Product Description
WELCOME TO VIRTUAL REALITY IN CYBERSPACE . . .
WHERE EVERYTHING’S REAL–INCLUDING DEATH.
Teenage misfits Marz and Tech are just two more orphaned brothers in New York, but they only live there. In the boys’ real world, the dazzling cybernetic metropolis known as Virtual Network, they are cybersleuths, genius hackers, and a cut above the best in Extreme Sports Racing.
There are some who think the boys know too much, particularly since Tech jumped the Escarpment, an irregularity designed to stop the city’s corporate tentacles from reaching an uncharted cyberland outside Virtual Network control known as the Wilds. As the only one ever to make the jump–and live to talk about it, Tech alone knows the coveted code sequence that made it possible. Powerful people want that code. For Tech, the only escape is back through the Wilds. Exploring the unknown has always been risky, but Tech’s about to confront far worse perils than cybersabotage and hard deletes. . . .
WHERE EVERYTHING’S REAL–INCLUDING DEATH.
Teenage misfits Marz and Tech are just two more orphaned brothers in New York, but they only live there. In the boys’ real world, the dazzling cybernetic metropolis known as Virtual Network, they are cybersleuths, genius hackers, and a cut above the best in Extreme Sports Racing.
There are some who think the boys know too much, particularly since Tech jumped the Escarpment, an irregularity designed to stop the city’s corporate tentacles from reaching an uncharted cyberland outside Virtual Network control known as the Wilds. As the only one ever to make the jump–and live to talk about it, Tech alone knows the coveted code sequence that made it possible. Powerful people want that code. For Tech, the only escape is back through the Wilds. Exploring the unknown has always been risky, but Tech’s about to confront far worse perils than cybersabotage and hard deletes. . . .
About the Author
James Luceno is the New York Times bestselling author of the Star Wars novels Millennium Falcon, Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader, Cloak of Deception, Labyrinth of Evil, as well as the New Jedi Order novels Agents of Chaos I: Hero’s Trial and Agents of Chaos II: Jedi Eclipse, The Unifying Force, and the eBook Darth Maul: Saboteur. He is also the author of the fantasy novel Hunt for the Mayan Looking-Glass, available as an eBook. He lives in Annapolis, Maryland, with his wife and youngest child.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The contrived sky of the Virtual Network had been gouged by the swift transit of an unidentified intruder. The rend ran straight as a jet's contrail, but yellow as the peel of a sun-ripened banana. At moments the intruder was a dazzling sphere outfitted with radar dishes that might have been giant ears, and at other moments a silver-hulled spacecraft, blunt nose aglow and rear thrusters blazing, sporting a pair of long-lashed cartoon eyes.
The transformation from one to the other was neither a trick of the virtual light nor evidence of sloppy programming, for clearly the intruder was intent on sowing confusion. Why else would it have announced itself with such a bold calling card and affected such obvious disguises? Like all the crafts and constructs and highways that made up the Network, the intruder was only an amalgam of complex codes, but that didn't mean it wasn't capable of wreaking havoc.
Faced with the possibility of cyberterror-ism, Network Security was quick to respond, launching tight formations of pursuit programs modeled after buzzsaw blades. Spinning energetically, the saw-toothed disks gushed fountains of disabling code that lit the false sky like metal filings flung from a grinding wheel. But the intruder merely held to its course, knocking cybercrafts violently aside or deleting them entirely as it plummeted like a meteor, deeper into the Network.
NetSec upped the anty.
From shield emplacements tucked into the elaborate crowns of the Mitsuni Spire and the IBM NeoDome--the Network's tallest constructs--came powerful salvos of defensive fire. Lime-green hyphens of corruption poured upward, striking the intruder repeatedly, and tearing loose segments of programming that trailed behind the dual-natured ship like colorful streamers.
The whirling pursuit programs converged, adding bursts of minimizing code to an already furious light show. Forced to grow more calculated in its movements, the intruder began to perform more like a piloted craft than a free- falling rocket. Narrowing its cartoon peepers, it executed abrupt swoops and dog-fight rollovers that left the security buzzsaws foundering in its wake. Then it veered sharply, hurtling toward the cityscaped heart of the Network with the unbridled enthusiasm of a child racing for a playground.
By then it had attracted the attention of a dozen or so daring cyberjocks flying custom crafts, all of whom were attempting to plot the intruder's course and match its speed. The pair of fliers at the head of the pack were all but nipping at the intruder's tail.
"It's heading straight for the Ribbon!" the male pilot slightly in the lead told his wingmate over their dedicated audio link.
"Wild!" she said. "I've never seen such a speed junky!"
Their user names were Tech and Isis, and they were piloting the hottest crafts in the pack. Tech's was a modified, bubble-canopied AirSpeeder 6000, bristling with infoscanners, uplink arrays, grappling hooks, and harpoon launchers. Isis' was a serpent-prowed skiff, replete with contoured wings and billowing sails, that would have been right at home in some fantasy writer's version of ancient Egypt. She called it "The Prowler." Bulging aftermarket turbodrives were allowing both crafts to keep pace with the intruder, although their repeated attempts to actually come alongside the thing had failed time and again.
"I'm getting all kinds of chatter from the fliers at Ziggy's," Isis said.
"Shut it down. This is our case."
"Can we catch it?"
"Hello! I thought I heard someone question the skills of the Vega brothers. What do you say to that, Dr. Marz?"
"Take some MaxBlast 4.7 and call me in the morning."
Tech's younger brother, Marz, was navigating for both fliers from the office of Data Discoveries, a cybersleuth agency devoted to tracking missing or misplaced data. It was Marz who had customized the crafts, and it was thanks to his ingenuity with software that Tech and Isis were managing to mirror the intruder's maneuvers.
"We need a solid kick in the butt, bro'," Tech said. "What else you got running besides MaxBlast?"
Programs scrolled down a window in Tech's visor: Turbo 7.5, Speedfreak, Mondo Gonzo . . .
"Here's something I haven't tested yet," Marz said, "an upgrade of Ripper."
"Beautiful," Tech said.
He could almost picture the sly grin on his brother's face. If there had been even a moment to spare he might have peeked out from under his data visor to throw Marz a knowing wink.
"Hit me."
Marz sniggered. "Hang onto your headgear."
Tech and Isis did just that as the bootleg software loaded. Then, instantly, their separate crafts streaked forward, with g-force acceleration their motion-capture vests let them feel deep in their chests. Aware of its pursuers the intruder dove, but to no avail. Soon Tech and Isis were flying side by side slightly above the ship, whose big, round eyes tracked them with exaggerated apprehension.
Isis ramped up her craft's code descrambler. "I'm getting audio."
Tech isolated the intruder in a readout window in his data visor and magnified the image. Using his joystick, he realigned one of the AirSpeeder's side-looking scanners and boosted the audio gain to his earphones. What he heard made him sit up straighter in the old dentist's chair that served as his flight seat in the real world.
"Sounds like it's laughing," he said.
"Cackling's more like it," Isis said a moment later.
Tech listened more closely. "I swear, I know that laugh from somewhere . . . Marz, is this thing piloted or glitched?"
"No one knows," his brother said, "or at least CiscoSoft's not saying."
"CiscoSoft?" Isis said. "They produce entertainment soft, don't they?"
"TV shows, movies, Netcasts . . . you name it," Marz said. "Cisco sent out the SOS to Felix, but if we don't hurry, every flier in town is going to be in on this."
Data Discoveries owner and head cybersleuth Felix McTurk was ever on the alert for jobs that could catapult the agency to the big leagues.
"I just wanna nail the thing," Tech said.
Chasing the intruder had been thrilling enough to allow him to forget, even temporarily, his lingering concerns about Harwood Strange--comatose as a result of having helped unravel the mystery of Cyrus, the artificial intelligence who had partnered with Data Discoveries only two weeks earlier--and about the dire warning Tech had received from unknown parties on the completion of Cyrus' reassembly.
A warning he had yet to share with anyone else, including Cyrus
"Maybe this rogue has something to say," Tech suggested. "Is Grappler running?" Grappler was a data link that wouldn't harm the rogue program.
"Locked and loaded," Marz said.
Returned to big-earred meteorite mode, the intruder had flattened the angle of its descent and was closing on the Network's principal thoroughfare, the Ribbon. But instead of making straight for CyberSquare, at the head of the Ribbon, the intruder had turned east to avoid the heavy traffic around Grand Adventure, the Network's premier race course construct. Tech, by contrast, knew those traffic patterns by heart, and so simply pitched the AirSpeeder 6000 into the thick of the snarl, weaving the craft from lane to lane and from level to level, and in the end managing to gain a few precious seconds on his fire-tailed quarry.
By the time Grand Adventure's entry gates were looming in the near distance, Tech had the intruder centered in the visor's targeting reticle. While the fingers of his right hand tapped positioning code into the joystick's bat-wing control pad, his left hand enabled the AirSpeeder's grappler function.
Flooring the interface rig's accelerator pedal, he fired a triple-pronged data-hook.
It was a clean, precise shot, aimed for the rim of the largest of the craters that pitted the intruder's dorsal surface. But who or whatever was responsible for defending the intruder hadn't been caught napping. In the blink of an eye the intruder transformed from rough-surfaced sphere to gleaming spaceship. Shrugged off by the now seamless craft, the grappler flailed ineffectually in the false wind.
