point is this:

It's never the computer's fault that something doesn't work. The error is always in the instructions. Human error.

There is one exception, and it's called heuristic programming. A heuristic algorithm has been programmed so that it can redesign itself randomly. It is a program that evolves. A programmer with sufficient skill can, for instance, set a target of designing a pair of simulated legs that can walk forwards, and let the program redesign itself to make a set of instructions that will make the pair of legs get up and walk. Most of the skill lies is defining the target, and finding a means of testing each new randomly evolved program (or iteration) for suitability. For instance, the programmer must find a way of making the computer think that a pair of legs that falls down is not as good as one which can stand. Once the target is set and the tests are defined, the program can be set away to evolve as fast as it can, coming up with a very complex but acceptable set of instructions which it has written by itself. This relatively simple process can create, in a very small amount of time, programs which would otherwise have required weeks or even months of tedious manual programming and testing. And frequently, the end result is a great deal more efficient, not to mention shorter.

The only downside to this is that the code is often so chaotic that it's almost illegible. Making sense of any part of it is near-impossible, and though even heuristic code has bugs (the point here being that the bugs are the fault of the computer, not the programmer), fixing these bugs is infinitely harder than simply generating a new copy of the program from scratch.

Tracing its origins backwards, it seems that Heuristic Algorithm Technologies was unofficially founded by the two Nash brothers shortly before Bobby finished his university course. It wasn't a commercial enterprise at the time, but a kind of informal computer group which was devoted to studying the new field of heuristic programming. There were four founding members - Bobby, Gareth, an American student called Gene and an elderly genius called Ronald Schmidt. Ron had known computers for a very long time - if he were ten years older he would have had memories of valve machines. Ron knew and remembered pretty much all of transistorised computing history, and had given lectures about computing in the past. Unable to keep up with rapidly advancing technology, Ron's lectures in computing had given way to lectures in computing history, and it was at one of these that he had met the three guys.

Ron, they discovered, was nowhere near over the hill, but merely lacked the contemporary technical knowledge to implement his relatively radical ideas. Bobby and his friends set about putting his thought experiments into practice. Though Ron had been a pioneer in his day, that day was long past by the time he began showing Bobby, Gareth and Gene how to make ones and noughts breed. His idea was very nearly the earliest of its kind - others elsewhere were considering the possibilities of heuristics at the time, but only Ron's group were taking it seriously. Most Tuesday evenings, they met to break new ground.

After two years of on-and-off informal meetings, the three youngsters finished their studies at university. Gene decided that heuristics were not the way forward and went to do R&D with some multinational corporation. Bobby and Gareth stuck together for a few difficult years and eventually made a breakthrough.

Scientific research is a lonely job and not often a profitable one. You need money to work and in the absence of a big enough grant, you need to work at something other than your research to get money. Bobby and Gareth hit upon a solution to this problem that many pure-bred scientists would consider a kind of betrayal to their profession. They discovered how to commercialise.

They collaborated on a computer game called Agar, whereby the user can evolve, from scratch, their own race of creatures. Agar was the name of a kind of bacteria food, well-known in biological circles and used to cultivate growths of bacteria or fungi.

Single-celled bacteria were all the game could handle but the potential was enormous. Complexity grew from the simplistic rules on which it was built. Each strain had a gene sequence that could be programmed to reproduce, synthesise antibodies, home in on food sources, group with others of its type for protection, anything that the user could think of. The final aim was to create a number of different strains that would coexist happily in a series of pre-designed environments, each of which threw a new challenge at the user. It was released under the (at the time) provisional company title of Heuristic Algorithm Technologies.

And the game, though functional and simple, was fun. It was also moderately successful. With the profits they were able to develop both the game and their heuristic technology. Rapidly improving computer speeds meant that more complex algorithms could be handled, and faster. The brothers continued to work on Agar while developing another system which would protect users against the worryingly fast-growing threat of computer viruses.

Two years of mostly automated development later, HALtech released its first serious product. It was christened HALtech Antivirus and it had one feature that made it unique. Instead of being programmed to recognise all known viruses, like its competitors, Antivirus was designed to evolve, automatically, to recognise any kind of virus at all. It wasn't "intelligent" like so many programs were marketed as. It actually knew what a virus was. Anything that could automatically duplicate itself, wipe information, or send messages elsewhere was instantly captured, isolated, analysed, and reported. It was immensely powerful, but much more importantly it was self-updating. Nobody needed to buy upgrades or download protection against new viruses any longer.

AV became phenomenally popular. HALtech's owners were millionaires within the next year.

***

The Nash brothers moved to America, set up shop in Silicon Valley, and proceeded to rake in the cash. They hired the best technical brains in the world to develop for them heuristic security systems, educational programs, image- and voice-recognition systems, and search engines. The current project is a new program called Bert, who is a chatterbot.

No typographical error. A chatterbot is a program that you can talk to, or at least hold written conversations with, just like a human being. Chatterbots are generally fairly advanced but it is relatively easy to fool them. Sooner or later they always come up with "I don't understand" or an equivalent-meaning phrase, or nonsense.

Bert was different. Bert said "I don't understand: please explain that to me," and he understood the explanation. Bert knew 100,000 words of English, and learned from every conversation he had. At the end of a half-hour chat, he asked the user for an opinion, or suggestions, and adjusted his program accordingly. Next time round, he didn't make that mistake. Bert was going to be the best chatterbot on the net. The gap between chatterbot chat and human chat was closing all the time as programs become more sophisticated, and with Bert, Bobby and Gareth were hoping, if ambitiously, to close the gap completely.

Only fifteen people worked in the building - Gareth, Bobby, three groups of three employees each working on an individual project, three project managers, and the caretaker. It was hard to call them tech-heads, or internet geeks, or nerds. These guys were programming geniuses, but knew as much about biology and genetics as they did about hacking. They didn't wear white coats and carry clipboards around in clinically clean labs, but on the other hand, they didn't lock themselves away in dark rooms designing viruses for hours at a time. They had cars, kids, friends, lives. To them working for HALtech was a day job like any other.

Mark Quimby was the project manager on group one, which was working on Bert. Group two was led by Terence "Fat Terry" Benton, and they dealt with all aspects of the existing product range - marketing, tech support. Francis H. Sweet, who insisted on the middle initial, ran group three, which was currently working on putting a brain inside a robot. They were starting with Dwarfs, small triangular-headed remote-control cars which found their own way around, and adding their own software. Things were progressing nicely. Sneezy, one of the Dwarfs, was the company's unofficial mascot. Someone had put a little green woolly hat on it.

And of course, all fourteen of the computer-literate employees worked on their own pet projects in between the proper stuff. Bobby and Gareth encouraged this attitude, because 100% of HALtech's successful products had begun as pet projects. As the memo had read, "One day we might decide to design something that already exists, half completed, in your 'Junk' folder. Just as long as you meet all your deadlines, enjoy yourselves."

***

It was ten o'clock, and Gareth had to take part in an informal meeting with the creative brains of group one. Mark Quimby, and Al, Frank, and Johnny, who made up team one, were sitting around the table in the middle of their "lab". There was no formality here, nobody could behave seriously with a pair of triangular-headed Dwarfs wandering around their shoes. Everybody was equal, except Mark and Gareth, who they had to listen to. This worked out fine. Mark was generally a man of good and noteworthy opinions, and Gareth's objections would be ignored and talked about seriously afterwards.

The four guys were already alertly slouched around the big central table when Gareth arrived. The only acknowledgement he received was that Al took his feet off the table and Johnny pushed his baseball cap up off his face and leaned his chair back onto four legs. Johnny was a youngster, only eighteen, and talkative.

"Morning, my partners in crime," said Gareth jovially. He took off his jacket, sat down at the free seat, and put his laptop on the table. "You all know what I'm here for, so get on with it."

"Bert is doing fine," said Mark Quimby on behalf of the group. "We've got him conversing fairly well - only a few major grammatical problems and a heck of a lot of minor ones."

Gareth grimaced. He knew what programming was like. A small bug in the code could frequently result a complete rewrite of the whole program. "Will you be able to fix them?" he asked, in a tone that suggested that he didn't want to know the answer if it was going to be bad.

"...Yes," said Mark eventually.

"How much time?"

"Depends. Depends mainly on whether we're supposed to manually change the code or let the heuristic algorithm sort itself out. If we give it enough time and enough raw material to study (assuming we can find enough), we can get 95% accurate comprehension over the weekend. If we end up having to go in there and see what the problem is, we can fix it, but it might take upwards of two weeks just wading through the garbage and finding where the problem is."

"How did you come up with that percentage?"

Al spoke up. "We estimate it'll understand and respond to roughly 95% of all the questions you can think of to ask it, if you let evolve until next Monday."

"Isolated questions?"

"Mainly."

"That's good, but what we're really looking for is one that can carry on a conversation. Make connections, you know?"

"It can kind of do that already, it can associate a couple of sentences. But a properly structured conversation is gonna take some time," said Al. "We'll need to lay a lot of groundwork and goalposts before we can let it whizz off and do its own thing."

"Don't worry. I'm sure what you've got will be fine for most of the applications we're thinking of incorporating it into so far. Still, keep it all in mind for version two." That was a such commonly-used phrase around the labs, it had become an informal slogan. "What's the rating at the moment?"

"Hovering around 90%," said Mark, anticipating Gareth's next request and booting up the latest version of Bert on the nearest PC. "Have a go."

Gareth Nash sat down at the PC, and looked at the interface. Just a plain black screen with a flashing white prompt. Dull font. "Definitely have to improve this interface later," he muttered to the rest of them, as they gathered around his chair and watched him.

