Cybersona , livre ebook

Hannacroix Creek Books, Inc. - Fred Yager

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96 pages

English

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Description

In an extreme case of identity theft, a computer genius who has recently become a quadriplegic when caught in the crossfire of a gang shootout uses an Internet game called "Cybersona" to take over the body of another player, a recently-fired science teacher, to get revenge on those responsible for his paralysis. In an effort to get his body back, the teacher takes over the body of the next player who signs on; that player turns out to be a ten-year-old boy.

Sujets

Adventure (Guyana)

Science fiction

Adventure

Informations

Publié par	Hannacroix Creek Books, Inc.
Date de parution	01 août 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781889262970
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0350€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Cybersona
Other novels by Fred Yager
SOUND FROM A STAR
REX
UNTIMELY DEATH (with Jan Yager)
JUST YOUR EVERYDAY PEOPLE (with Jan Yager)
Cybersona
Fred Yager
Hannacroix Creek Books, Inc.
Stamford, Connecticut
This novel is a work of fiction. The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, places, companies, or incidents, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2005 by Fred Yager
Cover design by Jan Yager
(Additional technical cover design services by Publication Services of Champaign, IL)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
ISBN: 1-889262-83-8 (HC) EBook ISBN: 978-1-889262-97-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yager, Fred, 1946- Cybersona / Fred Yager. p. cm. ISBN 1-889262-83-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Artificial intelligence--Fiction. 2. Computer games--Fiction. 3. Quadraplegics--Fiction. 4. Revenge--Fiction. I. Title. PS3575.A29C93 2005 813'.54--dc22
2004021244
Published by:
Hannacroix Creek Books, Inc.
1127 High Ridge Road, #110
Stamford, Connecticut 06905-1203
E-mail: hannacroix@aol.com
www.hannacroixcreekbooks.com
For my wife Jan and our sons Scott and Jeffrey
1
GARLAND DANIELS STARED out of his home office window at the mountain of fog rolling in from the Pacific Ocean, covering all but the highest towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. He could tell it was going to be one of those thick, wet, smack-you-in-the-face fogs that crept in like a soggy blanket and felt like a giant gob of damp cotton when it touched your skin.
He continued watching the slow-moving wall of white as it pushed on through the bridge and covered Alcatraz Island as it headed into the City by the Bay, chilling the San Francisco night.
Garland was the only non-Asian person living in the pre-war apartment building, which also housed a Chinese movie theater and catering service. His apartment overlooked Chinatown’s main thoroughfare of Grand Street. The fact that he was the only non-Asian tenant made him feel special. Physically, Garland was rather plain. He had a slight build and a face that changed like a chameleon from photo to photo, no two looking alike, depending on the lighting and how the shadows fell. But what he lacked in physicality, he more than made up for in mental acuity. Garland was a genius. His IQ was unknown since he had always scored 160 on the Wechsler Intelligence test and that was the highest score you could get. There wasn’t a question he couldn’t answer or a problem he couldn’t solve. Until now, that is.
Garland turned away from the window and back to the problem at hand, a problem he had been wrestling with for weeks, a problem that had absolutely nothing to do with the job he was supposed to be working on.
At 25, Garland had already established himself as one of the best freelance cyber-security technicians in the Bay area. Most of his clients were small businesses or wealthy private individuals whose broadband and wireless systems required sophisticated firewalls to prevent a seemingly never-ending onslaught of new viruses, Trojan horses, worms, and spyware.
But instead of completing the assignment for which he was being paid, Garland was puzzling over the failure of his tenth attempt to create a special applications program for his latest obsession, a new Internet virtual reality mind game called Cybersona , developed by a group of five Stanford University dropouts.
Using sophisticated artificial intelligence and virtual reality systems, Cybersona allowed players to create not only their own cyber personalities, or cyber personas as they called them, but also the virtual reality worlds in which they lived.
To Garland, playing Cybersona was as close to playing God as he had ever come. In Cybersona , Garland was no longer a skinny, near-sighted computer geek. In Cybersona , he was over six feet tall, with perfect muscular structure, and possessing such paranormal powers as telekinesis and telepathy. Basically, he could start fires with his mind and foretell the future. It was during one of his more intense sessions that Garland came up with the idea of creating a new special application that would put all others to shame. Unfortunately, he had yet to master the intricate program design such an application required.
The motto for Cybersona was "If you can think it, we can create it."
