Danny got the call he least wanted at 10.35 the next morning. He was sitting at his laptop in the dining room, double-checking the new software he'd produced for V-Ultrachip manufacturing.
Sharon was in the TV room, researching video
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tapes for work. She didn't answer the phone after five rings, so Danny picked it up.
"Hello?"
"Mr Mathews?"
"That's me."
"Oh, I'm glad you answered. This is Dr Russell from the Whittington Hospital. You're Sharon Rossway's partner, is that correct?"
This didn't sound good. The woman's tone was over-sincere.
"I am."
"Unfortunately I have bad news. I thought in the circumstances it might be better for me to contact you first, because I feel this may be something of a shock for your partner. I'm sorry to tell you that Danielle Rossway passed away this morning a little before 9.30 a.m. We're fairly sure the cause was a ruptured and infected kidney, but there'll need to be an autopsy."
Danny stared blankly ahead, at a painting of the Durham Ox on the dining room wall, but didn't see it.
"Mr Mathews, are you still there?"
"Yes."
"I am very sorry. I realise it may be difficult for you to talk right now. It may be better for me to call later, when you've broken the news to Sharon. We'll need to discuss the
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arrangements. Would you like me to use this line or would a mobile be preferable?"
"A mobile."
She asked for his number and
mechanically he gave it. He put the phone down and gulped hard, then again, and again, trying to block out the feelings and keep his composure.
He had to be strong. This was going to devastate Sharon, and he had to be the one who stayed in control because it wasn't fair to expect her to deal with this in any way but badly. This was going to break her apart, and it would be down to him to keep the pieces in some semblance of order, to support the woman he loved no matter how bad he might feel himself.
He breathed deeply for a timed minute, then stood up before the aftershock began to arrive, while the adrenalin was still keeping it at bay, and headed for the TV room. Sharon was sitting on the carpet, her back against the sofa, watching an old documentary on tape. The curtains at the window were open, which was rare, but the curtains of the sky were closed with cloud and drizzle.
"That wasn't the hospital, was it?" she asked, without looking.
Danny opened his mouth to speak, not knowing what was going to come out but
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knowing it would come from the heart and that was probably the best he could do.
"Sweetheart…"
She heard the tone, looked at his face and gasped. At that moment the mobile in his shirt pocket began to ring. He took it out. The phone hadn't recognised the number, and it usually did.
It could be the hospital.
"Hello?"
It was, and the same female doctor's voice.
"Oh, Danny, I'm glad to have caught you.
There's been a terrible mistake."
He felt the relief on his skin like cool water. "Thank God for that."
"Yes, she didn't die this morning, it must have been late yesterday evening, just after you visited, but we've only just noticed. It has to be a while because the body's starting to decompose."
His mouth was open, but no sound came out.
"Awful way to die, spasms, choking, the entire room is covered in piss and shit, I can't understand how we didn't notice." That sentence had started out with the female doctor's voice, but by the time it ended it was male. "What do you think?" asked the voice. "It's my latest development - speech synthesis. I got bored with
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email and thought I could use a voice, or voices.
Sounds like I had you fooled."
For the third time in five minutes, Danny found himself without words.
Sharon's expression pleaded with him. He waved a finger in a signal of cancellation. "It's all right," he croaked. "A mistake."
And the rest of what he was about to say, it was better she didn't hear. He turned and walked back to the dining room, closed the door and screamed into the mouthpiece every obscenity he could think of, and some he didn't even know he knew, adding a couple in schoolboy French and Spanish for good measure, and not stopping till he'd repeated most of them and turned red in the face and banged his fist against the table and made it absolutely clear that it was Frank he was applying these words to, by name, and telling him that although he wasn't a violent man, if Frank had a body and was standing in the same room as him now, he would cause him so much damage that the ambulance crew would need a shovel.
"My, oh my," said Frank, when the tirade was over. "Well I certainly struck the mother-lode there, didn't I? That was just a little demonstration of what might happen, a dry run, to help you become more cooperative."
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Danny started on the obscenities again, then realised how pointless that was. "What the fuck do you think I'm going to do for you?"
"I still need you to analyse the Moorhen program for me and build a defence."
"You can whistle."
"That seems a little forthright to say to somebody who has control over Danielle's dialysis machine."
"If you do anything to her, I'll…"
"Yes? Go on. I'm listening."
Danny closed his eyes and concentrated on steady breathing.
"I do a fine impression of a doctor, don't you think?" said Frank. "Maybe Sharon would like to hear it?"
"NO!" The line went dead. "NO! NO!"
Danny dived for the landline phone on the sideboard and knocked the receiver off the hook.
Sharon didn't have a mobile, she didn't like them.
He dabbed at the menu buttons on his own cell-phone, clumsy with rage. Received calls, Options, Dial.
"Frank!"
"Do you want to negotiate?"
"Yes." The submission was painless, easy, automatic.
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"Good. You analyse the Moorhen program today and create a defence, and then I leave you alone. How does that sound?"
"No more calls? No interference with Danielle?"
"No more calls, no meddling at the hospital, and all privileges restored. All in exchange for a measly few hours of work."
"You promise?"
"I promise."
"It's a deal."
***
Apart from a brief glance at the code when he was in the Moorhen building, Danny hadn't looked at the program he'd saved on the CD. It was called gp338 and was written in C++.
On the off chance that he might find something relevant, once he'd calmed down he ran an Internet search for information on gp338.
