THE QUEST

Chapter 7 MEPHISTO's Serenade

They had gone around a couple of corners when they encountered a hulking thug.

Adam was at first terrified that this guy was some sort of enforcer, who would beat Adam up to get information out of him. But the gunman looked completely startled to see him, and Adam suddenly realized who this new guy was: the avatar Joan called Tough Guy God.

The Tough Guy smiled at the gunman. "Let my people go."

Unnerved, the gunman raised his weapon and shot. It was not clear to Adam what happened next – indeed, some miracle may have been involved – but the bullets seemed to have no harm, and instead the gun itself flew into the Tough Guy's hand. Adam's kidnappers turned into wusses now that the firepower was on the other side, and turned to run. Adam managed to trip the bearded man as he rushed past.

The Tough Guy handed the gun to Adam and then walked off with His usual wave, as if they had had a pleasant encounter and He had handed Adam a nice present. Adam would have laughed if the situation wasn't so dire. Talk about a deus ex machina resolution – at least that answered Adam's theological question. God seemed to be taking more action on this mission than normal, which increased the mystery – why was this case so important?

Adam pointed his gun at the bearded man, who was just now getting up. The gun had an intimidating effect, though Adam had no intention of shooting it unless he was actually in great danger. "Walk. We're going to rejoin my partner."

The bearded man seemed to put up no resistance – sneaking around seemed to be more his thing. As Adam forced him back on a route to the taxi, he muttered, "I TOLD them I was a software expert, not a spy. Why did they put me into this situation?" He seemed to be a lot more annoyed at his employers than he was at Adam.

"Why did you go work for them?"

"Money. Recruit a couple of hackers and I'd get a huge commission, they said. They didn't say what would happen if I failed to recruit them."

Adam thought an unusually high reward might have been a tipoff that something sinister was involved, but some people were just too blinded by the greed. He didn't question the man now. Jane deserved to be in on the conversation.

As they finally reached the taxi, Adam put the gun in his coat pocket, hoping that it wouldn't go off. The taxi driver might object to driving with a gun in the back seat. But the bearded man seemed defeated; he simply climbed into the taxi so that he was sitting between Jane and Adam. Their luggage was gone from the back seat; maybe Joan had taken advantage of the wait to move it into the trunk.

"A good hotel, please," she said to the driver. "I'll leave it to your judgment."

"OK. Just remember you're paying for three people now." He must have known the third passenger was joining them under odd circumstances, and didn't seem to care.

"All right, now," said Adam. "Tell us what is going on. To start with, what's your name?"

"Henry Wagner."

"Let's see an ID," demanded Jane. Adam didn't know whether her father had given her pointers in how to do investigations, or whether she was trying to look like detective. Either way, he memorized the driver's license number when Jane passed him the card. "What is this software program that everybody is after?"

"Hmm," muttered the bearded man. "Do you know the computer term "daemon"? D A E M O N."

"I'm afraid not."

"It's a program that runs on its own, without displaying questions or results to the user. Often a user doesn't even know the program exists; it may be started by another program. That technology has been known for years. But these two guys have taken the idea to a whole new level. The Mephisto program. They say it stands for Multi-Function System Technology Organizer."

"It's also probably a pun," said Adam. "Mephistopheles was the demon in the Faust legend, supposed to me one of the most powerful ones. So they're bragging that they have the most powerful daemon program." He had read a book of legends several years earlier, looking for symbols to include in his art. "So what does it do?"

"It travels around the Internet like a virus. But unlike the viruses, it acts in an orderly fashion, carrying out the owner's commands. It can decide where it needs to go to carry out the commands. It can even rewrite itself to fit a new environment. In the end the programmers also wanted to make it untraceable, so that the owner could remain anonymous."

"What sort of commands?" asked Jane.

"All sorts. They could be perfectly harmless. It wasn't until I got too deep in this mess that I realized that the technology could do things like take over a government's computer system, or the stock market. And it couldn't be trapped, because it could rewrite itself to evade any sort of anti-virus software."

Adam thought back on the legend. Mephistopheles supposedly carried out Faust's wishes, but he did so in a cold-blooded way. Asked to help Faust win a girl, he arranged for her seduction by sending her jewelry and isolating her from mentors. When Faust got in a sword-fight, the demon not only helped him win but killed the opponent. Later he killed an elderly couple who got in the way of one of Faust's well-intended projects. Morally, it was still Faust's fault for not keeping track of what his demon was doing in his behalf.

A computer program would be equally cold-blooded, not because it was evil, but because it had no notion of pain, or death, or moral consequences. With no emotions, it could do whatever without guilt. Its only concern was carrying out its program. And if it was designed to work on its own, it might do thing that its owner might not even have intended. Adam was beginning to get a glimmer of why this software was important. Anybody who got a monopoly of the program would acquire a tremendous amount of power.