If that’s true, thought Garland, then why can’t you create what I’m thinking?
Garland considered suing the creators of Cybersona for false advertising when his cell phone chimed the melody chords to "Back Door Man" by the Doors. He looked at the screen and recognized the number of the pain in the ass client he was supposed to be servicing. He let his voicemail take it. Besides, he wasn’t that late. In another hour or so, he’d be finished and ten thousand dollars richer.
Not bad for a day’s work. Still, if he could crack the code that allowed him to create his Cybersona special app, then the world as he knew it would be a vastly different place.
He looked at the clock and decided to put the Cybersona problem aside and get back to fixing a sluggish
server that a video news release company was paying him to improve. He figured he could knock that off in an hour and get to Suzy’s apartment by nine at the latest.
As he reworked his client’s website, Garland wondered if he should put a jacket on before going out. He figured the air pouring in through the open window of his Grant Street apartment had dropped about ten degrees since sunset and would fall about ten more when the fog made landfall.
Garland liked the fog, the way its cool mist cleaned the dirty city air like a huge spritzer. The air always smelled fresher after the fog rolled through and the streets and sidewalks glistened under the street lamps.
2
ON THE NORTHERN border of Chinatown and San Francisco’s North Beach area, the streets, normally bustling with tourists, were nearly empty and quiet as the fog swirled down alleyways and hilly side streets.
It was the kind of night Raymond Lee liked the best. Raymond was the leader of the Grant Street Dragons and the fog was Raymond’s friend. Unlike Garland, who cherished the fog’s cleansing ability, Raymond appreciated other attributes. For example, the fog kept pedestrian traffic down and provided excellent cover in times of need. Those times usually being when Raymond or members of his gang needed to escape arrest for possession with intent to sell.
At 22, Raymond was the oldest and most experienced member of the Dragons, which consisted of eight young Asian men who’d grown up within a two-block radius of the alley in which they stood. The youngest was 14. Raymond had been their leader for the past year, inheriting the mantel from Jackie Lee (no relation to Raymond) who was doing a seven-to-ten year stretch in Chino for possession with intent to sell a lot, about half a kilo of China White.
A recently waxed, black, re-built and remodeled Chevy Impala "low rider," its glistening body a mere two inches off the pavement, crept slowly down Broadway toward the intersection at Grant Street. The windows on the long, sleek machine were tinted so dark you wondered how the driver managed to see where he was going. The vehicle stopped at the intersection, then turned right onto Grant Street, moving slowly past the alley where Raymond and his gang hid in the shadows and fog.
The high gloss polish was so fresh Raymond could smell the faint scent of Turtle Wax as the low rider glided by. He kept his eyes on the car while signaling behind his back for the rest of his gang to stop moving around. Once the car had passed, Raymond lowered his hand and the other young Asian men continued to check their automatic weapons.
When Raymond had first heard a Latino gang was talking about moving into North Beach, he didn’t believe it. But it had happened slowly, as old-time Italian families moved out of the neighborhood and Chinese, along with a large group of young, ethnically ambiguous x-geners, settled in. They didn’t care who sold them their drugs.
The problem, as Raymond Lee saw it, was that the Latinos had trouble with boundaries and therefore couldn’t remain content with selling drugs on Grant Street north of Telegraph Avenue. Two Latinos had even been seen working corners as far south as Stockton. Tonight, Raymond Lee was going to administer a crash course in geography to some wayward "Beaners."
Across the street from the alley, Floyd Harrison sat behind the wheel of his black government-issue sedan wondering how Chinatown had grown north of Broadway. When he was stationed at Treasure Island in the mid-1970s, Harrison and his fellow sailors spent their nights and weekends prowling the North Beach topless bars and hippie coffee bars that lined Broadway and Grant Street. Back then Chinatown had stopped at Broadway. And Broadway was where North Beach began and beckoned to the hordes of lonely sailors out for a night of R&R, or as they preferred to call it, I&I intoxication and intercourse. Now both the topless bars and the coffeehouses were gone, replaced by Chinese markets, cyber cafes, and cell phone stores.
Harrison had just turned 50 when he accepted the transfer to San Francisco. This was going to be his twilight tour with the Drug Enforcement Agency. His 20 years in the Navy meant he could retire from the DEA after ten. This time next year, Floyd Harrison would be a free man of leisure. No more tedious nights of wasted stakeouts, although tonight’s stakeout could actually result in something. In fact, it had better since it was Harrison who had convinced the division commander to let him take a team of six other agents in case an arrest situation developed.