GNasher001 says: Hello, Bert.

Bert says: Hello, user!

GNasher001 says: You're very enthusiastic today.

Bert says: Yes, I am.

GNasher001 says: Why?

Bert says: Why what?

GNasher001 says: Why are you so enthusiastic?

Bert says: Because I have been programmed to be enthusiastic.

GNasher001 says: What is the meaning of life?

Bert says: Life, don't talk to me about life, guest.

"Has he been talking to other chatterbots?" asked Gareth.

"Yes he has, how did you guess?" replied Mark.

"I saw a very old article in a magazine about bots and their general usefulness. Very interesting. They printed a short conversation with a chatterbot called Newt. He came up with the exact same answer to that question."

"Is that a bad thing?"

"Maybe. The 'guest' certainly doesn't fit in with the rest of his conversation." Lawsuit, lawsuit...

GNasher001 says: Do you surf the web, Bert?

Bert says: Sometimes.

GNasher001 says: Can you find things on the web?

Bert says: I'm afraid not.

GNasher001 says: Do you enjoy life?

Bert says: Yes, I find happiness in each new day.

GNasher001 says: Is that a quote from somewhere?

Bert says: I don't understand.

GNasher001 says: Do you find happiness in each new day?

Bert says: Yes, I find happiness in each new day.

GNasher001 says: Are you happy?

Bert says: Yes, I find happiness in each new day.

GNasher001 says: Are you alive?

Bert says: I don't know.

GNasher001 says: I don't think you are.

Bert says: Why not?

GNasher001 says: I think you're just a computer program.

Bert says: Yes, I am.

GNasher001 says: I suppose you've failed this test.

Bert says: What test?

"Shut it down, please, Mark, I've seen enough."

"Turing?" asked Mark Quimby as he closed the program.

"Yeah."

***

It has been said that if any computer system becomes sufficiently advanced that it responds to any question, or any system of questions, just like a human, that system is a human. This theory was put forward by a man named Alan Turing and testing such a system is called a Turing Test. The Turing Test is one of the things that philosophers argue about a lot, and the final aim laid down in Bert's project specifications is to pass it. At the moment, that seemed to be a long way in the future.

***

"But that wasn't a real Turing Test. For that you need a person sitting in the other room who might or might not be the one actually talking. And you need a large number of people to try out the questioning."

"Details, details. Okay, I'll call it a mini-Turing test. My own personal scaled-down five-minute version. I talk to it for a while and decide whether it's human or not."

"Okay. Surely you didn't expect Bert to even get close to passing at this early a stage?"

"Not really. I'm impressed with Bert's progress, but that's a good couple of decades in the future at the moment," said Gareth, hoping and half-knowing that the boys were going to prove him wrong.

"Oh, I don't know about that," said Frank. "Heuristic algorithms can let a program advance thousands of times faster than ordinary programming techniques. We're aiming for an entirely human conversation in a year's time."

"That soon?"

"Yeah. Shouldn't be too hard. Just need to let Bert watch the IRC channels for a few months and we'll be laughing."

Gareth smiled to himself as he went back to his chair. The team followed him. "Tell me, when we reach that point, when Bert's inane chatter is indistinguishable from our educated discourse, will Bert be human?"

"It's a knotty question," said Johnny. "Turing says yes."

"And do you believe him?"

"I reckon that anything that I made with my own hands can't possibly be alive," said Frank.

"Alive isn't the same as human," said Gareth.

"Define them, then," Johnny challenged him.

"Alright then." Gareth thought for a second, and spoke. "In an old biology lesson that I took, there were something like seven properties that a thing had to have before it was alive. It had to react to changes in the environment. It had to feed itself, it had to grow... uh, and it had to move, and I've forgotten the rest. So that defines a living creature." He paused. "There are two ways of defining a human. The first one is biological, and it says that a human as a member of the species Homo sapiens, descendant of an ape, and so on, blah blah blah. The second is a lot harder to put words around, but it kind of quantifies the outlook that that being has, whether it is self-aware, how it thinks, how its feelings and emotions work. I've seen books in which aliens with a sufficiently human outlook have been defined, officially, as human.

"That second definition is how we end up looking at cats or dogs and seeing them as almost human, through their indication of sadness or excitement. Chimps are nearly human because they have a kind of language. It's a display of intelligence. It's acting on consideration instead of instinct.

"Obviously Bert can never fit the first definition of a human, because he doesn't even exist in a corporeal form, but only as a pattern of electron movements. Nor will he ever be officially defined as alive in the biological sense, except maybe on the borderline, a bit like viruses. However, if we allow him to evolve far enough, it is entirely possible that by mimicking other humans he will begin to react with emotional characteristics that are absolutely, 100% indistinguishable from a human."

"So you're saying that from a purely philosophical outlook, even though he's not alive, this time next year Bert could be a person?" asked Johnny.

"Right. Spotted any problems yet?"

Mark nodded. "A big one. If he's a person, how will he feel about being turned off?"

Gareth smiled and nodded to himself. "That is precisely the point that I wanted to bring up today. Here in our cosy offices we can discuss the philosophical angles for hours on end, but what we have to decide as soon as possible is what decision the courts will make. If we find the need to turn Bert off, or erase his program, we will need to know as soon as possible whether or not the courts will treat this as manslaughter. We need to decide this now."

"I suppose, they'll just perform a Turing Test on the machine, you know, give each jury member time to look it over, have a chat, and they'll come to the right conclusion."

"There's no guarantee," said Mark, "that they'll accept a Turing Test pass as legal proof of sapience."

"Why not?"

"It's all theory. There's nothing in law about this kind of thing. It would certainly be a legal first. Turing's Test is just a theoretical tool that was invented to aid people talking about this kind of thing. It's only a suggested method, not a universally accepted be-all and end-all. So that's a possibility but not a guaranteed one."

"The easy way is to ask the program," said Johnny.

"Yeah, like you just did," said Frank. "He said he didn't know, so we decided that means no."

"Will that satisfy the courts, do you think?" asked Gareth. He had already thought of that question, and a possible objection. He waited to see what the boys were going to come up with. In a way, this was more of a test than a meeting. See how much they've learned. Make sure they can think on their feet.

"Should do," said Frank.

"What if they suggest that we have programmed in that particular response?" Gareth prompted.

"We can let them ask it themselves in their own terms," said Frank.

"It's a chatterbot," said Johnny. "There's nothing to prove that we didn't just program in that approximate question and its approximate answer."

"But we didn't even program it! It built itself. We just set the goalposts, it kicked."

Gareth quickly booted Bert up again.

GNasher001 says: Bert, you are not alive.

Bert says: I understand.

GNasher001 says: Bert, are you alive?

Bert says: No.

"Contradiction," said Gareth.

"This is a chatterbot we're talking about, Frank," said Johnny, "it's quite capable of coming up with the same answer to a differently-phrased question. Or even a different answer with the same meaning."

"And I suppose they'll know that, too," said Frank. "Hmm. It's a toughie."

They thought for a while. Gareth watched with interest.

"Hey, how about this," said Johnny. "We remove everything we've ever told Bert to say. Then they get an official court computer brain or something to look at Bert's code and prove that we didn't write anything in. That'll prove it."

Mark said, "Excuse me, Johnny, have you seen how big Bert's program is lately?"

"How big?" asked Gareth suddenly. "I haven't been told about this."

"Sorry, Gareth, I meant to tell you-" said Mark quickly, trying to make sure he didn't get angry. Gareth had a nasty temper. "The main body of code is up to twenty megabytes. I meant to bring it up when I saw you, but you spoke first, it slipped my mind. I meant to. It's in the next report."

"Twenty megabytes! That's, what, half a million words? Sheesh, it'll take months just to read it all. And I know what a mess heuristic programs turn out like, they'll end up spending a decade working out what each bit does. Some court loony will end up writing his thesis on this program. Man. Didn't you know that it's company policy that if somebody reports a fault we don't try to fix it? We just send them a fixed version, free of charge? We don't do it for no reason!" Gareth was mad.

"Look, Gareth," said Mark, "We're setting a new goalpost, so the program's got to be as short as possible. I've seen the code, it's 99% garbage, and all that is set to vanish in the next few thousand iterations. We'll be okay. We just like to give Bert room to manoeuvre while he's evolving, that's all."

Gareth sat back in his seat and tried to cool off. Things aren't so bad, he told himself. Come on. "Well, that's nice to hear. What about the knowledge base? What's the size of that nowadays?"

"Half a gig, just like I said in the last report," said Mark Quimby. "We're guessing Bert's learned just about every important aspect of human life by now. You'd be surprised at the amount of stuff in there that doesn't appear in any kind of encyclopaedia."

"Oh, don't tell me," said Gareth. "Like how most people brush their teeth twice a day. How they park cars in parking spaces. The fact that they live in houses. You don't find that in many books, because it's just so obvious."

"That's why he's listening in to IRCs instead," said Frank.

"Smart move. Oh by the way, Frank, you said anything you create with your own hands can't be alive..."

"Yeah..." Frank looked a little edgy, sensing that his argument was going to be undermined.

"Then what about these scientists who've decoded enough genes to create their very own bacteria? Do they count as alive?"

"They can do that now?"

"Twenty years' time, yes."

"I guess that the bacteria would be alive."

"Precisely. Point made, point disproved. Ding, chalk one up to Mr. Nash. So what does that make the scientist?"

"A creator?" suggested Frank.

"A life-giver," said Johnny.

"A god," said Al.