"Guess it doesn't like attachments," Isis said, coming alongside Tech.
"It's smarter than we are," Marz muttered in the melodramatic voice of a mad doctor from a 1950s SF movie. "Only science can conquer it."
"Science or a harpoon," Tech was quick to counter. "That'll take some of the flight out of it."
"Just what Captain Ahab said before Moby Dick bit off his leg," Isis said.
"Huh?"
"Skip it. I keep forgetting you only read comic books."
"And proud of it."
"Harpoon's up and running," Marz broke in. "Target one of the thruster ports."
Unlike Grappler, which allowed a flier to attach him- or herself to a program, Harpoon carried a compressed packet of crippling code that could stop a program dead in its tracks.
Tech called on Ripper for added velocity, then threw the AirSpeeder into a power dive. Falling in behind the intruder, he opened Harpoon and launched a barbed quill straight into the intruder's right thruster.
The intruder went wide eyed and yelped angrily. Issuing what sounded like cartoonish backfires, it streaked away.
"Heads up!" Isis said.
Tech instantly saw the reason why. Perturbed by Tech's sting, the intruder doubled back and tried to ram him off course. Tech climbed out of reach. He was on the verge of firing a second harpoon when the intruder commenced a steep corkscrewing descent for the cluster of buildings that surrounded CyberSquare.
The transformation from one to the other was neither a trick of the virtual light nor evidence of sloppy programming, for clearly the intruder was intent on sowing confusion. Why else would it have announced itself with such a bold calling card and affected such obvious disguises? Like all the crafts and constructs and highways that made up the Network, the intruder was only an amalgam of complex codes, but that didn't mean it wasn't capable of wreaking havoc.
Faced with the possibility of cyberterror-ism, Network Security was quick to respond, launching tight formations of pursuit programs modeled after buzzsaw blades. Spinning energetically, the saw-toothed disks gushed fountains of disabling code that lit the false sky like metal filings flung from a grinding wheel. But the intruder merely held to its course, knocking cybercrafts violently aside or deleting them entirely as it plummeted like a meteor, deeper into the Network.
NetSec upped the anty.
From shield emplacements tucked into the elaborate crowns of the Mitsuni Spire and the IBM NeoDome--the Network's tallest constructs--came powerful salvos of defensive fire. Lime-green hyphens of corruption poured upward, striking the intruder repeatedly, and tearing loose segments of programming that trailed behind the dual-natured ship like colorful streamers.
The whirling pursuit programs converged, adding bursts of minimizing code to an already furious light show. Forced to grow more calculated in its movements, the intruder began to perform more like a piloted craft than a free- falling rocket. Narrowing its cartoon peepers, it executed abrupt swoops and dog-fight rollovers that left the security buzzsaws foundering in its wake. Then it veered sharply, hurtling toward the cityscaped heart of the Network with the unbridled enthusiasm of a child racing for a playground.
By then it had attracted the attention of a dozen or so daring cyberjocks flying custom crafts, all of whom were attempting to plot the intruder's course and match its speed. The pair of fliers at the head of the pack were all but nipping at the intruder's tail.
"It's heading straight for the Ribbon!" the male pilot slightly in the lead told his wingmate over their dedicated audio link.
"Wild!" she said. "I've never seen such a speed junky!"
Their user names were Tech and Isis, and they were piloting the hottest crafts in the pack. Tech's was a modified, bubble-canopied AirSpeeder 6000, bristling with infoscanners, uplink arrays, grappling hooks, and harpoon launchers. Isis' was a serpent-prowed skiff, replete with contoured wings and billowing sails, that would have been right at home in some fantasy writer's version of ancient Egypt. She called it "The Prowler." Bulging aftermarket turbodrives were allowing both crafts to keep pace with the intruder, although their repeated attempts to actually come alongside the thing had failed time and again.
"I'm getting all kinds of chatter from the fliers at Ziggy's," Isis said.
"Shut it down. This is our case."
"Can we catch it?"
"Hello! I thought I heard someone question the skills of the Vega brothers. What do you say to that, Dr. Marz?"
"Take some MaxBlast 4.7 and call me in the morning."
Tech's younger brother, Marz, was navigating for both fliers from the office of Data Discoveries, a cybersleuth agency devoted to tracking missing or misplaced data. It was Marz who had customized the crafts, and it was thanks to his ingenuity with software that Tech and Isis were managing to mirror the intruder's maneuvers.
"We need a solid kick in the butt, bro'," Tech said. "What else you got running besides MaxBlast?"
Programs scrolled down a window in Tech's visor: Turbo 7.5, Speedfreak, Mondo Gonzo . . .
"Here's something I haven't tested yet," Marz said, "an upgrade of Ripper."
