Disclaimer: This is adult fiction. That means if you’re not an adult, or adults aren’t supposed to read this sort of stuff where you live, don’t. And fiction means it’s not true. If you think you can solve your relationship problems by using hypnosis or drugs, try therapy instead: it’s real, and it works. But watch out for those $!@# screen savers! <grin>
This is a continuation of my previous story… which ended in a stalemate of sorts, and whose resolution here is in part due to the feedback from readers, lurkers and fellow writers (thank you all, I’m honored). There’s not much sex in this chapter, but it has several setups and I’m eager, of course, for feedback on this, as it will shape the course of human events – well, the story line, at least.
Thanks to “Simon,” to all the writers who’ve made Simon Bar-Sinister’s site an excellent source for mind control, the ASSTR folks who have given erotica a home of its own.
Direct comments good and bad to ploni_almoni@mailexcite.com.
Henry Fong continued his sweep of the AEC subnets, his robot software agent burping and beeping at fairly regular intervals with the result of the scan of all storage devices. Average so far for this week, he thought. About four commercial software programs, a few dozen viruses stuffed into documents in the form of macros, and various and sundry indications that some folks just didn’t believe the posted policy that all electronic communications were monitored and subject to eavesdropping. The penalty wasn’t stated, but was fairly clear: mess with this and you just might not wake up in the same bed tomorrow morning.
Then the ‘bot started on the portion of the network in Dr. Christmas’ office, and the tone and fervor of the ‘bot increased dramatically. Fong silenced the audio and read through the list of code and data files that had been installed over the authorized software. He stopped, took a few notes, opened a window, and started cutting and pasting. Then he did something more than a little illegal: after a quick glance around the empty operations center, he downloaded all the tagged files to a micro-CD, then ejected it and surreptitiously slid it into the ankle of his high-top sneakers. Then he edited a few system logs and returned to protocol, which entailed calling a number in Security that, he had been warned, should never call for fun.
Five minutes later he was in the AEC IT duty officer’s office, explaining what he’d found. Ten minutes later he was doing it again, to someone dressed in army fatigues and a dangerous look. An hour later it was to one of the chief computer security architects of the AEC. And finally, an hour after that, he was going over the story one last time, this time to a rotund, chain-smoking little man with a too-stereotypical notepad and frayed cuffs, as grim-faced soldiers hauled all the computers and network components out of the offices formerly occupied by Drs. Jones and Dr. Merither.
“So, what have you seen, Wu Lee?”
Henry pulled his gaze back to the balding, snide troll of a man. “For the fourth time, it’s Henry Fong, not Lee. And what’s your name, anyway?”
The man just shifted some bulk to his other foot and replied, “That’s not relevant just now. What is is my knowing exactly how all this screen stuff got onto the computers, and could it have spread.”
Henry sighed; this was almost more repetition than he could stand – but this was hopefully the last of his interrogators. “Like I told the last three folks, this was installed, probably by Dr. Merither, and done on Thursday on his computer, then Friday on Dr. Jones’.”
“Fine, I got that. What about the program stuff; did it spread any?”
Fong started to get angry, and then caught himself; that’s what a good interrogator would want. Then caught fatso watching him flush, then control himself, and flushed again. The man smirked but motioned with his pen for Fong to continue. “It’s called software and no, it didn’t spread. Only those two computers were modified, and no other computers in the subnet – the office,” he corrected himself as the man paused in his scribbling to look up blankly, “showed this type of modifications.”
“What about other changes? Did any other computers have problems or stuff on them that shouldn’t be there?”
“Well, yes, but it was the usual, harmless stuff.” Fatso continued the blank look. “You know, like gaming software?” More blank stares. “Um, you know you can play games on a computer? Like chess, or poker?”
“No shit, poker, huh?” Fatso stopped to scratch at a pimple on his cheek with the back of the pen. “Can you win money with these games?”
“I don’t know; I don’t play those games. Anyway, my point is that these are the only two computers with strange stuff on them.”
