There are very few problems that can't be solved with a little help from your friends and the proper application of high explosives. Fans of Speed Racer will enjoy this fast paced adventure.
Ace mechanic Ethan Hayes had risen to the top of the computer gaming circuit as the Scarab. When he invented a device that made him rich over night, he and ex-girlfriend, Mary Ann, were able to enter SimCon, the simulated European road race.
When Ground Effect Vehicles became common, prototypes were too dangerous and expensive to build outright. Instead, each year, major designers competed in the Super Bowl of virtual races – SimCon. The vehicles needed speed, skill, and weapons to get ahead. The winners in each class got millions in production contracts and advertizing.
Ethan made a lot of enemies in his first professional race, including a cyber-criminal named Kali. The challenges of a week-long trek across Europe are nothing compared to the dirty tricks, murder, and kidnapping that took place off the track. When someone kidnapped Mary Ann, it was up to the Scarab to save her.
This was the first full-length novel I ever wrote, from 1998.
Buy through Amazon , Smashwords ($0.99) or in paperback for $12.99.
SAMPLE from The Scarab
Copyright 2011 Scott Rhine
Chapter 1 – Secret Identity
I closed my eyes and listened to the squad car’s engine run.
I liked fixing cars because there’s always a right answer if you pay attention.
My dad used to say, “An engine problem comes down to a simple matter of fuel,
air, and fire.” Of course, these days, there’s a lot of software added into the
mix, but that’s pretty black and white as well. Sometimes, I wish people came
with manuals.
I scratched my black, scraggly
beard as I thought. I tell my boss that I wear it to look more credible to the
customers, but the main reason I don’t shave is that I hate razors. I’m a
hemophiliac, and the last time I cut myself, I ended up staying a week in the
hospital. The blood they gave me had been tainted. I know I could use an
electric shaver, but then the scar on my jaw would show.
Closing the hood, I announced, “Your
harmonic balancer is broken.”
The regulars from the barber shop
next door nodded, and a few dollar bills traded hands. It was a small town. The
officer whose vehicle I had diagnosed wasn’t convinced. “You can’t tell that
just by ear!”
I kept my mouth closed. Police
usually rub me the wrong way. I’d inherited just enough swarthy complexion from
my Mom that I reminded authorities of whatever group they were profiling now.
Sam, the owner of Sam’s Floater
Physicians, backed me. “There’s a reason he’s the head mechanic after only five
years, Deputy.”
Mom didn’t have money, so I did all
her repair work growing up. I started wrenching here at sixteen and had to
learn a little aerodynamics. Floaters are ground-effect vehicles (GEVs) that
hover close to the ground.
The officer pointed to the
uniformed picture of Sam’s son, Nick, behind the cash register. Nick had died
in action a year after high school. “He was your boy’s friend.”
Sam got cold and civil. “You’ve had
two other shops stumped. Your engine isn’t mounted properly anymore. It fits
all the symptoms you told me.”
The deputy grunted, “Just a bolt?
That doesn’t sound too bad. How much?”
Sam asked, “Ethan, how long will it
take?”
I replied, “It’s a three hour job,
minimum. He’ll need new belts, too. If you want us to take care of that vacuum
leak while we’re that deep, I can probably do it for just another half hour.”
The deputy had a small aneurism
when Sam gave him the estimate. He stood nose to nose with me, but didn’t think
about shoving into my personal space. In high school, I lifted weights instead
of participating in contact sports. Eventually, I could bench press my own
weight, and people started leaving me alone.
“I can run it without a stupid bolt
for another month.”
“That could be fatal, sir,” I
explained. “Follow me.” The whole gang shuffled into the shop behind me. I
brought up the high-resolution surround-screen diagnostic simulator, punched in
the police car’s make and model, and a three-dimensional schematic appeared. The
car frame was transparent in the rendering, giving it the appearance of
blue-tinged glass. I rotated to show the undercarriage and then removed the balancer
connection with a click. “The ‘bolts’ remaining aren’t strong enough. If you
hit another car or telephone pole…” I entered a school-zone speed and hit the
collision button on the screen. The cam shaft on the screen detached, and the
engine was totaled within seconds.
The deputy deflated. “I’ll leave
the keys up front.”
Sam clapped me on the shoulder. “Good
job, Mr. Hayes. I didn’t know our simulation rig had a collision button.”
“It didn’t. I learned to program in
sim language a while back. I borrowed most of the code from a program at MIT,”
I said, failing to mention it was from a massively interactive game site.