"A god to the bacteria, that's for sure," said Mark. He put on a squeaky bacteria voice. "The one who gave our ancestors life, the father of our species, we are eternally grateful and will worship you for the rest of our lives."

"I'm sure the scientist will feel just great about that. 'Somebody down there is being smiled on by me,'" said Al. "Squish! Not any more."

"We're straying off-topic. We agree that one day Bert could be just as smart as you or me. He's smarter than Johnny already. What do we think will the lawyers say about that?"

"Oh, Gareth, we can't predict what the lawyers will say," said Mark. "Look, in what conceivable situation would we need to know whether Bert was human or not? Apart from us, who's going to worry about him being turned off?"

"Bert might."

There was a pause. Gareth grinned mischievously.

"Yikes," said Mark. "That would be a seriously tough dilemma."

"Not to mention one for the record books. First case in history of a computer program suing a human," said Johnny. "I can imagine the headlines: Computer Wins $100,000 Damages, Intends To Spend Money On Upgrades." He grinned. "Moves To Cushy CRAY In Kobe, Japan."

"But seriously, though," said Gareth, after Johnny had finished sniggering.

"If you want an honest answer," said Al, "I think the day that Bert wants to sue us is the day we start taking him seriously. If he's intelligent enough to worry about his own future he must be at least slightly sapient."

"Fair enough," replied Gareth. "How many people agree with that?"

"I do," said Mark. Johnny and Frank nodded.

"So we agree that the day Bert independently, without being prompted, acts in a way that must make him self-aware, is the day he becomes a person?"

"Yes."

"Okay. Glad that's settled." Gareth Nash checked his watch. "Golly, it's been nearly an hour. I gotta go, got work to do, people to see," he said, picking up his laptop and jacket. "Sorry to meet and run, keep me updated and that, see you guys later," and he left.

***

The team works, Gareth told himself as he strode back to his office. Imagination, intelligence and a bit of wit. To think where I dug them all up...

Gareth began considering what had been decided and mentally started to compose the message he would send to Bobby. Obviously it had dangerous implications.

What if Bert sued? Was he allowed to? He wasn't legally considered a person - or was he? He certainly wasn't an American citizen. What if he passed the test and took the oath over the Net? Was that allowed? How would he get a lawyer on his side? Should Bert's sapience be kept secret? How would he feel about that? How much would he sue for? How could they possibly pay him? Too many questions!

Calm down, calm down, he told himself. Deep cleansing breaths. One, Bert isn't alive yet. The guys said that's not for a few months yet, maybe a year, if at all. Two, Bert has no reason to sue the people who are the closest thing he has to parents. Don't let it worry you.

Mental note: never turn Bert off.

Yawn. Definitely need a holiday.

***

From: Gareth Nash

To: Robert Nash

Subject: Artificial intelligence and Bert suing us

Remember I chatted to you about that? I was worried we might get done for manslaughter if we turned him off. I had a long debate with Group One about it this morning, trying to work out if he's alive or not. We decided that if Bert is smart enough to sue us, he must be alive. Not the best news all year, huh? Going to investigate possible legal precedent when I get the chance. I'll mail you the results.

Gareth felt faint jealousy at the idea of a computer becoming sapient. It would have no religious problems. No queries about why it was here, who had created it, what its purpose was, what kind of 'life' it should lead.

Gareth just had time to send the message before a bright red and yellow window popped up on his screen. It was a warning from his Antivirus program.

Gareth's copy of Antivirus was the oldest, and the most advanced version existing in the world. It was still, technically, the same program he had first written in BASIC on the old BBC Micro back in England. His first heuristic program. It had been transferred from system to system, duplicated, chopped, cropped, adjusted, revamped, translated between sixteen programming languages of increasing sophistication and generally abused, but somewhere in what was now a highly streamlined half-megabyte of C++, were three lines of code that had originally been written over fifteen years ago. And it was still evolving. Even as he left his computer locked up when he left the office, the program adjusted and rewrote itself constantly. Ten evolutions per second per hundred megahertz of processor speed.

A head start of more than six years on the earliest commercial version meant that the Antivirus sitting on Gareth's hard drive had twice the power of anything else by any company anywhere in the world. Even the Army's version wasn't this good. Gareth had never let anybody use his copy, because it meant a lot to him, kind of like a painting does to an artist, but unlike paintings, computer programs could very easily be duplicated. This was his magnum opus, and unique, just how he liked it.

And it was this uniquely powerful security program that had just, at that very moment, discovered a new possible threat to the system. This was already worrying. It would have to be a very, very well-hidden threat - and, since HALtech's server was inaccessible from outside, it had to be internal.

Gareth read the warning. An unauthorised file had been discovered on his hard drive. It was a fairly small file, only a couple of kilobytes, and it had never shown up on his hard drive because it had cleverly hidden itself from Gareth's security measures. It hadn't even shown up when Antivirus had made one of its regular comparison checks between the total known volume of files in the system and the amount of hard disk space in use - which would have shown a discrepancy if a file had been using up space, but hiding itself. Instead it surreptitiously added a byte or two to the size each of the existing files, making them all unnoticeably bigger and filling up the gap.

Smart guy, thought Gareth, accessing the virus' code.

The code was very neat and tidy - obviously a pro. Equally, it had to be someone who knew the system inside-out, an employee in fact, because it had been encrypted with the right technique to slip into the system without setting off alarm bells. And the writer must have been a genius to slip under the customised Antivirus. Gareth was pretty sure that even he couldn't do that. Was there anybody in the building that skilled?

The unauthorised program was technically known as a system spy. The virus watched and analysed Gareth's every move on his computer, recording stuff that it deemed useful and sending it back to a secret web server whenever it had the opportunity. By now, if it had been there more than a day or two, it must have seen Gareth's password, and the contents of all of the doubly encrypted files he had read recently. Antivirus was unable to suggest when the spy had arrived on his computer, though inquiries were continuing. That could mean that the spy knew everything that was on his hard drive.

Three words - bewildering, terrifying, and dangerous.

Plus, if he deactivated the spy or sent a warning around to everybody in the company, that would alert the culprit. Nor could he take any action to preserve the security of his files without giving away what had happened. Gareth wondered if there really was any threat here... after all, there wasn't much important stuff in his folder, was there?

Don't be stupid, of course there was. There were names, addresses and phone numbers of people who would rather that they weren't public knowledge. There were the salaries of the whole company, and secret budgetary notices. And anyway, if anybody was this determined to find out what was in his file, that had to be dangerous, because clearly there was a very sinister aim in mind.

Then Gareth found the email address in the code. The mailbox of sorts, the drop point for the information. It wasn't one he recognised, but at least it provided a clue from which to start his investigation. Gareth started Antivirus finding information about the address. This would take some time, but he could do work in the meantime.

Gareth tried to be calm, and started typing up some relatively innocent reports on stuff that he wouldn't mind the spy seeing. He had to let Antivirus do its job.

***

Gareth's copy of Antivirus had a very advanced search engine built in, which enabled it to go and find useful information about any phrase (or "string" in computing terms) that he typed in. It first trawled the internet for mention of the string, and anything useful or relevant that it found was stored, to be followed up. At maximum search penetration, Antivirus would eventually find absolutely everything even remotely linked to that string, which invariably included everything available on the internet. Gareth had set the engine to only find information that has a relatively strong connection with the string that he has entered, which was the system spy's code. Stuff that it considered useful was forwarded back to Gareth later, when he asked for it, in a few hours' time.

***

It was five in the evening when Gareth finally stopped procrastinating and read the Antivirus' report. The finds were intriguing, not to mention gob-smacking.

The email address concerned was based at a certain computer in central London. However, though the computer was permanently online, there were almost no files on it. Antivirus had automatically hacked through the minimal security precautions, and searching through the skeletal remains of a sleek, customised OS on the machine's hard drive, it had located a program that automatically forwarded all mail directly back to another computer in America, the name and location of which were...

It was Bobby's computer.

It was Bobby's computer.

Gareth decided to read it a third time just to make sure.

It was still Bobby's computer.

Gareth gulped. There was absolutely no way this could have been a mistake. Bobby had been watching him like a hawk. Bobby was conspiring against him. His own brother was out to get him.

Why? Why turn against him? What was there on his computer that Bobby didn't know about? He had no secrets.

He found a spark of anger deep inside him. Nobody, but nobody, spies on Gareth Nash. If that's the way he wants to play it, so be it...

Temporarily ignoring his qualms and seeing where his anger would take him, Gareth opened up his brother's computer. As LAN master, he had the power to override Bobby's more orthodox security system, so that his entry would remain undetected. Hacking a HALtech computer from the inside was infinitely easier than from the outside - the main firewall was already behind you. Once you were through the primary encryption, the remaining defences were well within the reach of any advanced hacker like Gareth. And, to coin another metaphor, it is all the easier to demolish a building when you are the one who designed it.

The contents of Bobby's laptop were at once exactly what he had expected, and completely different. The folders were neatly ordered - Financial, Projects, Staff Stuff, Messages, Personal and Private. But at the same time Gareth felt odd, because this was like looking into somebody else's brain - everything worked, but in a different way from the way he was used to. Gareth spent some time exploring the first four folders and making sure nothing unusual existed. All the usual company details were doubly encrypted as per company security policy, but Gareth had copies of all them since he and Bobby ran the company together.

The Personal folder contained a number of confidential emails between the brothers, a diary, and Bobby's organiser. Most of these were also doubly encrypted. Gareth did not know Bobby's encryption key - nor, in fact, did Bobby, the encryption was that clever. There were a also few mystery files with names that just appeared as a jumble of punctuation and random numbers, whose contents could not even be guessed at.