"Beautiful," Tech said.
He could almost picture the sly grin on his brother's face. If there had been even a moment to spare he might have peeked out from under his data visor to throw Marz a knowing wink.
"Hit me."
Marz sniggered. "Hang onto your headgear."
Tech and Isis did just that as the bootleg software loaded. Then, instantly, their separate crafts streaked forward, with g-force acceleration their motion-capture vests let them feel deep in their chests. Aware of its pursuers the intruder dove, but to no avail. Soon Tech and Isis were flying side by side slightly above the ship, whose big, round eyes tracked them with exaggerated apprehension.
Isis ramped up her craft's code descrambler. "I'm getting audio."
Tech isolated the intruder in a readout window in his data visor and magnified the image. Using his joystick, he realigned one of the AirSpeeder's side-looking scanners and boosted the audio gain to his earphones. What he heard made him sit up straighter in the old dentist's chair that served as his flight seat in the real world.
"Sounds like it's laughing," he said.
"Cackling's more like it," Isis said a moment later.
Tech listened more closely. "I swear, I know that laugh from somewhere . . . Marz, is this thing piloted or glitched?"
"No one knows," his brother said, "or at least CiscoSoft's not saying."
"CiscoSoft?" Isis said. "They produce entertainment soft, don't they?"
"TV shows, movies, Netcasts . . . you name it," Marz said. "Cisco sent out the SOS to Felix, but if we don't hurry, every flier in town is going to be in on this."
Data Discoveries owner and head cybersleuth Felix McTurk was ever on the alert for jobs that could catapult the agency to the big leagues.
"I just wanna nail the thing," Tech said.
Chasing the intruder had been thrilling enough to allow him to forget, even temporarily, his lingering concerns about Harwood Strange--comatose as a result of having helped unravel the mystery of Cyrus, the artificial intelligence who had partnered with Data Discoveries only two weeks earlier--and about the dire warning Tech had received from unknown parties on the completion of Cyrus' reassembly.
A warning he had yet to share with anyone else, including Cyrus
"Maybe this rogue has something to say," Tech suggested. "Is Grappler running?" Grappler was a data link that wouldn't harm the rogue program.
"Locked and loaded," Marz said.
Returned to big-earred meteorite mode, the intruder had flattened the angle of its descent and was closing on the Network's principal thoroughfare, the Ribbon. But instead of making straight for CyberSquare, at the head of the Ribbon, the intruder had turned east to avoid the heavy traffic around Grand Adventure, the Network's premier race course construct. Tech, by contrast, knew those traffic patterns by heart, and so simply pitched the AirSpeeder 6000 into the thick of the snarl, weaving the craft from lane to lane and from level to level, and in the end managing to gain a few precious seconds on his fire-tailed quarry.
By the time Grand Adventure's entry gates were looming in the near distance, Tech had the intruder centered in the visor's targeting reticle. While the fingers of his right hand tapped positioning code into the joystick's bat-wing control pad, his left hand enabled the AirSpeeder's grappler function.
Flooring the interface rig's accelerator pedal, he fired a triple-pronged data-hook.
It was a clean, precise shot, aimed for the rim of the largest of the craters that pitted the intruder's dorsal surface. But who or whatever was responsible for defending the intruder hadn't been caught napping. In the blink of an eye the intruder transformed from rough-surfaced sphere to gleaming spaceship. Shrugged off by the now seamless craft, the grappler flailed ineffectually in the false wind.
"Guess it doesn't like attachments," Isis said, coming alongside Tech.
"It's smarter than we are," Marz muttered in the melodramatic voice of a mad doctor from a 1950s SF movie. "Only science can conquer it."
"Science or a harpoon," Tech was quick to counter. "That'll take some of the flight out of it."
"Just what Captain Ahab said before Moby Dick bit off his leg," Isis said.
"Huh?"
"Skip it. I keep forgetting you only read comic books."
"And proud of it."
"Harpoon's up and running," Marz broke in. "Target one of the thruster ports."
Unlike Grappler, which allowed a flier to attach him- or herself to a program, Harpoon carried a compressed packet of crippling code that could stop a program dead in its tracks.
Tech called on Ripper for added velocity, then threw the AirSpeeder into a power dive. Falling in behind the intruder, he opened Harpoon and launched a barbed quill straight into the intruder's right thruster.
The intruder went wide eyed and yelped angrily. Issuing what sounded like cartoonish backfires, it streaked away.
"Heads up!" Isis said.
Tech instantly saw the reason why. Perturbed by Tech's sting, the intruder doubled back and tried to ram him off course. Tech climbed out of reach. He was on the verge of firing a second harpoon when the intruder commenced a steep corkscrewing descent for the cluster of buildings that surrounded CyberSquare.
