cover

The War Bug

by

Everything in this novel will be true. Nothing has been changed to protect the innocent, and any resemblances to persons living or dead will not occur for another two hundred years, or so.

"Personally, I like hanging from the ceiling, you know, just hanging from the ceiling and grooving on those small movements that air currents set in motion. Unlike you, I don't spend my days worrying about the string suspending me from the ceiling. I never give it a thought."

Betts, the paper mache fish

"Being human is a lot easier when you're dead."

A dead guy

"You will settle."

A Reality Law

Cripes

"If God truly is in the details, then DNA must be God."

When Jared Friedman, the biocomputist who invented the DNA bubble computer said this, he failed to understand that it meant the details reflected God's work, not that God was just a bunch of details.

So much for details.

Maybe it was a tiny mishap in the sequencing of Jared's own DNA that caused him to misunderstand Goethe, or maybe he was just blinded by the boggling enormity of his invention: a computer that used simulated DNA structures to store information and to perform computing operations, though "computing" was not what it did in the traditional sense. Jared's computer used strings of programming similar to DNA codes riding on waves of bubbles smaller than atoms to simultaneously access enormous data warehouses and spit out results trillions of times faster than any computer before it.

Jared's computer was based on a biological entity that could replicate life, which on second thought, might make him right and Goethe wrong after all. But who really cares? They're both dead; Goethe for centuries and Jared, for, oh, about ten minutes. The details were just too much for him, so he jumped off his balcony-about an eight-foot drop, but he landed on his head and broke his neck.

Details.

What drove Jared over the railing was the realization that this new computer of his-a computer that could fit into this period . but could store all the information currently contained on earth a billion trillion times over-was beyond anything he could ever hope to comprehend. Its implications were more staggering than his mind could handle.

Cripes, he thought, and jumped.

It would be a couple of hundred years before a young Virtual Code Geneticist would crack the encryption on Jared's work and actually build a working DNA computer. And when that happened, he wouldn't go crazy like Jared. He would keep his wits and neck intact because he would build his DNA computer for something far larger than eternity. He would build it for love.

A Hundred and Fifty Years Later...

Viennese Lead Crystal

"Call me the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." Yang Yin giggled. "I am Armageddon!"

He chuckled as he clicked icons and files, copying and pasting furiously. Around him, an unsteady breeze trudged through the park, bumping into sparse trees. There were no birds in the sky.

"Nobody screws the Scourge of the Earth."

He dumped file after file into the same folder, its contents growing by tetrabytes each second.

"I am the Revelations of my Age."

He burst out laughing hard enough to skew the glasses on his nose. He reached a heavily veined hand up and righted them. With his other hand, he clicked and dumped.

"That which I have builded, so shall I tear asunder."

It would be a vast understatement to say that fire leaped in his eyes. It was more like his eyes were balls of fire spinning inside the furnace of his head and casting a baleful glow on the screen of his laptop, which many would consider an artifact of an ancient past. "An antique," the polite would say, even though the machine had been upgraded beyond anything on the market. The exterior, though, was exactly the kind of idiosyncrasy that distinguished Yang from most other humans, for he was a creator, a builder of worlds, a maker of destinies, and a juggler of the pins of fate. He was a god of sorts. And at this moment, an angry god of sorts with bursts of lightning flashing through the ramparts of his lofty self-esteem.

"They screwed me! They screwed me and my creation!"

Twenty feet in front of his park bench, a dark motionless pond struggled to be water-like. Whatever microscopic life it once supported had fled in terror from whatever the pond water had become.

"Financial Philistines! Turned my perfect world, all my beautifully programmed modules of CityWare, into a temple of false gods, a Mecca of Marketing, a corporate corruption of beauty." He didn't always talk like this, but he'd just learned that he'd been royally screwed up the butt and tossed out of bed without so much as a cigarette.

"Time to unleash my Angel of Death."

He chuckled as he clicked, copied and pasted, dumping file after file into the folder, which would have appeared to bloat and burp if he had been doing this in VR. But Yang Yin, for all his claim to being a millennium ahead of his time, loved his ancient laptop with its lifeless icons.

The folder grew with files whose extensions were unlike any ever used before. These were components in Yang's personal language, a language that only he, in all the world, understood.

This was the one thing they'd overlooked. They'd forgotten to consider that maybe he didn't completely trust them, that maybe he'd built a little surprise feature into all those millions of lines of programming, and that maybe he'd built in a little door, a hole in the wall of the mighty citadels he'd created. Something only he knew about. Something he hoped he'd never have to use, but having at least one iota of his own godly self-absorption connected to reality, always suspected that someday he might have to use. And that little surprise was the folder into which he now dumped a staggering magnitude of information.

"Not even their best will ever find it." He laughed insanely. He tilted his sharp-nosed face up from the laptop screen and looked through metallic gray eyes at the lifeless pond liquid. "And that's what it'll all look like in time." The water was so thick it resisted waving in the wind. A pebble dropped on its serene plateau would likely bounce back without a single ripple. "But it will be slow, painful and slow."

He clicked and clicked and copied and copied and pasted file after file into the folder and the folder grew not just with size... but also with life.

"Fly now my Angel of Death and bring the walls crumbling down."

And he dropped the last of the files into the folder called War_Bug.

***

Definitely does not taste like chicken, he thought as he sipped again from the crystal stemware wine glass with a delicate snowflake motif cut razor-sharp into its shiny circular surface. Only the best Viennese lead crystal when you drink a cyanide cocktail.

That was the last thing Yang Yin thought before the death pain wrestled him into his next level of being. Whatever that turned out to be.

Another Fifty Years Later...

The Trouble with Kids

"I love my daughter. But she's going to get us killed." The Zen-rhythm sameness of four large fan blades inscribing a monotonous circle on the kitchen ceiling captured Abner Hayes' attention. He felt like his mind was whirling with the blades, the argument going around and around, going nowhere. "They'll delete her. They'll delete you and I'll be Included," he heard himself say.

"So what are you going to do? Lock her program?" Claire sat perfectly erect in a loose white sweater and baggy gray slacks, her hands folded neatly in her lap, legs crossed at the ankles, composed, a study in defiant patience. "Maybe you could recode her behavior modules? Treat her like another piece of software... "

"Stop it! You know I wouldn't do that." Abner's avatar shifted a fraction of a minipixel, a miniscule blur of anger expressed by his entire presence; what 'liners called emotional shakin'.

Aside from the shift, he appeared calm, staring at Claire, his wide face and droopy eyes and mouth emanating serenity as always. He leaned against the counter and looked again at the rotating blades, mesmerized as a point of light winked rhythmically from the edge of one blade each time it arced in his direction. That should happen on every blade, he thought. "I just want my little girl to be safe. I don't want to lose her."

Claire looked at him with dark brown eyes floating in a white corneal lake surrounded by black eye shadow shores. It was this intense black and white of her eyes, contrasted with her pale skin that had first attracted Abner to her.

Even with the stark contrast, her eyes were soft when she turned them toward him. "I know you want her to be safe. So do I. But she's not a little girl anymore, and she needs you to reach out to her like you would to a human sixteen-year-ol...