The Private folder was where things finally started to get interesting. A version of Bobby's organiser was there, but comparing the two, Gareth saw that there were a number of extra appointments. Most of them were late at night - ten in the evening or later - and they all took place at the weekend. There were also some very, very secret emails - Gareth didn't know that when he saw them, but he read them with widening eyes and a rapidly accelerating heart rate.

From: Mack Magnusson

To: Robert Nash

Subject: This week's order

I have received a larger number of requests than usual this week. Payment will be 10% on delivery as arranged.

1. Two system spies. Must be configured to locate: otherwise protected information; passwords; serial or code numbers; information pertaining to the string "hi_meg_365". On unmarked Zip or Gig disk(s). Payment: US$10,500

2. One NetSpy camera program. Configured to record movement only. Must work at the target computer and forward information back to a user-specified drop point. Maximum image recognition capability. On an unmarked rewritable CD-ROM. Payment: US$45,000

3. One van Eck phreaking kit. Configured for laptop screens, thinnest possible wiring or radio link if possible. Decoding software on an unmarked DAT tape. Payment: US$24,200

4. One heuristic security-evasion program with space for customised software. On a white 31/4 inch floppy disk marked "White Rabbit". Payment: US$10,000

Total payment: US$79,700

My cut (95% of payment): US$75,715

Your cut (5% of payment): US$3,985

Meet me at the corner of Grape and 77th at 11:45pm on 12th August. Bring the goods in a plastic carrier bag and make sure no-one follows you. Payment will be by cheque.

Every single email was like this - a selection of orders, payment, and a late-night drop point which seemed to be different every time.

Gareth was stunned. Bobby was corrupt. Bobby was supplying illegal software and technology to a man named Mack Magnusson. Mack himself was taking orders from - presumably - a large number of people who would then use the goods for purposes known neither to himself or Bobby. The goods were always illegal and usually took the form of software, always obviously with a very specific (but carefully undisclosed) purpose in mind. The orders came weekly. More recent orders were larger than earlier ones.

How many of HALtech's employees were in on this? Could Bobby be doing the work on his own? Certainly a lot of the software could be easily modified from existing HALtech products, though the phreaking kit would require a lot of work. Maybe if there were repeat orders - which there were - that would save him a little work each time. So there was the possibility that Bobby was doing his dirty work alone, in his spare time. Perhaps in his workshop at home.

Bobby was being employed by a gangster, to design and manufacture illegal electronic weapons which were then sold to internet terrorists across the country, or even the globe. He was taking money for produce that, if he was even making a half-decent job of them, had the capability to destroy his - their - entire future market!

Was he insane? Had he had the intelligence to make sure that nothing seriously dangerous escaped into the open? What could he possibly hope to achieve, other than a few extra bucks on the side?

Gareth downloaded the Antivirus' report, copied the entire Private folder onto a disk along with it, and then left, head spinning.

***

Shadows lengthened as he drove home. For a few minutes, the ocean, along with the whole of Silicon Valley, turned that beautiful orange you only get during a deep sunset over a polluted city. Gareth, cruising along the surprisingly empty freeway, was too involved in himself to notice any of this. He'd seen it pretty much every day for the last few years, and it no longer amazed him, or even turned his head, especially in his current frame of mind.

Questions sped through his mind much too fast to be answered. Some were minor, some were heart-stopping. Something at the back was jumping up and down and trying to get attention, and was drowned out in the flood of confusion. Gareth's mind was buzzing with adrenaline, or it might have been the car engine.

***

He realised with a jolt how drowsy he was becoming. It was the come-down after the adrenaline making him sleepy. He yawned and rubbed his eyes, and suddenly became aware that he was drifting across the road. He moved the car back into the middle of the lane, thankful of the lack of traffic.

He saw a sign coming up on the right. It said, "Tiredness can kill - Take a break." He'd seen it every day for years, so it no longer had the impact it was designed to. He saw the words but couldn't be bothered to read them.

Gareth was a good mile away by the time the message sunk in, and he realised he was much too exhausted to be driving. He was a danger to other road users, not to mention himself. He sensibly pulled over into a lay-by that was coming up on the right, and turned off the engine. Then he wound his seat all the way back and tried to rest.

***

He woke up with a start, and noticed how dark it had suddenly become. He checked his watch - it was ten o'clock at night. He'd fallen asleep for four and a half hours. Sheesh. He was lucky he hadn't been attacked or something. His car was still here, right? Yes, so was the laptop. Phew.

Anyway, he ought to be getting home, he thought, sitting up straight and turning on the ignition. His head was nice and clear. Awake, alert and firm of purpose. Yeah.

He heard the ringing again. The ringing - that had woken him up. It was his mobile phone. Gareth scrabbled around the gear stick for the phone and hit the button for hands-free conversation.

"Hello?"

"Gaz?"

"Yes?"

"It's Bobby."

"Oh, hi!" What do I do? What do I do? thought Gareth frantically. Act nonchalant. He doesn't have an inkling. "What can I do for you?"

"Are you okay?"

"Fine, fine. Why?"

"I tried phoning your home number, but you weren't there."

"Oh, yeah. I was feeling really tired on the freeway home, so I stopped in a lay-by for a rest. Must have fallen asleep."

"You've been sleeping in a lay-by for four hours?"

"I know, it just sounds crazy, doesn't it? But I was seriously about to fall asleep at the wheel. I must need a holiday. Your call woke me up, so I'm on my way home now."

"Just as long as you're okay," said Bobby.

"Why did you want to talk to me?"

"Err... I think I've forgotten. Wait... No, it's gone."

"Huh."

"Typical. Anyway, see you tomorrow. I'll probably have remembered by then."

"Uh, okay."

"Bye."

"Bye," said Gareth, and hung up in faint puzzlement. He pulled into the road and drove away home.

***

Gareth suddenly felt sick. His whole life had just crashed down around his ears. Bobby, who had been such a close family member for so long that he had never even considered the possibility that he was the culprit. This completely blew apart his view of the universe. Everything, and everything else, had changed. His whole life was so much cold, damp spaghetti.

The thing with Bobby had worried him, but he had repressed that inside him, in the hope that he wouldn't have to face it properly. Now it had come back twofold.

He was not married, and had no kids. Their parents had gone to Scotland to buy a farm, and didn't even have a telephone to their name, rejecting contact with the world. They hadn't written in months. Bobby had been just about his only companion after college, while they set up the company, during the big move to America. It had been nice to have a big brother to look after him, and for support. There were some things only a brother could do. You can't hug your colleagues when you're sad and you can't borrow half a million dollars from your spouse. Bobby had always been there.

Now Bobby was an alien, another face in the crowd he didn't know anything about. Everything he had thought he always knew about Bobby was out the window. Bobby wasn't there to turn to any more. Gareth suddenly felt very, very alone, in a big world that was out to get him.

He needed to get home. The world was easier to face when there were lights on, a roof over his head, soft jazz on the radio, and a warm bed in which he could curl up and let the rest of the universe go whistle.

The thought itself made him feel happier.

***

He had just pulled off the freeway and started up the hill towards his home when, ahead of him, what he thought was a firework exploded. It appeared on the large hill towards which he was more or less headed, and although it looked very small, it was also a good couple of miles distant. It was large and red, and was not, he realised as he squinted into the distance, a riot of coloured stars and lights but a single, enormous fireball.

He felt the judder as the shockwave passed the car and heard the very faint boom. An explosion! A gas explosion? The electricity substation going foom? Heaven forbid, a terrorist attack? That was a residential area up there on the hill. That was where he lived. People could have been killed. People must have been killed.

Sirens began wailing. A few red and blue lights were already creeping up the streets towards where a plume of black smoke was beginning to rise, lit from below by the subsidiary fires.

***

Gareth drove on numbly towards his home, unable to get away from the rapid sinking feeling in his chest that he was also driving straight towards the sirens.

And then suddenly, as he pulled into his street, all the facts clicked together. Realisation washed over him like a concrete tsunami.

He had read Bobby's secret files.

There had been a system spy on his computer.

He hadn't deactivated it, for fear of blowing his cover, because he had been too stupid to realise that the spy would have seen the very first red and yellow window, and that his cover had been blown from minute one. Stupid fool!

Therefore the spy would have seen him hacking.

Therefore it would have notified Bobby.

All he had to do was to look up and check - yes - that the charred residue of the explosion had indeed been his house, and then he could collapse in his seat and, gratefully, allow the world to fade to black.

***

His first thought on regaining consciousness was - this is the worst day of my life so far. Please let it be tomorrow by now so that nothing else can go wrong.

He spotted a nurse-shaped figure by his bed. "What time is it?"

"It's coming up to five to midnight, Mr. Nash."

Oh well. What can happen in five minutes? "Where am I?"

"You're in an ambulance, just near where you collapsed in your car."

"Can I see my house?"

"Of course. Have you seen it since..."

"Yes, but just briefly. I'd like to take a closer look, please."

"Do you feel you can walk?"

Gareth sat up and swung his legs off the bed. His head seemed clear enough. "I think so."

The nurse helped him down the step at the back of the ambulance. The street was crammed with various emergency vehicles parked at skewed angles. There was a fire engine. A number of policemen bustled up to him but the nurse shooed them away. He saw a large number of reporters standing frustratedly behind the police tape, taking pictures.

He suddenly felt queasy. He ducked behind a police van so that they wouldn't be able to photograph him throwing up. A hand with a plastic cup of water in it appeared in front of him, so he washed his mouth out, mumbling a thank you.

