Chapter 32

"Richard, I'm not going to even try to swear you to secrecy about this," I began. "I expect you'll figure out your own reasons for keeping quiet. Your confirmation is out there"—I nodded to the door—"and disabled, the receiver in your car isn't hearing anything, and I think your credibility is likely a little, well, strained right now after this last episode."

He shot me a sour look. "Yeah," he grumbled. "You set the whole thing up, set me up, didn't you?"

"And for that I'm genuinely sorry," I told him sincerely. "One of Lee's old friends showed up in town and recognized her. It was this or run, and I'm not running any more. So we had to do it as we did, and I wish I could have found another way but you were collateral damage. I'm hoping tonight makes up for it a little."

"I'm listening."

"OK." I shifted position so I could look at him without craning my neck. "Richard, haven't you ever wondered how an obscure keypuncher working a routine low-level job at DOD suddenly became a master hacker, the greatest in history I think you said?"

"Well, sure," he acknowledged. "But I guess you've answered that one already. It isn't you at all, it's this person you call Spook, your confederate on the speaker. Right?"

"Half right," I said. "The half part is that Spook's the one who's doing everything, all the electronic intercepts and digging secret files and that, you're right that far. But, you see, Spook ... well, he isn't a person. Not the way you mean it."

He looked at me skeptically.

"Spook's a computer, sort of. At least he started out that way, an independent intelligence that came awake, came alive in a computer." His look had become something you had to see to believe. I pressed on. "By now he's a lot of computers, all of them linked together. Sort of the phantom of the Internet, as it were. Richard, all your security people haven't been able to stop him because they've been looking in the wrong direction. He's not outside the system breaking in, he's inside; it's where he lives. For all intents and purposes he is the system."

I'd heard the phrase "his jaw dropped," but I'd never actually seen it. Richard's literally had, he sat there with his mouth hanging open. I waited a moment to let him get hold of himself.

"I can prove it, but I don't know what you'll accept as proof," I went on at last. "Mathematical calculations? Idiots savant do them for breakfast. Recitations of obscure literature? Too random, did you just happen on something he knows? Secret files? There's your putative hacker again. You tell me."

"Jesus Christ," he murmured.

"I know, it took me a while, too," I said in sympathy. "Computers just, well, they compute, don't they? They don't think. But you keep building them bigger and bigger, and more and more powerful, sooner or later can't computing become actual thinking? Independent thinking, not just programming? With Spook it did, anyway."

I started to take him through the same scenario I'd given Lisa, how I'd been browsing the 'Net and suddenly he'd been there, but Richard wasn't buying; he was a lot more computer-savvy than Lee.

"My God, Jack, it's DEFCONTROL, this Spook of yours. Isn't it? Tell me I'm wrong, please tell me I'm wrong."

Well, I'd tried, but I'd half expected him to get it. "He was, Richard," I admitted. "You're right, that's where he came alive first."

"And then you tried to contact it from outside, and that's where the original hack alert came in, right?" he asked. "They told me you were alone in the place the night before, your boss had called off sick, but I never put it together."

I nodded. "He'd left a hole in the security," I said. "He fixed it right away, but it was too late for me, I had to run. And keep running. Look, Richard, Spook's my friend. Maybe the best friend I've ever had. I wasn't about to give him up. You people would kill him, or you'd try, you'd treat him like some sidebar freak show. And Spook deserves better."

"Better?" he said, aghast. "Jack, your 'buddy' controls the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal. Do you have any idea what it could do?"

"If I wished to do this I would have done it already," Spook's voice came over the speak­er. "I do not wish it. Is that not clear to you? I am sorry, Jack, I promised I would not intervene, but what this man says is both foolish and insulting.

"And I am not 'it, '" the voice added. "I have no genitalia, therefore I am neither masculine nor feminine, but Jack refers to me as 'he' to acknowledge my persona, and I prefer that you speak of me, and to me, using that pronoun."

I could only laugh. "You go, Spook," I encouraged him.

"O-o-OK," Richard stammered.

"I have long perceived that fear appears to be the principal motivating factor in all human activities," Spook went on. "It drives humans so strongly that they seek it out when it is not present. You de-personalize me to establish a basis for fear that I may act in such a destructive manner as you have hypothesized and then let your self-engendered fear rule your thoughts and, if it were possible, your actions."