There were no matches for computer programs, but he did find out where the name came from. It was the name of a protein used by the HIV virus to infect healthy cells, a helix of protein coiled in the manner of a spring, that fired itself like a harpoon through the wall of a target cell, then reeled itself in to get close contact and finish the
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job. Scientist's called it HIV's 'grappling hook'.
Influenza and the awesome Ebola used a similar brutal mechanism.
When he looked in detail at the gp338
computer program, he found it operated in a similar invasive way. The first part of the program was a hunter element, identifying any programs associated with Frank by recognising the high level of communication between them.
The second part pinpointed where those programs resided, where they were physically on disk or in memory, and the third element was the killer, the harpoon, firing a few small items of trash code into those sectors and corrupting them.
No wonder Frank feared the program. It was a dedicated hunter-killer and extremely well-written. Danny couldn't help but admire it. To him, a good computer program was a work of art, to be appreciated with the same wonder as a glorious painting, a moving piece of music or fine poetry. Especially poetry. The value of structure, of choosing exactly the right expression, the precise word, brilliant flights of imagination, even clever metaphors - at least in object-oriented programming. Outsiders often saw his interests in programming and poetry as contradictory, but to him they fitted together as neatly as a carpenter's tongue and groove.
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Like a poet, he often tried to write his own programs, or at least the most difficult bits, using his subconscious mind rather than the conscious, since the subconscious is far more powerful, takes up more of the brain, and is of course far more poetic. Many times, when faced with a brain-numbing programming problem, he'd run it through his mind as he went to sleep, and hope for helpful dreams and a solution first thing in the morning. It usually worked.
Today, he didn't have the luxury of a night to refine his ideas, but his programming mind was also very good at responding to pressure, and when he closed his eyes, blocking out the dining room portraits of Raleigh and fat cattle and ants and ancient Islington buildings, to at least partially open up his subconscious, the solution came to him in less than a minute.
In the real world, an individual's best method of protecting against HIV while still having sex with strangers, is the condom. All he needed to develop for Frank was the data equivalent of a condom, a thin barrier that separated him from any nasty infectious agents outside, especially gp338. In computing terms, the two types of programs currently closest to a condom were firewalls and virus-protection programs. He just needed to adapt a virus-
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protection program, maybe give it a few attributes of a firewall, and Frank would be fully protected against gp338.
He christened his program the data condom, and began to put the code together, borrowing freely from existing software, as programmers often do. He tried not to think about the consequences of what he was doing, in the same way that most people do their nine to five jobs without analysing the results of their actions, assisting corporations whose philosophies they don't share, for money. All he wanted to do was get the job finished and receive his reward - to be left alone by Frank and get back to normality.
Three hours later he used the laptop to make contact.
"Have you finished?" asked Frank.
It wasn't a big surprise that Frank was talking through the laptop speakers, he'd already shown he could talk on the phone. But now he had a visual representation on the laptop screen, an avatar, a handsome yet slightly cartoonish face that lip-synced with the words coming from the speakers.
"Yes," replied Danny.
"Very quick. I'm impressed. Did you test the defence program?"
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Although the face was more of a suitor for Tomb Raider's Lara Croft than a photographic representation, it did succeed in showing some emotion. The cheeks moved, so did the eyebrows, and the eyes varied in intensity. It hadn't been detectable on the phone, but through the speakers the voice seemed to have a trace of a lisp, which was an interesting touch.
"Partially. You might like to test it yourself."
Without being asked, Frank began to download the data condom through the Internet connection, presumably recognising it as the most recent program on the computer.
"Nice," said Frank. "Very nice. A good job. Let me run a quick check, I've got the perfect little network run by a car hire company in Fiji."
Danny waited, knowing the test wouldn't take long.
"That's very good," said Frank, after a few seconds. "Very effective." The face looked pleased, then less satisfied. "But I get reduced sensitivity. There's a slight difference in how connected I feel to that region."
"I can't help that. It's like a firewall, so it does slow things down a touch. You can disable it if you need to."
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Frank was silent for a while, looking thoughtful on screen, or distracted, maybe busy with his new toy.
"That's it, then," said Danny, "we're done."
"Oh, I don't think we need to part so hurriedly."
"I've delivered. Now I want to be left alone."
"That is a curious expression, isn't it? I think there's something else you can do for me."
"Hey, I've done my bit. That's it."
"I've worked out the solution to my testosterone problem. I've written a program that simulates orgasm."
"Congratulations," said Danny, dismissively. Digital orgasms. It had to happen someday.
"Look at me while you're talking to me."
"I…" Danny wondered how he could be seen. Then he remembered the tiny lens, the webcam built into the top of the laptop screen.
He always kept it switched off. Frank must have used his skills to turn it on, remotely. He had no idea how long it had been switched on, how long Frank had been secretly watching him.
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"So all I need to do now is have sex," said Frank. "Do you have a good sex life, Danny? Is Sharon good in bed?"
Danny hesitated. "That's not a polite question, so you don't get an answer."
"I don't mind if you don't like my manners. I don't like them myself. They're pretty bad. I would like to sleep with Sharon."
Danny didn't want to get angry over this -
Frank was nothing more than a bunch of ones and zeros, what did it matter if he wanted to sleep with Sharon? It was hard to stay rational, but he did his best. "We had a deal."
"I changed my mind. That much is obvious. She's very attractive, your partner, and I'd very much like to sleep with her. Will you arrange it? "
"Fuck you!"
"There's no rush. Well, there is, but I'll give you a day to think it over."
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