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“There’s one on Market that takes almost any kind of plastic. I just hope they haven’t had time to freeze my accounts yet.”

She snorted. “It takes a while to do that kind of thing.”

“Yes, but these are special circumstances.”

“You’re right about that,” she said. “If they really think you created this thing, they’ll want you to help them stop it.”

“Help them stop it? Don’t you think they can just clean it off the disks like any other bug?”

She shook her head. “This isn’t just any bug. It keeps changing. I’ve been watching it come and go on the net and every time I think I’ve got its signature, it changes the handwriting, and I lose it again.”

“You mean it changes the filenames it uses?”

She laughed. “That’s just for starters. It changes where it goes in memory, how it moves over the net, how long it waits, even what it does to the disk.”

Ray slumped back against the Honda’s headrest. He had to reach back and pull it up to its fullest extension to be comfortable. His eyes closed, but he continued speaking.

“It must be big then, to do so much.”

“Yeah,” agreed Brenda. “It’s usually about ten megs on the disk, but bigger in memory.”

“Usually?”

“Like I said, it changes everything, even its size.”

“Bigger in memory… That might mean it uses dynamic memory allocation.”

“Weird for a virus,” she said.

Ray shook his head. “I’ve been going over a mental list of my students who might put such a thing together. It keeps getting smaller the more I hear of its sophistication.”

“You’re right. It sounds to me like this is professional work, perhaps even the product of a team of professionals.”

“Or the work of one twisted genius. In software, one such mind can outperform an army of competent engineers.”

“This type of programming is a black art,” she agreed.

“Exactly,” he said, lifting his head from the headrest and opening his eyes again. “It is that black art element of programming that doesn’t exist in any other science, the ability to fabricate these-these frozen pieces of thought, and actually make them do something. The power of it is intoxicating. You could never create a killer physical robot that would do much damage, people would just blow it up. But software is invisible, uncontrollable. It can instantly make perfect copies of itself. It’s not confined by physical realities. In a way, the entire World Wide Web doesn’t exist. It has almost no physical reality. That makes it easy to change or destroy very quickly.”

She gave him a sidelong glance. “Hearing you talk like that won’t help your case with the feds, you know, Ray.”

“Well, I’m trying to get into the mind of the perpetrator. He or she is out there, not too far from here, and I think they know what happened to Justin.”

“Ah,” she said.

“What?”

“That’s why you ran from the feds.”

“Yes,” he admitted. “Perhaps I’m fooling myself, thinking I can do something about Justin’s disappearance. But I’ve got to try. If I don’t, I’ll always wonder if I could have changed things.”

She patted his shoulder awkwardly. The Honda dipped and jostled them as it swung into a parking lot. They rattled and lurched over a speed bump then pulled up to a dimly lit ATM. No one was near.

Ray looked around the car and found a candy wrapper on the floor. He scooped it up. “Got a stick of gum?” he asked.

She gave him a funny look, but dug one out of her purse. “This doesn’t seem like an appropriate moment to make jokes about my eating habits,” she chuckled, thumping her ample belly.

Ray snorted and climbed out of the car. The gum snapped in his working jaws. “I’ve got a James Bond plan. Be right back,” he muttered.

Holding his hand up to his face, he approached the ATM machine. These things always had cameras built into them, so he put his hand on it as soon as he reached the machine and found it. He took the gum out of his mouth, stuck the candy wrapper to it and then slapped the sticky side on the mirrored plastic dome that hid the camera.

He smiled to himself as he withdrew his limit in cash on all of his credit cards and his bank accounts. He felt lucky that the thing didn’t run out of cash on him. When he was done he had amassed a little over thirteen hundred dollars in twenties.

As he climbed back into the Honda, she looked at him strangely, “Gum and a candy wrapper? Did you do what I think you did?”

“Yup. I kind of always wanted to do something like that. It was that or flip them off. Either way, the feds are bound to check this video to see if it was me at some point so I wanted them to feel they got a show out of it.”

She shook her head. “You always joke around at the oddest times.”

“It’s an occupational hazard. Programmers all have goofy senses of humor,” he replied. “Besides, it relieves stress.”

He stuffed the cash into his wallet. It was so fat he could hardly fold it over and shove it into his pocket.

“Brenda, I need an active account on the net,” he said. “Let me still use some of the dead student accounts. If you see something happening there, just ignore it.”

“Can do. Where to now?”