The questioning droned on for another twenty minutes, until Henry and the fat man were standing in a totally empty office, bare to the walls and ceiling. The fat man finally looked up, as if seeing the bare room for the first time, and nodded. “Okay, kid, I think I got what I need.” He consulting a damp folder he had tucked under his armpit, under the polyester jacket. “Um, you’re off duty for the next few days, but you gotta stay at home. If you leave, even to pick up milk, call this number –“ he handed Fong a card from the folder, which Henry took by its edges. “— and wait until your tail shows up. Your telephone will be tapped, for voice as well as computer; don’t go talking to anyone about this. Got it?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
The fat man sniffed, stuck the notepad into a jacket pocket, slid the well-chewed pen back behind his ear, and trudged out the door. Harry waited a moment, then scratched his ankle, making sure the CD was still there, and headed out the door.
Henry went out past the guard, looking behind him as a security team was setting up metal detectors in the entrance hall. The CD’s edge was rubbing his ankle raw by this time, and he struggled to keep his stride and gait casual as he approached his car. He made it, opened the door, and sat down with a sigh of relief, and eased himself back into the seat, slipping the CD from his sneaker to the slot under his seat as he did so. Then he started the engine and headed for home, wondering how he was going to look at whatever it was that had been on their computers, still tantalized by the clip of text he scrolled through on Dr. Jones’ machine: “you are hot. You are horny. Obey Jarrod Merither. Obey Jarrod. Obey. Obey. Obey.” He didn’t notice the car tailing him until he was almost home.
“Sound off.”
“Salesman check.”
“Vacuum check.”
“Possum check.”
Silence.
“Traffic, are you ready?” the voice said, somewhat irritated.
Silence.
“Traffic, are you awake?” A sarcastic bite to that last.
After another long pause, “Yah, this is Grunder. I’m ready. Have been for two hours.”
“Okay,” Charlene Lassiter said, ignoring the remark, “Salesman, this is Control. Go.”
“Roger.”
From her position at the far end of the block, she saw the first team coast and park right in front of the subject’s car. The sliding doors opened and several people hustled out, two each heading to the front and rear of the house, while the van’s front passenger got busy breaking into Dr. Christmas Jones’ car. Which wasn’t hard, as she had left it unlocked and with the alarm off in her drunken, programmed rush to get to Dr. Merither.
Within seconds Dr. Jones’ car started up, and, lights off, drove off, back to base. Agent-In-Charge Lassiter nodded to herself. As field commander of the Atomic Energy Commission’s special operations group, she was pleased to be finally doing something on their own, instead of babysitting the FBI. She reached forward and pressed the setting for the front entry team’s setting. “How’s the alarm?” she asked.
“Fine, no current at any of the switch points. It looks like the door’s locked, but the alarm itself is off.
“Good. Proceed.” She switched her headset to the rear entry team’s intercom frequency. “Okay, rear team. Execute entry; alarm is off.”
“Set?” asked one of the agents.
“Go,” was the response.
Through the open microphone, Lassitter heard the muffled scratch of glass being cut. From her view of the front, the two agents by the door opened it casually, as if they had the key, and quickly entered, shutting the door behind them. She patched both teams into her headset.
The front team came in first. “Two primaries in front, seem, ah, immobilized,” said one agent, as a running set of “Clear, clear” comments came from the other entry team members.
After a minute, the entry team leader came on the air. “Salesman reports all clear, Control. Two subjects unresponsive in a front room; I haven’t touched them.”
Lassiter considered her options for a moment, then “Okay, secure the subjects for transport.” Drs. Jones and Merither were immediately injected with fast-acting knockout drugs, then handcuffed and placed in body bags. Meanwhile, Lassiter returned to the main frequency. “Control to Vacuum, go.”
“Rolling.” A small moving van quietly turned the corner onto the street, then neatly backed up into Merither’s driveway. The front door opened and the entry team came out, each pair carrying a bag between them, which they swung into the open truck door. Out the door came another team, seven agents this time, equipped with briefcases, electronic equipment, and vacuum cleaners. They passed each other, the entry team returning to their van, which drove off after Dr. Jones’ car. Lassiter glanced at the mission clock: three and a half minutes had elapsed so far.