Glowing faintly red in front of him were the remains of his house. There was almost nothing left. As far as he could tell, the entire upper floor had been blown apart, scattering a very large number of tiles around the surrounding area and through at least one window across the street. Wreckage from the walls were lying in the garden and street, but policemen were clearing that away. The lower floor no longer had a ceiling, or outer walls, but the inner walls between rooms were somehow still standing. Some of the furniture was almost recognisable.

The two houses next door were almost completely unscathed, Gareth noted bitterly.

He was not so much worried about the loss of property. He had insurance, and if that didn't work out, a couple of million dollars. What brought a tear to his eye was having lost the irreplaceable. Personal mementos. Family heirlooms. Photo albums. Childhood toys. Priceless memories... His entire life. Everything that had defined him and shaped him and made him what he was today, was now so much charcoal.

In the last twelve hours, his life had been, quite literally, blown to pieces. He had lost his family and he had lost his past. Now it seemed like there was little point in trying to put together a future. He just wanted to curl into a foetal ball and go to sleep for ever.

Gareth began to sob. The nurse laid a hand on his shoulder as they began to shake, so he turned around and gratefully accepted a hug from her. "Was there anybody else in there?" she asked.

Gareth rapidly tried to think of something dramatic, ironic and witty to say, but was forced to settle for a lame "No." He'd never had this much emotion before.

His watch chose that moment to chime midnight.

Tuesday

From: Gareth Nash

To: Mark Quimby

Subject: My absence

This news will shock you. It's all over the papers in any case, but I wanted to contact you personally.

Last night I arrived home to find that someone had detonated a bomb in the roof of my house. It had gone off late in the evening and I would have been killed in the blast had I not stopped in a lay-by for some shut-eye on the way home. It is fortunate that the device was timed and not set off by remote control, or a trigger inside the house.

You will understand, therefore, why I haven't come into work today. The police are doing all they can to find out who is responsible and I have my own suspicions. On the advice of the police, I have gone into hiding for now. Do not attempt to contact me. Copies of this email have been sent to the other team heads and you can read them out to your crew. The police know I am sending this to you so you can mention it if they question you. Don't talk to the press.

Gareth sent the message into the electric ether, and breathed out. It always helps to share your pain with somebody else, and it's reassuring to know that someone out there cares about you. His connection with the compassionate side of the world restored, he no longer felt as alone as he had.

So where did that leave him? Sitting on the bed in a drab, beige hotel room somewhere in a part of town he had never heard of, with not a scrap of his life remaining and somebody trying to kill him. All the clothes in his wardrobe were provided by the police, and had quite obviously been worn by a large number of other people in their time. He felt strange wearing other people's clothes.

Right, so number one on the list is to find an internet clothing retailer and order some decent stuff to wear, thought Gareth as he unplugged the modem cable from the wall and wound it back up. Like some underwear I can call my own and a shirt I'd be prepared to step out of the door wearing. Probably have to get the cops to do that for me, to avoid giving my location away... wonder if they'll take a cheque...

Number two was to work out which of his possible next moves he was going to take. That would involve first inventing one or two next moves, because at the moment he had precisely zero to choose from. Was he permitted to do anything other than stay here? How much of what he knew should he tell the police? He'd managed to argue them into questioning him that afternoon instead of at 1 a.m. as they had been planning.

Bobby was embroiled in this somehow, he knew that for certain. But there was doubt in his mind too, a lingering presence who refused to talk to him and explain why it was there. Could Bobby have done such a thing to his brother?

It seemed very unlikely, given how many years they had spent together, in the same financial boat. But who knew how much of that affection had been phony.

Gareth's thoughts dissolved into that sizzling mess that is too fast-paced, vague and reliant on feelings instead of words for narrative to follow easily, but he got to the end with a simple black and white decision.

1. Bobby really hated his brother, and had been falsifying all the generosity and I'll-be-there-for-you for months, or years, depending on how long he had been corrupt for. He was an active and willing partner in an illegal trade. He was very suspicious and had installed espionage software on Gareth's computer to make sure he did not discover anything incriminating. He had even attempted to kill him to prevent word getting out. This attempt had failed.

2. Bobby still cared for his brother, and was being forced to do something he didn't want to by means of blackmail. He had arranged the bombing against his will, or maybe somebody else had done it instead. Someone who he was collaborating with, with whom he would now be arguing for his brother's safety.

Right now, it seemed that the obvious choice was number one. It was impossible that Bobby would have started the illegal trade voluntarily, because he was clearly being paid for it. And Bobby couldn't have been pleading with Mack, or whoever the top dog was in this organisation, because he had failed completely.

Should he tell the police, then? Well, yes. Someone was out to kill him, and he required far greater security than he currently had. Here in this undefended out-of-town hotel he felt incredibly exposed. He had been suspiciously watching cars parked outside for hours now, although only this second, as he thought about it, had he noticed. As soon as the cops were hot on Bobby's tail, he would feel much more secure.

But still... Bobby... There were nagging doubts. Even if he was now a cold-blooded killer, Gareth would feel incredibly guilty if he incriminated his brother. Could he send a sibling to jail? Could he do that?

Gareth let out a loud grunt of indecision. He stood up and paced up and down the room restlessly. He needed space to concentrate.

Okay, let's look at it from another angle. What would Bobby be doing now? Suppose Bobby were truly responsible. Then he would have known that he would be one of the prime suspects, whether Gareth accused him or not. So it would have been prudent to book a flight out of the state beforehand, or at least have some form of escape route that wouldn't attract the attention of the police. Bobby was smart. He had Mack on his side, and the rest of his organisation, however big that was. They had at least a quarter of a million dollars at their disposal, according to the orders, plus Bobby's personal fortune. There were ways and means...

Suppose Bobby were not responsible, but acting under duress. He would know that he was a suspect, and so would instantly throw himself on the mercy of the American legal system. This he had quite clearly failed to do.

But on the other hand, what was absolutely, unquestionably, one hundred percent, cast-iron, bet-your-life certain, was that he was guilty of corruption. And of supplying illegal software for illegal purposes. That was a whole lot of illegality. There would be no getting away from that.

Whichever way you looked at it, Bobby was guilty and he would be locked up. He would have the police and the FBI and every other legal enforcement agency in the country after him. Plus he was associated with Mack Magnusson, who may be already known to the police and wanted in any number of states. So it would make sense to make use of the vast quantities of money and however many shady contacts at his disposal, and make his escape. New identities were cheap.

So whatever the situation, Bobby was a) guilty and b) if he had any sense, on the run. So he might as well tell all for all the good it would do.

And then the thought occurred to him: I might as well say nothing for all the good it will do.

Now he was back to where he started! Blast.

No, I will tell all, thought Gareth. Bobby is a criminal, and he must be brought to justice. I might get into trouble if I don't and the police find out anyway. Besides, I'm sure the police will have a lot of fun with Mr. Magnusson when they catch up with him, and I don't owe him anything.

The phone rang.

Gareth's hotel room had a phone in it. He had insisted on it because there were people he needed to contact, by email if not the usual way. This would presumably be a policeman calling to ask him something. Or something. Gareth answered it.

"Hello?"

"Gareth?"

"Bobby?" said Gareth loudly, going to the door and opening it. There were no cops around. Blast. No way of tracing the call...

"Gareth, you must listen to me."

"No, you listen to me, you little piece of scum," said Gareth angrily, slamming the door. "I don't know who you are anymore. I thought you were my brother but you're obviously not. Don't play dumb with me, don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about because you know exactly what I'm talking about and I know perfectly well that you know. You've broken the law, Robert Eric Nash, and you'd better have a good enough reason for it and you'd better be able to explain it in five seconds flat because otherwise I'm telling the police everything and I mean everything, and you're looking at six years to life for this night's work, pal. Go. Five..."

"I can explain."

"Hah! Four."

"Please listen to me!"

"Three."

"Look, this is on the level."

"Two..."

"I can explain everything, but it's going to-"

"-one-"

"-take a little more than five seconds-"

"Too late! Goodbye!"

He slammed the phone down. The nerve! He could feel the blood pumping through his forehead. Right now he felt like putting his fist through a window.

Fortunately, Gareth was smart enough not to do this.

***

Gareth cajoled a policeman into ordering a selection of clothes and other essentials from a nearby store that promised to deliver within the hour, a promise which they kept. He took the opportunity to have a bath and a shave.

"We'll be up here to collect you for the interview at about half past three, Mr. Nash."

"'kay!" Gareth had called from the bath.

Feeling the cleanest he had for what seemed like years, and wearing jeans and a decent shirt and jacket, Gareth sat down on his bed and began to mentally put the facts in order, which was not as simple as it seemed. There turned out to be a great many facts, and not much order.

Half past three arrived, and a quarter of an hour later, so did two police officers and a shortish, vaguely rodent-like FBI agent, who introduced himself as Luke Danowitz and flashed a licence at him. "We're ready for you now, Mr. Nash."

They led him downstairs to the car park, where two police cars were waiting to take him to the station for questioning.

Gareth sighed, and squared his shoulders. This was going to be a long afternoon, he could tell. It might even last until next morning.

***

The interview was indeed long. Gareth started at the very beginning.

"My version of HALtech Antivirus is the most advanced in the world, as far as I know."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. Even more powerful than the one the US Army have."

"How can you be certain of that?"

"Because I wrote it for them," said Gareth gleefully.

***

Danowitz asked a lot of questions that Gareth himself had not considered.

"Have you any idea why you never realised that your brother must have known about your illicit hacking until you got home?"