Excitement over, Sam helped me pack
up the tools and sweep up. Promptly at seven, I turned off the lights and
locked the doors. When I was alone, I rolled my chair back to the simulator,
and started my second life. Slipping on the data gloves, I pushed another
button on the console. On nights and weekends, to hundreds of gamers, I became
the mysterious and deadly Scarab.
This close to MIT there is an
enormous net community connected around the clock, and the college version of
GEVSIM is popular for spectators and players alike. As the name implies, GEVSIM
involves players designing their own ground-effect vehicles and racing them at
high speeds on a simulated obstacle course until only one of the combatants
remains. Aside from the laser targeting systems, entertainment really hasn’t
changed that much since the Roman chariot races.
My boss and his parent company Exotech
don’t know I play, and to help keep it that way, nobody on the net knows my
real name. Exotech has strict rules about unauthorized use of its computers by
indentured servants. Under the Credit Repayment Act, they give me minimum wage,
and all the rest of my salary goes to pay off my own medical bills and the
debts my mother accrued during her terminal illness.
I wouldn’t call the game an
addiction. I have frequent insomnia during the summer, and the garage had
air-conditioning that my squalid apartment across the street lacked.
I didn’t start out trying to design
the ultimate driving machine; I just got a little bored with winning. I started
by making obvious improvements to stock vehicles and eventually designed my
own.
Tonight I was entering a radical
new prototype into a small side game in Finland, and I had to clear the model
with the expert system referee first. Colleges had pirated the simulator code
from SimCon, a yearly event which involved all the major car makers. The
official simulator cared about streamlined appearance, passenger comfort, fuel
economy, safety, noise pollution, blind spots, and average time till repair—all
the facts usually monitored by Consumer Reports. This thorough simulation has
pointed out several design problems and prevented several recalls before
vehicle production even began. The simplified pirate version cared about only
one thing—what on-line manuals do your parts and weapons come from?
The three-panel display for the
simulation looked like a normal windshield and control panel. The overhead GPS
map view plotted all the other race vehicles just like real cars do, using the FedNet
global positioning system. FedNet uses the transponders under the front and
rear bumper of every vehicle to track its location, speed, and direction. This
technology was great for autopilot steering and avoiding traffic jams.
Mandatory transponder use was viewed by many as a colossal violation of
privacy. Unfortunately, two teenagers joy-riding in Florida broadsided a bus full of school kids
and the legislation got railroaded through without debate.
After twenty minutes, I convinced
the Finnish referee that I could keep my engines running at almost a constant
speed. Any energy not being used for movement would be channeled into rotating
the hull of the vehicle, much like a 1960’s UFO. This greatly simplified my
fuel consumption, engine design, and autopilot software, as well as giving me
the ability to accelerate in almost any direction, seconds ahead of the
competition. Most GEVs steer like airplanes, with fast forward movement and
slow, wide turns. My design would handle like a helicopter; whichever way I
leaned the joystick, that’s where I’d go.
The one disadvantage I foresaw was
that if I braked too fast, the torque from the suddenly spinning hull would pop
me up in the air like a champagne cork. To turn this unwanted height to my
advantage, I hung a machine gun from the underbelly of the craft. That way, if
anybody was hot on my tail, I could brake fast, and strafe them as they passed
under me.
I picked this out-of-the-way game
so that I could work out the kinks without anybody discovering my design.
Looking over the roster of logins, I only spotted two from the United States and one from Germany likely to give me grief. By
e-mail, I offered twenty gallons of fuel from my reserve tank to “Gandalf” from
Belgium
if he could eliminate any of the three.
The course was composed of two
intersecting ovals with sharp embankments for high-speed turning. The center
had light posts, oil slicks, and tank traps for slaloming and pits with ramps
for jumping. One complete lap was required every five minutes to avoid
disqualification. The first player to reach twenty-four laps or ten kills would
win.
The virtual race started around
eight. For the first twenty minutes, I hung around the perimeter of the track,
avoiding conflict and pointing out kill opportunities to less experienced
players. I was running in non-rotation mode in order to calibrate my controls
and get a feel for how all of the other subsystems performed. This vehicle had
a revolutionary suspension, improved altimeter and banking indicators, and
idiot-simple pilot controls.
By the time the other players
caught on, I was one of the final four. A vicious Berkeley student calling
himself “Metallica” made a truce with “Red Dwarf” and “Red Oktober” to see who
could dust me first. No one had scored me in the past thirty-seven games.
“Gonna squash you bug man!”
Metallica broadcast.
