the DoJ net, Mr. Slippery to Pasadena and the JPL planetary probe archives, Erythrina to Cambridge and the Harvard Multispectral Patrol.
It should take several hours to survey these records, to determine just what transmissions might be cover for the alien invasion that both the Feds and Erythrina were guessing had begun. But Mr. Slippery had barely started when he noticed that there were dozens of processors within reach that he could just grab with his new Federal powers. He checked carefully to make sure he wasn’t upsetting air traffic control or hospital life support, then quietly stole the computing resources of several hundred unknowing users, whose data sets automatically switched to other resources. Now he had more power than he ever would have risked taking in the past. On the other side of the continent, he was aware that Erythrina had done something similar.
In three minutes, they had sifted through five years’ transmissions far more thoroughly than they had originally planned.
“No sign of him,” he sighed and “looked” at Erythrina. They had found plenty of irregular sources at Harvard, but there was no orbital fit. All transmissions from the NASA probes checked out legitimately.
“Yes.” Her face, with its dark skin and slanting eyes, seemed to hover beside him. Apparently with her new power, she could image even here. “But you know, we haven’t really done much more than the Feds could — given a couple months of data set work …. I know, it’s more than we had planned to do. But we’ve barely used the resources they’ve opened to us.”
It was true. He looked around, feeling suddenly like a small boy let loose in a candy shop: he sensed enormous databases and the power that would let him use them. Perhaps the cops had not intended them to take advantage of this, but it was obvious that with these powers, they could do a search no enemy could evade. “Okay,” he said finally, “let’s pig it.”
Ery laughed and made a loud snuffling sound. Carefully, quickly, they grabbed noncritical data-processing facilities along all the East/West nets. In seconds, they were the biggest users in North America. The drain would be clear to anyone monitoring the System, though a casual user might notice only increased delays in turnaround. Modem nets are at least as resilient as old-time power nets — but like power nets, they have their elastic limit and their breaking point. So far, at least, he and Erythrina were far short of those.
But they were experiencing what no human had ever known before, a sensory bandwidth thousands of times normal. For seconds that seemed without end, their minds were filled with a jumble verging on pain, data that was not information and information that was not knowledge. To hear ten million simultaneous phone conversations, to see the continent’s entire video output, should have been a white noise. Instead it was a tidal wave of detail rammed through the tiny aperture of their minds. The pain increased, and Mr. Slippery panicked. This could be the True Death, some kind of sensory burnout —
Erythrina’s voice was faint against the roar, “
Use everything, not just the inputs!
” And he had just enough sense left to see what she meant. He controlled more than raw data now; if he could master them, the continent’s computers could process this avalanche, much the way parts of the human brain preprocess their input. More seconds passed, but now with a sense of time, as he struggled to distribute his very consciousness through the System.
Then it was over, and he had control once more. But things would never be the same: the human that had been Mr. Slippery was an insect wandering in the cathedral his mind had become. There simply was more there than before. No sparrow could fall without his knowledge, via air traffic control; no check could be cashed without his noticing over the bank communication net. More than three hundred million lives swept before
It should take several hours to survey these records, to determine just what transmissions might be cover for the alien invasion that both the Feds and Erythrina were guessing had begun. But Mr. Slippery had barely started when he noticed that there were dozens of processors within reach that he could just grab with his new Federal powers. He checked carefully to make sure he wasn’t upsetting air traffic control or hospital life support, then quietly stole the computing resources of several hundred unknowing users, whose data sets automatically switched to other resources. Now he had more power than he ever would have risked taking in the past. On the other side of the continent, he was aware that Erythrina had done something similar.
In three minutes, they had sifted through five years’ transmissions far more thoroughly than they had originally planned.
“No sign of him,” he sighed and “looked” at Erythrina. They had found plenty of irregular sources at Harvard, but there was no orbital fit. All transmissions from the NASA probes checked out legitimately.
“Yes.” Her face, with its dark skin and slanting eyes, seemed to hover beside him. Apparently with her new power, she could image even here. “But you know, we haven’t really done much more than the Feds could — given a couple months of data set work …. I know, it’s more than we had planned to do. But we’ve barely used the resources they’ve opened to us.”
It was true. He looked around, feeling suddenly like a small boy let loose in a candy shop: he sensed enormous databases and the power that would let him use them. Perhaps the cops had not intended them to take advantage of this, but it was obvious that with these powers, they could do a search no enemy could evade. “Okay,” he said finally, “let’s pig it.”
Ery laughed and made a loud snuffling sound. Carefully, quickly, they grabbed noncritical data-processing facilities along all the East/West nets. In seconds, they were the biggest users in North America. The drain would be clear to anyone monitoring the System, though a casual user might notice only increased delays in turnaround. Modem nets are at least as resilient as old-time power nets — but like power nets, they have their elastic limit and their breaking point. So far, at least, he and Erythrina were far short of those.
But they were experiencing what no human had ever known before, a sensory bandwidth thousands of times normal. For seconds that seemed without end, their minds were filled with a jumble verging on pain, data that was not information and information that was not knowledge. To hear ten million simultaneous phone conversations, to see the continent’s entire video output, should have been a white noise. Instead it was a tidal wave of detail rammed through the tiny aperture of their minds. The pain increased, and Mr. Slippery panicked. This could be the True Death, some kind of sensory burnout —
Erythrina’s voice was faint against the roar, “
Use everything, not just the inputs!
” And he had just enough sense left to see what she meant. He controlled more than raw data now; if he could master them, the continent’s computers could process this avalanche, much the way parts of the human brain preprocess their input. More seconds passed, but now with a sense of time, as he struggled to distribute his very consciousness through the System.
Then it was over, and he had control once more. But things would never be the same: the human that had been Mr. Slippery was an insect wandering in the cathedral his mind had become. There simply was more there than before. No sparrow could fall without his knowledge, via air traffic control; no check could be cashed without his noticing over the bank communication net. More than three hundred million lives swept before
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