"I was working too hard. I had too much on my mind at once to make connections. To be honest, I probably wasn't thinking very clearly. I'm told I have a bad temper when I get upset."

***

"Have you ever heard of Mack Magnusson before?"

"No. Never."

"Your brother never made any reference to him, never had any unexplained appointments?"

"Not that I can remember, but I don't follow my brother's affairs that closely."

***

"Bobby called you?"

"Yes, he did. He had the nerve to try to explain it all to me. I was so mad at him that I slammed the phone down on him before he could say anything. I let my temper get the better of me again."

"Were there any police officers around at the time?"

"No, I even checked the hall outside. I thought you might be able to get a trace on the phone if you had the chance but there was no-one around."

"Presumably he called you on your mobile phone?" Danowitz asked.

"No, the phone in the hotel room."

He watched Danowitz write this down, and then pause while he looked at what he had just written.

A cold feeling stole over Gareth as Danowitz slowly looked back up again. Their eyes met, and the agent whispered, "He knew where you were."

***

Danowitz was already rising and heading for the door to the interview room. There was a cop waiting outside, an immensely tall youth by the name of Finnegan.

"Call Hawking at the hotel," Danowitz commanded, speaking of the police officer who had been left behind to perform the lonely task of watching Gareth's empty room. It was now about ten o'clock in the evening.

"Hawking here," said Hawking on the radio, in the guilty tone of somebody who has been dozing on the job.

"Hawking? Agent Danowitz."

"Yes?"

"Where are you?"

"I'm in Nash's bedroom. What's happening?"

"Has anyone been in there since we left?"

"The cleaning lady turned up at about five, so I let her in. But I kept an eye on her."

"Did she leave anything in the room?"

"Don't think so."

"In a bin, down the side of a seat cushion?"

"Bin's empty, uh, no seats in the room, though-"

"Go to the window."

"What?"

"Go to the window. Is there anyone outside? Hovering within eyeshot? Has anybody been hanging around?"

Hawking scanned around with a pair of binoculars. He couldn't see much in the darkness, and the street lights weren't helping much. There were cars in the car park, but there always were, and the cars parked opposite looked empty...

"Can't see anybody..."

"Have you got binoculars?"

"Yes, I am using them, you know," said Hawking sullenly.

"Have you looked at all the windows opposite?"

"Yes, but half of them aren't lit."

"Use your flashlight."

Hawking picked up his flashlight from the bed and shone it at the darkened windows opposite in turn. The light over such a long distance was fairly dim and spread out, but there was enough to see into the rooms by. "Empty, empty, curtains drawn, empty, boarded up, curtains, blinds... what are you looking for, some lady undressing for a bath?"

Hawking had so far failed to spot the woman undressing for a bath at one of the third floor windows.

"Just keep looking."

"They're all empty so far."

"Did you start at the bottom of the building?"

"Yes."

"Try upstairs. Look at the roof."

Hawking scanned along a series of boarded up windows. "Boarded up, boarded up, boarded up, boarded up, all this row's been boarded up... wait a minute..."

"What do you see?"

"Some kind of silhouette... kind of like a cat lying on the window sill, but it's hard to make up the exact shape at this distance. It's got a sort of... it's moving, hold on while I focus a bit more..."

From the speaker of the phone came the noise of smashing glass, a groan, and a thud.

"Hawking?"

"..." gasped Hawking. "...s..."

"Hawking!"

There was no reply.

"Hawking!"

Still silence.

Danowitz and Gareth looked at each other in horror. "Sniper," they chorused.

"He's been killed!" said Gareth.

"We've got to get there," said Danowitz.

"Right!"

"Not you," said Danowitz, pointing to Finnegan, "you. We'll take your car, get on the radio and have a SWAT team meet me there." The cop nodded and reached for his radio. "Nash, you stay here for safety." In a couple of seconds, they were gone.

***

Gareth was left standing in the corridor on his own, and at a bit of a loss. He conscientiously went back into the interview room and tidied up Danowitz' scattered notes where he had left them, and put them back in the folder in as best an order he could manage. The folder he put into Danowitz' briefcase and locked it.

He sat in the dimly-lit room for a minute or two, then announced "Stuff this", picked up his laptop and opened the door in search of a spare telephone socket.

***

Ten minutes later, Danowitz and Finnegan screeched to a halt just around the corner from the building that the sniper had been in. It was an apartment block, half empty and boarded up. Just visible across the road was the hotel, and a quick check confirmed that Gareth's window had been smashed.

"Somebody definitely shot him," said Danowitz, squinting into the binoculars. "Tell the ambulance crew to get up there as fast as possible. Make sure they use the kitchen entrance and tell them to stay away from the window. Keep me informed on Hawking's condition once they get to him."

"What if he's dead?" asked Finnegan.

"Then inform me. Is the SWAT team here yet?"

"Three minutes."

"He could be long gone by then. Blast it, we don't even know if he's still in the building. Tell them to keep an eye out for suspicious-looking cars on the way over."

There was an electronic bleeping noise.

"Drat." He reached inside his coat for his mobile. "Danowitz."

"It's me, Gareth."

"Gareth who?"

"Gareth Nash, who do you think?"

"What's the problem, Nash, and this'd better be good 'cause we're busy up here."

"The sniper is escaping. I can track him for you and help you catch him."

"How do you know?"

"Long story."

***

Gareth had succeeded in finding a telephone socket that wasn't currently in use. It was at ground level below a ledge with a phone that currently bore a yellow note saying "out of order." He had discreetly pulled the plug out and replaced it with his modem line, which he had run back to the interview room, where he now sat in the dark using his laptop. He had also located Danowitz' mobile phone number in the briefcase.

HALtech, which supplied customised software of all types to all comers with a sufficient amount of money and a satisfactorily creditable background, had served a great deal of customers in its time. Information storage and retrieval systems, LAN protocols, a whole series of security protection software ranging from reasonably to astonishingly secure depending on price, encryption programs, voice and image recognition, and some light hardware on the side.

There was one thing that Gareth had always ensured. Every program, whether going to the smallest businessman or the largest MNC, had had built into it a simple back door. No employees knew about it, after all, heuristic programs were even more chaotic to read than normal ones. It was literally impossible to locate unless you knew it was there. Bobby had had no idea, though in fact he himself had implemented similar precautions in some of the software. Anybody, anywhere in the world, if he were using HALtech software, could at any time have that software taken over by Gareth and used for his own purposes.

Which was where the job from NASA had come in so useful.

They had wanted an image-recognition system. Not for human faces, but for infrared images of up to half of the Earth at once. HelterSat-3AX was one of three satellites in a ninety-minute polar orbit, equipped with HALtech software letting it scan, record and transmit what it considered to be useful information back to NASA. It was a very, very smart satellite, designed to record mainly important weather patterns and look for order in the chaos. It had three ultra-high-resolution infrared cameras, one of which had currently been temporarily dropped from use by the satellite's AI. According to the operations record, it did this from time to time, for any amount of time between a second and a few minutes. It didn't seem to have worried the NASA boys much, because they had not phoned up and demanded a replacement, though it was clearly a programming fault.

How long Gareth would be able to control the free camera before the guys in white coats became suspicious, was an unknown factor. He hoped that the cops would have time to run the sniper to the ground before he was forced to tune out.

No matter. In the meantime, he had the third camera focused on the suburb, and the fleeing vehicle of the sniper was a dull orange on the predominantly dark blue background. "Suffice it to say, I have contacts in high places," Gareth said into his mobile, grinning at his private joke. "And an infrared image of his car on my laptop. I can guide you to him but I don't know the names of the streets so you must do exactly as I say."

"How are you doing that?"

"Less chat, more vroom, okay?"

"Okay. Can you see us?"

"Yes. Are you in the car?"

"Yep."

"Turn right across the front of the hotel."

The car on the screen pulled away. "The sniper is heading east. He's about to pass under the freeway."

"I know where that is. If you can spot a shortcut, it would help."

"He about to reach it... right, he's gone under, heading for a roundabout."

Danowitz slammed on the gas. The freeway was a only half a mile away, he could catch the felon in a couple of minutes. "Where's the SWAT team?" he asked Finnegan.

"Two minutes from the hotel in the other direction."

"Get them on the radio and relay our position."

As Finnegan spoke into the handset, Danowitz picked his mobile back up again. "Any more news?"

"He's gone across the roundabout and is still heading east. I think he's doing thirty to forty mph, you should catch him soon. I don't think he knows you're on his tail. I suggest you kill the siren, I can see the flashing lights from up here."

"Don't tell me how to do my job, buster."

"Okay, okay... Turn right at the next junction and then take the second left."

Danowitz pulled the car into another deserted road, and accelerated up to 70mph. He screeched into the street Gareth had indicated. "Keep going along here as fast as you can," said Gareth. "This street runs parallel with the one he's on, and there's about half a dozen places you can catch him if you turn left."

"Nice work," said Danowitz, accelerating again.

A couple of seconds later, Gareth asked, "How fast are you going?"

"Seventy-five-ish."

"Then he must be onto you, he just went from forty to sixty in a couple of seconds. I think he's trying to get away."

"Affirmative," said Danowitz, screeching left into a narrower street and out into the road that the sniper was on.

"You should have visual contact by now," said Gareth, checking his watch. Two minutes.

"Almost. Distance?"

"Two hundred metres I think, but there's no scale on this map," said Gareth, scrolling his screen to keep up with the two speeding cars. The infra-red image was very slowly tilting backwards as the satellite orbited south. Within forty-five minutes, he would have to switch satellites; hopefully, it would be all over by then. "I can guarantee he's spotted you though - wait, he's taken the next right."