The cleanup squad went through the house with quiet efficiency. Armed with house plans obtained two hours before, the team went room to room, eliminating any trace of Dr. Jones. Their bags filled with clothes, bedding and towels. One of the team picked up the open disk of glass cut from one of the windows and quickly repaired it, so only a very close examination would reveal that it had ever been tampered with. Two other team members wrestled out the leather chair Dr. Jones had been programmed on, and another came out with boxes of tapes and computer equipment.
Lassiter could hear through the agent headsets the quiet sound of the vacuum cleaners going over the carpet and gurgling in the shower and sink. Lassiter clocked the entire procedure as the van drove off, the house cleaned and wiped, at just under twenty minutes. She started up her specially-modified car, slipped it into gear, and smoothly followed it. As they turned the corner, she passed the car placed to watch for suspicious traffic. Grunder was sitting in plain sight, his corpulent frame smoke-wreathed as he read the paper with the car’s interior light on. Charlene grimaced and flipped her video on for a few seconds, then set her radio to his personal frequency and hit the “panic” signal. In her rear view mirror, to her satisfaction, she saw him fumbling with the paper, his cigarette, and radio.
“Get your head out of your ass, Grunder,” she snarled into the radio, “you’d be useless if we’d needed you.” She stopped, heard him starting to sputter. She cut him off. “I take that back; you’d be useless even then. I’m writing you up, Grunder. No more bullshit, no more whining. I’ve got you dead to rights. I’ll see you after debriefing in DuPrey’s office. She turned off the radio, and followed the van on into the night.
Henry carefully exited the freeway, almost gingerly turning through his subdivision’s side streets, lest he look as if he was trying to shake his tail. His concentration was seriously fractured between getting home, exhaustion, and figuring out how to get someone, anyone, to look at what he downloaded. It was almost midnight, and he’d been working for almost fourteen hours. That wasn’t bad, except he had been burning the candle on both ends for the past several nights, and had counted on tonight being a kick-back-and-relax sort of evening.
Finally he pulled up outside the modest, three bedroom house he shared with his brother and sisters. His tail, he noticed, stopped behind him in the cul-de-sac entrance. He made a show of getting out normally, ignoring the dark sedan, and opened the front door.
“Hello, anyone home?” he shouted. Techno music blared from the upstairs, where his sisters, twenty-year-old twins Jade and Jinn, had their bedrooms.
“Yo,” he heard from the basement. He navigated the cluttered living room and went down the stairs to the small, unfinished room where his brother Eric looked up from his mixing console, CDs strewn all over a rickety bridge table next to a cot bed and heaps of clothing, roughly divided into piles of ‘clean’ and ‘less clean.’
“You’re late,” Eric said. “Lei called for you; you were supposed to meet her this evening at that new Vietnamese place, right?” Henry groaned. “Yeah, well, she said not to bother calling again; you had your third strike.”
“Shit!” Henry said, banging his head ceremoniously into a wooden post by the stairs.
“Yeah, well, I tried to call you, but they said you were in a meeting. Since when do you have meetings, brother?”
Henry started to explain, then remembered what the man had told him at work. “Ah, I had something come up at work. They’re doing an investigation, so I can’t talk about it,” he said.
“Uh huh. They already came out here and asked a bunch of questions. Asked us where our parents were and all that kind of stuff.” Henry grimaced. They knew they were orphans; their parents had been killed in a SUV rollover three years ago, and Henry had raised them ever since. “They said something about your being home for the next few days. What did you do, go get yourself put in time out?”
“Sort of, I guess. I found some stuff at work that they really didn’t like. No, I had nothing to do with it,” he added, responding to Eric’s sidelong glance. The two of them had been close, all the kids had been close as glue, since they had to face growing up alone. There were no secrets in their house.
“Anyway,” he continued, I’m on kind of a house arrest until they get things sorted out, even though I’m the one that found out the problem.”
“Kinda like cops getting suspended whenever they use their guns, huh.”