"What went wrong?" he asked.

The bearded man frowned. "I tried to go about it honestly. Offered the programmers a huge fee if they'd sell exclusive use of the program to my employers. Lenny seemed interested. But the girl, Elizabeth, was suspicious of me for some reason, and urged Darryl not to deal with me. And when I persisted, she persuaded Darryl to take her on a vacation – and take the crucial hardware with him. Lenny tried to cover up for a while, but finally admitted that he would fall behind Darryl if the latter had the hardware advantage. Then my employer turned nasty. Said if I didn't get control of the system, what would happen to me was a lot worse than just being fired."

Suddenly things were making sense. Darryl and Elizabeth weren't trying to steal the program from Lenny; it was a matter of Elizabeth trying to keep Lenny from selling it, and for a very ethical reason. And of course she got on edge when intrigue followed them, and she couldn't tell whether Adam, or the Bearded Man, or both, were the bad guy.

"So you tried to break into their room in Florida while they were at the beach," speculated Adam. "Then you realized I had seen you, and you panicked, all the way back to Washington."

Wagner winced. "It was crucial not to let any hint of the project get out. If it did, other people would be trying to steal the software too. If a big company, or a government, found out just a little, they could fund their own megaproject and not have to deal with Darryl or Lennie at all."

Jane and Adam stared at each other, realizing that there was a moral question for them. Did God want them to keep the secret as well? If so, what were they to do with Wagner? Turning him in to police would create a lot of confusion, particularly since Adam and Jane could not explain their own roles.

"Mariott hotel ahead," announced the cabby.

Jane seemed to come to a decision. "All right, Wagner. We're letting you go. But we're keeping your license, enough to identify you if you create any more trouble for us."

"Fine. I'm getting out of here."

Adam let him out, while Jane made the final settlement with the cabby. "And an extra tip if you promise not to talk about this," she added.

"I promise. Interesting trip with you three," said the driver. "Am I ever going to find out how this ended up?"

"To quote a British expression," said Jane, "not bloody likely."

Later, in bed, in a room of the Mariott (paid for by grace of God), the couple discussed what they had learned.

"So at last we know why the argument was sort of important," said Jane. "It was never just a matter of two guys in a business dispute. The software itself was dangerous."

"Yes," agreed Adam. "But the question is, what we are supposed to about it? Basically all we accomplished was to scare off this Wagner guy from spying on Darryl, but he was just a cog in the machine. His employers are still around and still greedy. Are we supposed to stop them somehow?"

"I suppose an avatar will pop up tomorrow and tell us the next step," Jane said wearily. "Until then, we've got our lives to ourselves."

They discussed making love, but had to refrain, for purely practical reasons. They had been expecting to go straight home from school, so they had not packed in birth control. Jane said she thought she was in the most fertile phase of her month.

"I'm not ready to have a baby," she admitted. "I know Sister Lily's looking forward to it, but she's ten years older than me. I want to get through college first."

"But in the long run—"

"Yes, I'd love to have your children. Plus—" her voice turned bitter. "I suppose HE wants me to have kids too."

"W-why do you say that?"

"This business of being in tune with God is supposed to run in the family, all the way back to a female prophetess in the Old Testament. Even Lily's gotten affected temporarily, just because she has a special baby in her womb. So of course He'd want to keep the family running."

"Umm." Adam had once been nervous at the idea of being intimate with a "holy woman", so much so that he had developed a case of what Jane miscalled "importations". Now he felt intimidated in quite a different way. To be blunt about it, God probably wanted to breed helpers, the way Morgiana Begh's family bred horses. So Jane was the crucial broodmare, and what did that make Adam? He didn't know the technical term for the male animal that serviced the important female, and didn't want to think it anyway.

It was degrading to think in those terms: they were human beings, not horses. At least none of the avatars had brought up the matter yet. But God definitely didn't mind intervening in their lives.

And he wanted kids, in the long run. Why take a happy outcome for everybody, and turn it into something sinister?

With these disturbing thoughts in mind, he fell asleep.

In the middle of the night, a noise woke him up. At first he thought his wife may have gotten up, to go to the bathroom. But as he shifted position, he felt Jane at his side in the bed. She was waking up, too.

"Who's there?" he called out.

The room lights came on, and he found some heavyset men glaring at them. Jane screamed.

"Shut up, " said one of the men, pulling out another gun. Adam had thrown his captured gun in one of the clothes drawers, out of reach. "I don't know how you got away, but we're not going to make the same mistake twice. You're coming with us!"

TO BE CONTINUED