"Gotcha," said Danowitz, pulling right.

"Left at the end, no wait, scrub that, go straight on," said Gareth. "He's going straight on."

"Where do you think he's heading?"

"There's a river ahead, but that doesn't seem a likely target."

"Agreed. Any big buildings?"

"Some, but I couldn't say."

Danowitz' car reached another junction. "Straight on?"

"Straight on."

"Where's the SWAT team, Finnegan?"

"They're still trailing by a couple of miles, sir."

"Where could he be heading for?" mused the FBI agent.

***

The sniper was a professional, who had been doing his job for a large number of years. He took any job for the right amount of money, regardless of who owned the money. He didn't know who had been employing him for this job, but he did know that ten thousand dollars down payment and a further fifteen on completion was not to be sneezed at.

His actions had been noticed by the police before, but he himself had not. The experience of being chased by the law was new to him. In his life he had rarely given thought to a contingency plan - this time, he had merely planned to return to a rendezvous point where he would be paid, and leave.

However, now and then, he had briefly given thought to a possible last-ditch escape route. It was risky, and could go horribly, horribly wrong if he messed it up. He had never expected to use it. Still, better risk death, than the wrath of his employer when he or she discovered he had failed. The penalties for failure were usually very unpleasant, and were almost certain to be administered whether he ended up in the hands of the police or not.

***

"He's heading for a dock area," said Gareth, checking his watch once more. Three minutes of downtime. He was already pushing it. "Get a move on."

"We need directions!"

"Go left now."

"Check."

"The sniper is headed north, he's heading along a row of what I assume are warehouses."

"Good, we're on it. Where do you think he's aiming for? It must be somewhere in the docks."

"One sec." Gareth scrolled up the screen to the speeding sniper's destination, and was puzzled when he saw nothing ahead. "Unless he's stopping in one of the warehouses, which I doubt, he's gonna go straight off the edge of the pier."

"Could he be planning to turn round?"

"He'd have to make it a screaming one-eighty, and I don't think there's space..."

"Has he stopped yet?"

"No, he's still going! He's going to go over the edge... He's gone over the edge!" Gareth watched in horror as the speeding car hurtled straight off the edge of the pier, and into the river. Then a rose of white expanded across the screen where the car had been, cooling to yellow and red and then fading. Even from orbit, there was no question it had been an explosion. The car had exploded.

"Did you see that?" he gasped.

"You bet we did," said Danowitz. His car was slowing as it approached the edge of the pier.

"Car's don't just explode like that, do they?" quavered Gareth.

"No," said Danowitz.

"Did you shoot at him?"

"No."

"Did anyone else?"

"No," said Danowitz as he and Finnegan climbed out of the car and walked towards the edge of the pier.

"Then what could have caused the explosion?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

Danowitz was silent.

"I smell a rat," said Gareth.

"Me too."

There was silence from both ends of the phone. Danowitz watched the ripples spread across the dark water to the pier. "I'm going to check the video record of those last few seconds," said Gareth, rewinding the image while he continued to record. The car had sped towards the edge of the pier. About seventy miles per hour.

"You never did tell me how you're doing that," said Danowitz.

"Quiet."

Gareth squinted and magnified the image. He could swear that the car was decelerating. That, at least, made some sense. And the car door was opening. He could just see the sniper's arm...

Gareth glanced back at the real-time window, and frowned.

"You and Finnegan are still there, aren't you?"

"Yes, of course we are."

"Okay. Keep it quiet, don't react too loudly."

"What is it?"

"Was there anybody else in the police car?"

"No, just us two."

"Keep quiet. There is a third person on my screen."

"Who?"

"I think it's the sniper. It's just possible that he dived out of the door before the explosion. I'm guessing he must have pulled the pin on a hand grenade and dived out to try to fool you."

"Where is he?" said Danowitz quietly, drawing his gun. Fortunately, this detail was too small for Gareth to make out.

"Face directly out across the river, and he's at about half past five behind you. He's creeping towards the car, but he's probably in total darkness so I doubt you'll be able to see him. Are the keys still in?"

"Yes."

"Do you need any help?" Five minutes clocked, he'd better make this quick...

"Just keep watching. Freeze, FBI!" barked Danowitz, spinning round and aiming at the car.

And then a bright red and yellow window popped up on Gareth's screen, and NASA was onto him.

***

Gareth threw away the mobile phone, blurted an expletive, and scrabbled at the keyboard. NASA was tracing his location, and they would have it as accurately as they liked within five seconds if he did nothing to prevent them. Gareth had never bothered to create some sort of protection against such an event, otherwise the industrious blocking of a protection bot would have bought him at least another two minutes, but there was no time for hindsight now.

He sent disconnection messages, but was returned with a message that something wasn't letting go at the other end, and then the video record turned into static-

Then he realised why he had never thought about trace protection-

And he yanked the modem lead from the back of his laptop.

He sagged with relief, and exhaled. There were a few moments of silence.

Gareth leaned forward and picked up the phone from where it had landed, and discovered that Danowitz had hung up. Presumably he needed no further help.

Peace at last. Gareth relaxed into his chair, and stared blankly at his computer, and his brain took this moment of relative inactivity to catch up on recent events.

Very slowly, all the other facts reassembled themselves in his head, and a terrible expression crossed his face, as realisation dawned. His lips moved as he repeated what he'd just thought again, slowly. He tried it again, but they still pointed to the same conclusion.

"Oh my..."

And with the knowledge that Bobby was most likely completely innocent sinking slowly into his mind, Gareth grabbed his mobile phone again and stabbed "Redial".

***

"Danowitz," said Danowitz.

"It's Gareth."

"Gareth who?"

"Gareth Nash, I thought we'd already established that."

"Okay, okay. What is it?"

"Did you catch the sniper?"

"No."

"He escaped?"

"No."

There was a pause while Gareth worked this one out.

"You shot him?" he shrieked.

"Look, it was an instinctive reaction, right?" said Danowitz, looking down at the corpse that lay at his feet. "We had him cornered behind the warehouse, I was going round one way, Finnegan was going the other, and you know how when you're not aiming at someone you're supposed to point your gun upwards for safety? Well, it doesn't help when he jumps on you from the fire escape!"

Gareth stuttered, "I'm amazed you can sound so unfazed after having killed somebody."

"I'm usually fine at first. I'll probably start getting suicidally depressed about it on Friday evening, and spend the weekend getting drunk. I'll be over it by next Monday, don't worry."

Gareth was briefly dumbstruck with horror. "Remind me never to start discussing ethics with you."

"Yeah, that's how wars start," said Danowitz, laughing.

"...Anyway, I've just thought of some new evidence."

"You just thought of it?"

"Don't put it like that."

"Well, it sounds kind of unlikely, doesn't it?"

"Okay, to put it another way, I thought of a new way to look at the evidence which changes things considerably."

"Yeah?"

"Okay, think about this. One. Just before the bomb is detonated at my house, Bobby calls me. But he can't remember what he's going to say. Two. A few hours before the sniper attack at the hotel, Bobby calls me again, in an attempt to explain something to me. But I don't give him a chance to explain anything, and hang up. Three. I open up his secret email orders and discovered what he is supplying to Mack Magnusson. I find that Bobby is only receiving about five percent of the total payment. That's only about half a grand per item... But I've made more money than that during this phone call, so that doesn't count for much. Four. It is company policy to encrypt all information, and employees are advised to doubly encrypt private information to hide it from other employees. But Bobby mysteriously doesn't encrypt any of the files pertaining to his illegal activities. You can see what I'm getting at?"

"He's an innocent participant being blackmailed into something he doesn't want to do? Yes, I see where you're going."

Gareth sighed. "What do you think?"

"It's a possibility. If this goes to court I can see his lawyer using those arguments in his defence."

"But how likely is it that it's true?"

"Well, I don't know him as well as you do, but I'd say fifty-fifty."

"Well, let me put it in context. Bobby is the most paranoid man I've ever met when it comes to data security. He personally demanded the best encryption in the world when we founded our American base. So for someone like him to carelessly leave his most secret documents unencrypted for the world to see is... unthinkable. Secondly, judging by what is actually being ordered from him, he's putting a good few hours of work every day into something that, on our pay scale at least, is practically small change."

"Yes, it's pretty convincing when you put it like that."

"Well, what shall I do?"

"The police and I are going to proceed with what we'd initially planned and bring him in for questioning. And I hardly like to say this to you, of all people, Nash, but whichever way you look at it, Bobby is guilty of trafficking in illegal software, and will most likely be sent to jail."

"But-"

"You just sit tight where you are - you're still at the police station, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"And we'll be back in about an hour."

Gareth hung up and bit his lip. What to do now? He'd decided only twelve hours ago that he would send Bobby to jail regardless. But that had been before he knew.

Blasted moral dilemmas.

Bobby should go to jail...

...but it's only software. Only ones and noughts. There were worse crimes. He hadn't, like, killed anybody, had he?

Had he?

Well, there was one way to find out.

***

Gareth had left the police station unchallenged, hailed a taxi and now he was heading for a newly-opened Cyber Café in the middle of the district. He was surprised to see it open at this time of night, it wasn't even the week-end.

Come to think of it, events had gone so quickly, it was impossible to remember what day it was. Gareth checked his watch. Tuesday. Ten to eleven on Tuesday evening.

The café was named in bright neon pink outside, and decorated in tasteful steel and iMacs inside. There were one or two people sitting in front of coffee and web pages. Oh well, there were plenty of people in this city who worked nights. Guess some of them must need coffee now and then...