I sent back a digitized video clip
from some old Mummy movie with a scarab necklace killing a tomb desecrator. I
can’t send voice on the garage rig, but it adds to my air of mystery.
The kid had a point, though.
Without the secret weapon, my GEV wallowed like an elephant in quicksand. When
the others were about fifteen seconds away, I started rotation. At forty km/h,
I noticed the first glitch. My satellite velocity indicator read forty, but the
direction indicator had me traveling northeast! The period of rotation was such
that when the simulated satellite guidance system looked at the front of my
vehicle, it was always pointing the same direction. Holding at this rate of
revolution, I tried an experiment. Nudging my joy-stick west, I watched the
velocity indicator jump to forty-five, but still in the northeast direction.
The other three players fired their
long-range weapons at where my icon appeared on the strategy map. The shots
passed harmlessly through my shadow; in fact, someone’s rogue missile locked
onto “Red Oktober’s” vehicle and blew it to pieces. And then there were three.
Now that they were all in close
range, I began to worry about how my camouflage would hold up under scrutiny.
Someone was bound to notice my blip slowly creeping in the wrong direction once
the scale changed on their overhead displays. Stopping cold would make me dead
meat at this point, since both enemies were behind me. Because my pilot was
always facing forward and at the same angle, I couldn’t see back to target my
machine guns. This was a serious design flaw I would correct once I got out of
this mess.
“Metallica” fired a salvo of
incendiary shells. Without thinking, I increased engine output to the red line
and tried to evade. My heading indicators went insane for a moment and then the
compass needle vanished entirely. I disappeared from the screen. I was rotating
faster than the screen refresh rate and had made myself effectively invisible.
“Red Dwarf” immediately assumed I
had been vaporized and was out of the game. Sometimes the computer was a few
seconds late in registering the kill, especially with overseas phone lines.
With the truce officially over, “Dwarf” took the opportunity to lay impeller
mines in an arc around the area. “Metallica” blew himself up while turning to
avoid my presumed wreckage.
“Red Dwarf” slowed to a halt,
waiting for the traditional virtual blonde to come out and crown him with
laurel leaves. Unable to resist the bait, I slapped the prototype into reverse.
I could run over the smug geek and he’d never know what hit him.
Design flaw number three surfaced
about then. Reverse gear also tried to reverse the direction of the hull spin.
Have you ever slapped your car into reverse while going 100 km/h? Chunks of
simulated engine block shot half a meter into the asphalt. At the last second,
my icon flickered into existence again, and my red “self-destruct” symbol came
on. It was a feature most racers had. If you were just crippled, the simulation
would eject your pilot and blow the car so that no one else could cannibalize
your equipment.
Since “Red Dwarf’s” pilot was
outside his vehicle’s armor, he got caught in the blast radius from all my
unspent fifty caliber shells. Technically, the game ended in a draw because I
had killed the winner before being eliminated myself. I was still undefeated. I
told the other guys on the net that my new self-destruct feature delayed until
another player was within a certain range. Nobody suspected that I was lying to
keep bigger secrets.
Chapter 2 – Reward
For the next several months, each night or so, I began
refining the various subsystems of my design, toying with only one or two new
features per game to preserve secrecy. With a modified spin model, I could be
totally invisible while standing still but completely visible at full speed. At
half speed, the satellite could show me at any speed in between, going any
direction. The more forward motion I had, the easier it would be to fix my
position. I was able to stay hidden longer by painting my hull to look like the
track and using terrain creatively.
In working out the design kinks, I
would often drop into games under an alias, and sometimes leave before the end.
Players that figured this out would have a contest to see who could “spot the
Scarab” first. If they caught me, I had to stay for the whole race to protect
my reputation.
Since I couldn’t rely on satellites
for my own direction and speed, I installed tiny solid-state accelerometers
like they use in jet fighters for backup. As a pleasant side-effect, I wasn’t
instrument-blind whenever my prototype went through a tunnel. Most of my
controls now had double safeties. This was good because when any GEV system
fails, you’re going to crash, it’s just a matter of how hard. This principle,
along with the high expense of building a real prototype, was the primary
reason new vehicle testing had moved toward simulation.
Next I noticed that, at high
speeds, my oval hull would rotate too slowly, and the craft would wobble too
much to be controlled by human reflexes. It was a matter of balancing the
power. Since all the tiny elements in the grid were computer controlled to
begin with, I programmed the air-cushion system and the small canard wing on
top to compensate for these instabilities 32 times a second. This arrangement
limited my peak speed, but made me unbeatable in a dog-fight.
