She suddenly realized that her previous assumptions had been all wrong. Mitsuhama hadn’t been experimenting with spirits in order to use them as weapons. She’d let the fact that the spirit had killed the mage lull her into that crude conclusion. Instead, the research project had involved computers-Mitsuhama’s chief industry-all along.

Carla could feel her heart pounding in her chest. “Corwin,” she asked softly. “Is it possible for a spirit enter the Matrix?”

The ork shook his head. “No way. The Matrix is an artificial reality, nothing more than a series of computer-generated simsense impressions, while magic is inherently associated with living organisms. The two are completely incompatible; that’s why mages have such trouble with simsense. Regardless of what it’s actually made of, a spirit is a living creature And nothing living can enter the Matrix.”

“1 thought we just did.”

“Nope. What we did was download sensory data from the Matrix directly into our brains, through these He tapped the datajack in his temple while still watching the screen of the diagnostic unit. “We weren’t actually ‘inside’ the Matrix-we just perceived it as if we were. We were actually downloading coded pulses of photons, which our datalinks translated into signals our brains could understand and interpret. Whenever I seemed to he manipulating an icon. I was actually executing a command, uploading the information that would do the job. My neural synapses fired, and the thought was translated by my datalink into a coded burst of light that activated the program in my deck.” He paused, looked up for a moment at Carla. “You scan all that?”

“Huh-huh. But what if the spirit had a physical body that was composed of light?” Carla asked. “Couldn’t it enter the Matrix like any other beam of light, through a fiber-optic cable?”

The decker paused for a second, then shrugged “Maybe for a millisecond or two. It would just blast through at three hundred thousand klicks per second and be out again.”

“What would it look like?”

“Like a flash of…” Corwin looked up, his eyes wide. “So that’s what we saw,” he whispered softly. “Mega cool.” His deck lay ignored in his lap. He leaned forward, and the foam of the recliner squeaked slightly as it contoured itself to his new position.

“A creature composed of light would be one fragger of a virus,” he said, thinking out loud. “It wouldn’t be affected by any intrusion countermeasures, since they’re set up to attack the deck or the decker. It would be nearly impossible to detect, because it wouldn’t interfere with the other data transmissions. Light doesn’t interfere with itself unless the two beams are exactly in phase-that’s why a fiber-optic cable can carry thousands of commands and transmissions simultaneously. One more pulse of light down the tube wouldn’t affect it a bit. And it wouldn’t hurt the hardware-at least, I don’t think so. But there is one thing he spirit would do-it would sure mess up stored data.”

His gestures grew more animated. See, information is written on memory chips and hard drives by a beam of light, and read in the same manner. Individual pulses within the beam, as well as the light wave’s pattern of crests and troughs, are all part of the information carrying code. If a creature made of light suddenly surged through a data storage device, it would completely scramble the code that had been written previously. There’d be a whole new pattern laid down, none of it coherent. And that’s what makes this spirit so perfect as a virus. There’s no way to stop it from corrupting your data. Even if you installed a passcode system, any word or image you use is encoded as light. All the spirit would have to do is reconfigure itself to emulate the passcode, write-enable the datastore, and slide right in. Only a hardwired lock could stop it-and that involves completely locking the system away from the Matrix. It just isn’t economically feasible to do that.

“You’d have to have some way of directing the spirit. Otherwise, it would wipe out every file it passed through along the way. Maybe if you got it to home in on a keyword…”

“That’s it!” Carla said. “The spirit showed up in the research lab node of the Mitsuhama system as soon as you decrypted the name on the project file. It’s also wiped datastores at a theology school and a televangelist network, and keeps attacking a woman by the name of Luci Ferraro each time she tries to access any cormputer or telecom unit that’s linked to the Matrix. What do these four things have in common?” She smiled, pleased with herself for putting the pieces together and waiting for Corwin to do the same.

Corwin frowned, puzzled. Then he broke into wide, snag-toothed grin. “The word Lucifer.”

“There’s your keyword,” Carla concluded.

Corwin shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense,” he countered. “You say this spirit was developed at the Mitsuhama research lab. Why would they target their own facility?”

“As a test, maybe?”

Corwin snorted with laughter. “A test capable of wiping out their entire data-storage system? No way!”

“No, not a test,” Carla agreed. Then the answer hit her. “The spirit is trying to wipe out the files on itself. In the process, it’s erasing a lot of unrelated data-any file that contains the word Lucifer. But why does it feel the need to do that? It’s already killed the man who conjured it and become a free spirit. Even if it was once under someone’s control, nobody’s controlling it now.”

Corwin reached for his deck. “This is totally wacked. I’d better warn my chummers about-”

“Don’t!” Carla grabbed the ork’s hand. “Keep this to yourself, O.K.? At least until I’ve completed my story. That run you just did was on KKRU time and as an employee of this station, you have to honor your confidentiality oath. Agreed?”

Corwin sighed heavily. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Good.” She left him staring morosely at his deck and hurried back into the newsroom.

15

Pita sat in the basement room, stroking the white cat. She stared at the ray of sunlight that slanted through the broken window, trying to ignore the hunger that gnawed at her belly. She listened instead to the sounds of people moving through the store above her, to the traffic outside, to the purring of the cat in her lap. Without meaning to do so, she began to hum a ballad she’d heard on one of the muzak stations last week. She’d laughed at it when she first heard it; the song was some mushy thing, not a bit like the scream-rock she usually listened to. But humming it now somehow made her feel better.

She stroked the cat’s soft fur, concentrating on its texture in an effort to focus her thoughts. She was beginning to feel light-headed, dizzy. As her mind drifted, her body felt thinner, less substantial. All that existed was the dust motes, the sunlight the rumbling purr of the cat. Or was that the sound of her humming? The two had blended together in a gentle harmony.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the floor drifted away. Pita was floating, bobbing like a dust mote in the air. With a sense of wonder, she unfolded her legs from their crossed position and placed her feet on the floor. Through her legs, which had become translucent, she could see her body, still seated and leaning back against the wall. Her eyes had closed and her head hung to one side, mouth open. Her chest was still; it didn’t look as though she was breathing.

Amazingly, the sight did not frighten her. It seemed natural, right. This detached perspective was better, somehow, than confronting her own face in a mirror. From this angle, her wide face, jutting teeth, and broad shoulders seemed perfectly proportioned. She reached out to touch herself but overshot her mark, and her hand passed through the wall. Amazed, she drew it back. She could pass through man-made objects as if they were not there.