“Kinda. Anyway,” Henry said, the seed of an inspiration coming to him, “since I can’t go over to Rocky’s house with the twins’ demo CD, can you run that errand? I have it in the car, under my seat,” he continued, shaking his head at his brother’s puzzled look, “just go in and give it to him. He knows what to do with it. It’s important; it’s on a deadline. Tell him he’s gotta make it available for the GNUtella pickup scan this evening, okay?”
“Uh, sure, Henry, but didn’t you have –“
“No, I know where it is and when it was due. Just do it for me,” Henry said, adding an unspoken plea in his eyes.
Eric shrugged. “Okay, I’ll drive out there in a minute, just let me get my sneakers on.” Henry exhaled quietly.
“Thanks, Eric. I appreciate it. Make sure you give him a message as well: that the demo CD needs to be uploaded so it’s available via GNUtella.”
“Got it,” Eric said, and bent down to put on his sneakers, then went out the door, snagging the car keys from Henry as he left the room.
Eric found the CD and drove off. He didn’t notice a car parked down the street outside the cul-de-sac slowly pull out and follow him.
Eric wasn’t far from the house where Raymond Stein was living, around and up the hill, then back around until he stopped at a house on a cliff edge overlooking the lower half of the subdivision. Still unaware of his tail, which stopped discretely half a block behind and almost hidden, Eric got out, CD in hand, and headed towards the house’s front door, as the agent studiously copied the house’s address as proximity lights lit up the front entrance way. Almost at the double wooden doors he turned left onto a trail of stepping stones, and followed them around the house and down a set of concrete steps to a scratched door with a sign “Warning: Pesticides” officiously tacked onto it. He knocked, then pounded on the door when there was no answer.
“Coming, coming!” he heard faintly, then heard a click as the door unbolted and opened a crack. Eric pushed it open and went on through. The door was backed by a steel door, with an electronic lock. As he shut the door he heard it ‘snick’ shut again. He walked down another few steps and turned from the entrance hall into what could best be described as a hacker paradise.
The AEC’s Special Operations Group building looked exactly like a clandestine, constitutionally impossible federal organization. That is to say, it looked like any other anonymous industrial park in an area covered with them. The bored guard sluggishly manning the front gate came huffing up to work on the stroke of eight, and was gone by four, with just the magnetic card operated robot to keep cars out of the lot. Of course, getting to the front door of the building was easy – getting past the security that comprised the entire building floor was quite another matter.
Lassiter made her way past the security folks, handed in her weapons and duty-issued equipment, snagging the video tape for use later. She nodded to the security guard at the elevator entrance and smiled. The guard, through the bulletproof glass and armored wall, stared stonily back for as long as Charlene cared to keep up her professional smile. Which was just a second, as she was in no mood to play mind games with the humorless trolls that inhabited the aboveground floors of the building. She turned to the elevator, which thankfully cycled open a few seconds later. She stepped in, handprinted the door, got iris scanned, and it closed, sending her hurtling downwards into the underground warren of the AEC.
“Hey, Rocky,” Eric said, flopping into a slightly crushed easy chair and tossing the CD at Raymond, who fumbled a few times before snagging the CD between his fat lags. Raymond adjusted his thick glasses and brought the CD up to the light.
“Hmmm, this doesn’t look like your sisters’ demo, ya know,” he said. He tilted the burned side so the lamp light near his computer reflected off the surface. “This is much more than ten minutes of music, here; more like fifty or sixty minutes,” he said, and inserted the CD-ROM into his computer and brought up a virus checker. “Better be safe than fucked,” he said to no one in particular as he pointed the scanner to the media. In a few seconds it came back: clean of anything known.
He grunted, then brought up a directory of the CD. “Yup, like I said, this isn’t the demo.” He turned to Eric, who had a mildly puzzled look in his eyes. “Any clues?”
“Um, well, Henry was kinda pushing that you make the contents available on GNUtella for the folks,” he said. “He got suspended or something from work, but he didn’t say anything about this being part of it.”
“Yeah, well, before I bring it online I better have a closer look at this.” He popped the CD out and inserted it into a Linux box tucked under his desk, then switched the KVM and its command line display appeared on screen. “I’ll just run a little profiling on this code and see what there is to see.” He started typing, setting up parameters, moving directory lists into files, then grinned and turned back to Eric. “Okay, let’s unravel Henry’s little present.” He pressed the <enter> key on a short command line he’d typed.
The display blanked, then, slowly, line by line, the software profiler started bringing up information on the contents. “Hmmm. Okay, Henry’s got something in ‘c’,” he said, typing a short command to the program. More lines appeared. “It’s a Windows program… a screen saver, by the looks of it… There’s a server and client side to it… Uses port 443 for communications… And… WOW!”
Eric popped up and came around to Raymond’s creaking chair as the geek peered at the screen. “What’s so cool about a screen saver?”
“It’s not that it’s a screen saver, dork, I mean, look at the text matches here!” Raymond poked at the screen, then wiped at the smudge with a screen cleaner.
Eric tried to look through the wet film at the word directory list forming on the screen. “Obey… horny… slave…” Eric felt his cock stir in his jeans. “Kinky screen saver, huh? Any pictures?”
“No, you dickwad, it’s not a porno program, it’s some kind of brainwashing thing. No wonder Henry wanted this in the public domain; it’s hot, and it should be open source and spread around the world. Show the world those stupid motherfuckers trying to screw with citizens!” He quickly tarred it up and placed the files, unchanged, into a directory. “Okay, you can tell your brother that it’s available on the ‘net.” He typed a few more commands. “And tell him it’s on at least… a dozen warez servers.”
“Uh, cool, I will.” Eric thought a moment. “Got any new games or cracks for me?” he asked.
Raymond was still transfixed by the code Eric had brought. “No, nothing now,” he said, nose still almost pressed into the 21” monitor, fingers flying at the keys. “Why doncha come back in a couple of days; I’ll have a cracked copy of new first person shooter beta from Ego for you.”
“Fine,” Eric said, and stood up.
“Don’t forget to close that door tight, and put that planter back in place; I don’t want any visitors down here.”
“You got it,” Eric called from the doorway. He unlocked the three bolts on the door, yanked it open, and pulled it shut behind him, hearing the bolts click home a second later as Raymond remotely locked them. Then he cakewalked the clay planter back into place and trotted back up to the front of the house, where he walked back out the front walkway and back to his car.
Chapter 15: Heat
“So my backup, chief, is sitting in his car, with the lights on, smoking, reading a paper,” Charlene Lassiter said, slamming a slim, muscled fist down onto her boss’ desk. “This bozo is worse than useless, Director; I need you to assign me someone I can count on.” Director Mary Fuentes looked up at her favorite agent through thick eyelashes, and tried to present a sympathetic, professional front while watching Charlene’s breasts bob up and down in the form-fitting gray sweater as the agent continued her emphatic complaints. She felt herself getting moist down below, but kept her face and tone impassive. Subordinates were strictly off-limits, and she was nothing if not professional.
“Lassiter, you know the drill. Grunder’s got another eighteen months until retirement. I know he’s burned out, but…”
“Yeah, spare me, chief, I know the sob story. Caught, tortured, freed… But I gotta get my job done, and he’s not helping me or my career.”
“Don’t go racing too fast through this agency, Charlene. We’re a defense agency, not a vehicle for your career.”
“Fine,” she retorted, “just make sure you give me a partner who can defend something other than his own sorry ass.”
The door slammed behind her, as Fuentes watched Lassiter’s well-shaped ass grind down the bullpen corridor. Then she sighed, and opened the personnel folder on her desk. She leaned forward and punched an extension. “Grunder, get in here. No, I don’t care if you’re not finished with your report, just – no, now.” She jammed the phone down into its cradle and reread his dossier, fuming. She turned back to the office window, just in time to see Lassiter almost run Grunder down as he came out of his cube, vainly trying to stuff his shirt over his gut and into his cheap pants.
Charlene started to calm down about the time she stomped Grunder’s scuffed wingtips on her way to her cube. She squared her shoulders (giving those in range quite the view of her firm chest) as she saw the small mountain of paperwork, then settled into the chair and grabbed a pen.