I also beefed up the cockpit armor,
and searched for a means to halt the hull spin in an emergency situation. I
rigged the radial armor to blow off at the touch of a button. It still took
over fifteen seconds to spin down to a dead stop, but if anyone were close
enough to hit me, the shrapnel would put them out of commission too. Afterward,
my GEV would be a traveling skeleton, but it would survive.
Now my prototype was no longer just
a one-trick pony.
This week I had repeated nightmares
about my childhood in Brazil .
With no local games over the semester break, I began playing with variations of
the invisible transponder effect. I was particularly interested in the results
from the FedNet satellite traffic monitor.
One quirky variation traded the
front and rear bumper transponders between two vehicles. As long as the pair
stayed in the same sample grid, on the same road, the two would appear to be
moving side-by-side. No matter how fast they went, the velocity indicator would
be an average of the two. This glitch wasn’t of much practical use for the game,
but might be a slick dodge for smugglers. The trick wouldn’t be easy to spot,
but on any curves, there’d be a slight lag time between the ghost position and
the real. On a whim, I down-loaded some public-access data from around the State
Park system for a period of ten days. Overnight, I crunched through the numbers
looking for vehicle pairs that strayed from their lanes on turns.
I don’t know what I expected, but
on the scan for last Friday night, I found a distinct double image signature
that snaked into the beach area and then back toward the city. The signature
repeated itself at 2:00 AM this Friday, just before my data snapshot ended.
What should I do about it? Something obviously illegal was going on, but I didn’t
have any concrete vehicle identification or destination. Since the multi-state
superhighway system, the national parks, and the satellite guidance system were
all under Federal jurisdiction, they required a special type of Federal Marshal
to police them—the Hover-way Patrol. This was also necessary because local
police often couldn’t accelerate fast enough to catch perpetrators before they
left city limits. The only member of the Hover-way Patrol I knew on a
first-name basis was Mary Ann Anselm.
She was a no-nonsense kind of gal
with long legs, shoulder-length, brown hair and three older brothers. Mary Ann
played Lady Macbeth in our high school Senior play in a performance that sends
sado-masochistic shivers down my spine to this day. She could also smell BS a
mile away, and wouldn’t tolerate a lie.
I met Mary Ann again just after
high school graduation when she brought her cruiser in for a maintenance
check-up. I mustered the nerve to ask her out, and we ended up dating steadily
for over a year. She’s in great physical shape, knows as much about vehicles as
any guy, and is one of the outright best friends I’ve ever had. Being with her
felt like home.
Eventually, I had to cut it off.
Things were getting too serious. She wanted to get married, and I couldn’t do
that to her. You see, she’d be legally responsible for my debt, too. I couldn’t
see dragging two people through that misery. The final straw for me was that
any kids might inherit my hemophilia. I could barely afford my own medication.
One male in ten-thousand has my severe problem with clotting, so I try not to
take it personally. But I had seen first-hand the constant worry my condition
could cause a mother.
I decided to show Mary Ann the
FedNet tricks I’d found and see if she could get any mileage out of it. Because
of the potential for misuse, I hid my files on the university Meteorology
department computer. After taking a few days to get my courage up, I made a
lunch date with her at “the Oasis,” a Mediterranean food joint that had been
one of her favorites. I figured at a worst-case scenario we’d talk about
SimCon, which was coming up in another three months. Maybe at best, I expected
her to be grateful enough to spend the weekend with me over Labor Day. I wasn’t
counting on anything, just enjoying the fantasy.
Thursday afternoon, on a tan cement
patio with white iron lawn furniture and huge umbrellas painted to look like
palm trees, I watched traffic whiz by for half an hour till I saw her walk
through the gate.
My heart raced like a teenager. Dry
mouthed, I finally managed to say, “Hey, Mare. I got you a shwarma and Dr.
Pepper, just the way you like it.”
She said, “What do you want, Hayes?”
Suspicious? No, just cautious. Her chair made a grating sound as she pulled it
out.
I hastened to clarify. “Call me
Ethan; I’m not selling anything, and I haven’t clubbed any baby seals. I’ve
stumbled across an abuse of the law, and I thought you might be able use the
information. Hell, it might even get you that promotion you’ve been waiting
for.” I signaled the waiter.
“Bring the Lady a fresh set of
everything, and a Baklava for me.”
Mary Ann mellowed a little. “Are
you sure you can afford it, Ethan?”
I shrugged, “I skipped a meal
yesterday, so I’ll have two today.”
“You look tired,” she said, genuine
concern creeping in. “Have you had a check up recently? What your mom had could
be hereditary.”
“I’ve just been up late
programming. Forget about me. How’s your life been going? How’s the patrol unit
running?”
“Fine,” she said in a tone that
sounded exactly like the word lonely. “Ethan, spit it out. I have to be into
work in less than two hours.”
“We might go in together,” I
hinted. She said nothing, but raised an eyebrow. She plucked one of my cold
fries and put on her “convince me” face. I started explaining. After I told her
the whole thing, she had finished eating and was even beginning to smile at the
right places.
“I didn’t want to leak the secrets—partly
because I want to use them myself in the game—but mainly because ignorance of
these loopholes is preventing a lot of crime.”
She snickered. “Don’t worry. Even
the smart crooks are still pretty ignorant. I appreciate what you’re telling
me, but how many busts can we make? We can’t afford to link our computers into
real-time satellite feed for a week at a time to catch just one speeder.”
I shook my head and snatched a
little of her drink. “Let me run the pattern detectors for the five sure-fire
dodges I’ve come up with, and I bet you I’ll find a dozen regular offenders in
this city alone.”
She gazed at my left shirt button
for a full minute, and in a soft, almost apologetic voice, she said, “I’ll give
you a chance. Tonight. I’ll get permission from my shift chief, and bring a CD
of data over from the last two nights. You show me something concrete, and we’ll
owe you some reward money.”
Again, I shook my head. “Sorry,
babe. No money. I’ll never see it; the Credit Recovery Bureau sucks it like a
leech. I wouldn’t mind, but with a debt that big, throwing in a measly hundred
is like spitting in the ocean.”
My mother ran up incredible credit
bills in the year before she died, the year I turned eighteen. It was also the
year that several major banks pressured Congress into making credit debts pass
on to the beneficiaries of the debtor. I can’t blame them. Ever since hospitals
started taking plastic, people have been taking advantage. Technically, I could
have fled to Brazil
to pursue my citizenship there. They don’t recognize debts from the United States .
But I like this country. A servant here is richer than 95 percent of the people
in the third world, plus the water is safer.
“Okay. No money, your favorite
charity, anything. Hell, we have a few lawyers who owe us big. I could give you
your reward in free legal visits.” Mary Ann got a lopsided grin as she
considered the ramifications. “You may help me catch more than one slippery
customer.”
Later that night, in Sam’s place,
she looked over my shoulder at the color-enhanced read-out. “I don’t believe
it. That came from a high-speed chase that stretched out across three counties.
The Masserati just vanished.”
“He didn’t vanish. His twin car was
this station wagon, which means he really disappeared about... here,” I said,
pointing to a stretch of rural road just off the main Hover-way, three miles
from where the trace stopped. “Masseratis can’t swallow dirt in the intakes for
long. If the driver’s any good, he’ll pull it off into a barn or under a
bridge. Then tomorrow, after they’ve switched their rear transponders again,
they can drive off in broad daylight.
“This wasn’t much of a challenge
for the package I put together. All in all, I found twelve loopholes in FedNet.
When I plotted the reply addresses for all guidance queries, I found hundreds
of scattered points with inactive or incorrect transponders. Some of those are
just defective, but if we filter out the ones we see every day in the same
residential speed zone with this button here, we’ll see the people who are
traveling illegally. If you hit the animation button here, you can track...” I
wanted to impress her with the interface I’d designed, but she wasn’t listening
any more.
“Stop. Go back!” I hit the button
to return to the Masserati example.
Mary Ann gawked for a minute,
looked over at me, and then back to the map again. “Is this time stamp from the
data or when you processed it?”
“I process it in real time. The
time stamp is from the satellite,” I explained.
“This data is less than five hours
old. We can still get him.” Quick-drawing her police mobile-phone from its
holster, she dialed dispatch. All four units in the area were told to converge
discretely on Salem ’s
Pond.
On her way out, Mary Ann surprised
me with a quick kiss that gave the promise of many more. The faint taste of
raspberry lingered. It was the same lip gloss that she’d worn when we kissed
for the first time.
“As soon as we nab the bad guys, I’ll
be back! If you can give us a couple of these gadgets, we’ll get you all the Philadelphia lawyers you
can handle. The police have an edge again for the first time since radar.” She
barely finished her sentence before the shop door slammed shut behind her.
Dazed from the kiss, I waited three hours before shutting down the glowing
screen and taking the wine coolers back to my apartment.