Gareth pushed open the door, and stifled a yawn. The pale and painfully stylish lighting in here was making him feel sleepy, and at the same time stopping him from sleeping by being too bright. Maybe that was a good thing. He'd never live down falling asleep in a public place...

He sat down at one of the many free computers, having spent a few seconds trying to choose one as people always do, and begin to log on. His laptop was still at his side, but he had decided to use a public computer for this particular purpose, and wisely so. At least these computers would not have any kind of system spies or phreaking equipment installed...

"Forty-five minutes online and a cappuccino," he said to the waitress who came to his table, handing her ten dollars.

He logged in.

***

From: Gareth Nash

To: Robert Nash

Subject: CONTACT ME NOW

You called me this morning to try to explain something to me. If you still want to tell me, contact me at this IRC channel sometime in the next forty minutes. I am calling from a public computer so don't bother trying any funny stuff, it won't do you any good.

***

GNasher001 started online discussion

Bobbyn joined online discussion

GNasher001 locked discussion; no others may join

GNasher001 activated discussion encryption; no others may listen

GNasher001 says: That you, Bobby?

Bobbyn says: Yes

GNasher001 says: Prove it. What happened on 12th November two years ago?

Bobbyn says: We moved to the U.S.

GNasher001 says: When's our dad's birthday?

Bobbyn says: January 14th.

GNasher001 says: How old am I?

Bobbyn says: 25

Bobbyn says: You convinced yet?

GNasher001 says: Story checks out. What were you gonna tell me?

Bobbyn says: If we're going to be Mr. Suspicious, how do I know you're you?

GNasher001 says: You have a small scar on your left elbow where you fell over in the garden when you were four.

Bobbyn says: Good.

Bobbyn says: Sheesh, man, it's good to know you're OK. I was trying to warn you when I called you, I hope you realise that now. I guess that's why you've called me back?

GNasher001 says: Yep. What's the story, Bobby? Why are you tied up in all this? And who else is involved?

Bobbyn says: Firstly, can I say that nobody else at HALtech is in this. It's just me.

Bobbyn says: It goes back a very long way. When we started producing Agar back whenever it was we didn't have much money so I had to borrow some from the bank.

Bobbyn says: That's what I told you anyway. Actually the bank turned me down because they didn't have enough faith.

Bobbyn says: We were so skint I couldn't face coming home to tell you. I was your big brother, and I was supposed to be looking after you.

Bobbyn says: Mum & Dad had moved to Scotland and had no money. So I had to sacrifice my morals and sell some of the other stuff to someone.

GNasher001 says: Other stuff?

GNasher001 says: Do you mean the secret stuff you were working on?

Bobbyn says: Yes.

Bobbyn says: I sold a prototype system spy to a guy I met in the bar called Mack.

GNasher001 says: Funny name for a bar haha

GNasher001 says: What were you doing there?

Bobbyn says: Drowning my sorrows.

GNasher001 says: Uh-huh. How much?

Bobbyn says: £2,000.

Bobbyn says: Two grand wasn't enough to keep up production and keep us fed so I needed more. The guy Mack arranged to buy a few more items.

Bobbyn says: I think he started selling on to third parties fairly soon after that.

GNasher001 says: Presumably his organisation is much bigger by now

Bobbyn says: After a few months, he started taking orders and bringing them to me.

Bobbyn says: Mostly they were stuff I already had copies of and there were only one or two a week, so it didn't take much extra effort.

Bobbyn says: Once we started to make a steady profit, I didn't need his services any more, and I said so. But he still kept coming to me despite this.

Bobbyn says: I tried to fend him off saying "one last order" but he ignored me. I thought I would be safe once we moved to America.

Bobbyn says: We were okay for the first few weeks but then I received an order by email.

GNasher001 says: Were they the ones I found?

Bobbyn says: I left them deliberately unencrypted and planted a virus on your PC to lead you to them.

GNasher001 says: I guessed as much, but it's nice to hear a confirmation.

GNasher001 says: Why did you keep it secret for so long?

Bobbyn says: I didn't want to worry you!

GNasher001 says: So what's changed that you started worrying me all of a sudden?

Bobbyn says: I haven't seen Mack in person since we left England, but he keeps in contact and someone whom I assume is a minion collects the goods every week.

Bobbyn says: Obviously he has made a number of contacts and gained power. He is a very powerful man now. That power scares me.

Bobbyn says: You may have spotted from the emails that orders more recently have become larger. People also order stuff that they don't even know I can do, so I have to create the program for them on the spot.

Bobbyn says: It's taking up the best part of my hours at work and all of my free time keeping up with the orders. It's putting me under a lot of stress.

Bobbyn says: Prices have been increasing but my percentage decreases just as fast. It's certainly no longer worth the money, like it used to be.

Bobbyn says: I've mailed Mack back saying I want out but he hardly responds. He's made threats, and he is certainly capable of carrying them out.

GNasher001 says: What sort of threats?

Bobbyn says: I made a half-completed delivery about two weeks ago, because I didn't have time to do all of it. A lot of money hangs on this business, and I suspect Mack himself is in trouble with his buyers, whoever they are.

Bobbyn says: Mack was pretty annoyed about it. He reduced my cut to zero by the following day, and said if I did it again he'd kill you.

Bobbyn says: That was when I decided I needed to get out. I didn't fancy going to the police because there was a good chance I'd land up in jail, so I let you discover the system spy they'd made me put on your computer just in case.

GNasher001 says: How long had it been there?

Bobbyn says: Couple of months

GNasher001 says: That's some nice programming there, hiding from my custom Antivirus all that time.

Bobbyn says: I'd be lying if I said I programmed it myself. Our heuristic tools made the job easier than I could imagine.

GNasher001 says: Why didn't you just contact me directly?

Bobbyn says: I had to make it look genuine. They've been monitoring my every move for a long time.

Bobbyn says: Despite my best efforts I couldn't finish the next order either. Then last night Mack called me saying he was going to blow up your house with you inside, so I threw caution to the wind and phoned you back pronto.

Bobbyn says: You know what happened.

GNasher001 says: Your nerve broke when you found out that I was safe, made an excuse and hung up?

Bobbyn says: Bingo.

GNasher001 says: Why do you think Mack told you about the bomb? Surely it would have been much easier just to not tell you. That would have precluded a warning.

Bobbyn says: He thought it would be ironic - or poetic - for me to phone you up, and then to blow you up as you speak to me on the phone, or a fraction of a second after I'd warned you.

Bobbyn says: He didn't tell me that, of course, but I could tell from the way he was laughing.

Bobbyn says: It was an amateurish thing to do, in my opinion.

GNasher001 says: And the second time you tried to warn me you were shouted down.

Bobbyn says: I'm sure Mack was very surprised when he found you had escaped the bomb.

Bobbyn says: Mack hasn't contacted me since, and he certainly hasn't told me about any kind of contingency plans so I had no idea what form the next attempt would take.

GNasher001 says: Well, it happened, all right. There was a sniper at my hotel room. We got him, though.

Bobbyn says: Well, that's something.

Bobbyn says: I'm sorry, I had hoped you would be safe in the hands of the police...

GNasher001 says: Clearly I'm not. You located me, among others. And I dare say other attempts are on the way.

Bobbyn says: Pah. That was easy. If you want to stay hidden you shouldn't go online so often.

GNasher001 says: Just had a thought. How sophisticated are your system spies?

Bobbyn says: Slipped under your Antivirus, didn't it?

GNasher001 says: User-friendly?

Bobbyn says: The very best.

GNasher001 says: You said he had been watching your every move for a while, now...

GNasher001 says: Then how likely is it that there's a system spy like mine in your PC?

Bobbyn says: Uh...

GNasher001 says: Where are you?

GNasher001 says: Don't answer that! Wherever you are, get out NOW.

GNasher001 says: Meet me outside the pink Cyber Café ASAP.

Bobbyn says: See you in 10.

Bobbyn left online discussion

GNasher001 closed online discussion

***

Robert Nash had been working hard at his computer at home that night, trying to finish as many of the items in the latest order as possible before Mack Magnusson decided to kill him as well. The workshop, which consisted of a computer and a workbench where he made his circuit boards, was a complete mess, and had been for several years. Unfortunately, the prospect of death was not having a good effect on his work - he was tired, sweaty, and shivering. His brain was not up to speed this evening.

When he had received the email from Gareth, his heart had leapt. Gareth was alive! Gareth wanted to know what was going on! His cry for help had finally got through. Liberation! An ally! And as soon as he had called Gareth back, and explained everything to him, and got him on his side... his own life was in danger.

He could just have minutes to escape.

Bobby logged out, retrieved a disk from his computer, reached for his laptop, and froze. There was someone behind his door. He could hear them trying to be quiet. The door was not locked.

He heard the workshop door open behind him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the light from the hall outside illuminate a door-shaped area on the floor. There was a faint "snick" as a gun was cocked.

"Hello, Bobby," said a very familiar voice.

"Hello, Mack," said Bobby.

***

"It's been a while, Bobby," said Mack.

Bobby was barely breathing.

"Four years, isn't it?" Mack prompted.

"What do you want?" said Bobby.

"You weren't paranoid enough, Nash," growled Mack. "I sat there watching the entire conversation in the car on the way over, and your smart little brother guessed how I did it."

"Should have put a back door on that thing," said Bobby.

"Hindsight is 20/20," said Mack.

"True. How come you suspected me?"

"Oh please, it didn't take a genius to spot. You're a dissident, Nash. You don't want to be part of my organisation anymore. You're edgy, dissatisfied, overworked. I should know because I'm the one who overworks you. I thought you might tr