Breaking point - By Tom Clancy & Steve Perry & Steve Pieczenik Page 0,18

“And how is it you came to believe somebody has been stealing information?”

Morrison smiled and took another DVD disc from his briefcase. “They left footprints.”

6

Vermillion. River, Lafayette, Louisiana

Michaels sat in the stern of a twelve-foot aluminum bateau, his hand on the control arm of the little electric trolling motor. The sluggish waters of the bayou flowed past, the motor just strong enough to hold the boat’s backward movement to a slow drift. The boat had been dark green once, but was rain- and sun-faded to a chalky, lighter shade. It was hot here, probably in the low nineties, even on the water, and the humidity of the air wasn’t much drier than the bayou itself. On the shores to either side, huge live oaks loomed, gray Spanish moss hanging down like ragged, organic curtains. A three-foot-long alligator gar broke the surface half a body length, fell back, and splashed the murky water next to a bobbing incandescent lightbulb somebody had thrown in somewhere upstream.

Michaels pulled on the rubber handle of the Mercury outboard motor’s starter. The starter rope was nylon, and had once been white, but was now soaked with enough two-cycle oil and grease so it was nearly black. The fifteen-horsepower motor caught, burbled, and rumbled. He shut off the electric, geared the Mercury, and twisted the throttle. The smell of gasoline and lubricant enveloped him.

The bateau surged against the slow flow. He angled toward the east bank to avoid a half-submerged log floating toward him. Or was that a gator?

On the shore, a big snapping turtle sunned itself on a rock. The approaching boat made it nervous, and the turtle slid from the rock and vanished into the dark water.

Michaels smiled. Jay had done a terrific job on this scenario. It felt so real.

Ahead, the virtual reality construct that represented the HAARP facility’s computer system stood on the east bank of the bayou, the image of a backwoods bar, a juke joint. The building was wooden, painted white with a slanting, corrugated metal roof, and the exterior walls were hung with metal beer and soft-drink signs whose paint was flaking and peeling: Falstaff, Jax, Royal Crown Cola, Dr Pepper. A small mountain of rusting steel cans avalanched toward the riverbank to the side of the ramshackle building. Michaels was close enough to see that the empty cans had pairs of triangular-shaped holes punched into the tops—opened with what his father used to call a church key, long before pull- or pop-tops were invented.

He guided the boat toward the shore.

Virtual reality hadn’t turned out quite the way the early computer geeks had imagined. With the power and input devices available, virtual reality could be, well, virtually anything—it was up to the person who designed the scenario. The constructs were analogies, of course, but configured so that people could relate to them intuitively. Normal people didn’t want to push buttons or click on icons, no matter how cute these things were. What they really wanted was to be surrounded by a setting in which they could behave like people. Instead of tapping at a keyboard, they could hike a mountain trail, ride a horse through the Old West, or—like Michaels—take a small boat down a dark and slow-flowing bayou. There were no limits to what you could do in VR, save those of imagination. You could buy off-the-shelf software, have it custom designed by somebody who knew about such things, or do it yourself. Michaels was the head of Net Force, so he had to at least have a passing familiarity with doing it himself, and he did, but it was much easier to let Jay Gridley or one of the other hotshot ops build them. These guys were detail oriented, and they really got into it.

You could go places, interact with other people, get into computer systems, and what you saw and did might have no relationship to what other people in the same location saw or did. It was personal, unless you opted for the default scenario, or agreed to a consensus reality. A lot of people did that, picked one setting, in order to have a common experience, but Michaels liked his or Jay’s imagery better. If you could do it, then why not?

The bateau bumped against the pilings of the little dock, and Michaels killed the outboard and hopped up onto the creosoted wooden planks. He tied the boat up and started for the bar. From this angle, he could see the name of the place: