Faces in the Fire (9 page)

But even for the kids on the traveling sales crews, there was a certain hierarchy. At the bottom were the door-to-door sales robots, repeating lines they'd learned by rote and hoping to appeal to the pity of homeowners. And then above them were the crew heads, like Marcus. And at the top were the ringleaders, the people
who owned and financed the sales crews.

Of course, that ladder was reversed for the kids who were actually part of the crews: they placed themselves at the top, followed by the crew heads, followed by the owners. Time and again, she'd heard other kids on the crew talk about how the job sucked, but at least they hadn't sold their souls and become someone like Marcus.

Of course, Marcus ended up paying for his time in the basement in a big way.

Corrine didn't resent Marcus or his presence in her life, didn't point to her time with him as the great Traumatic Event that let her forever be a victim.

She was no victim.

Maybe Marcus was even out of the pen now, running another crew or two, or bankrolling a few if he'd come into some cash. Marcus was a bottom-feeder, and once you were a bottom-feeder, you never became anything else. Corrine knew this too well.

She sighed, pushed her chair closer to the computer keyboard, started typing another e-mail message promising an instant degree from Heritage Springs University. Even now, more than a decade after getting out of the traveling sales crew game, she was still selling the same elusive dream.

Better yourself, keep yourself out of the basement.

She'd graduated, long ago, from a traveling salesperson to an e-mail spammer. A phishing artist. A site scammer.

Still a bottom-feeder, though.

Most people could never picture themselves doing any such thing. In many ways, it was even worse than the prostitutes and the druggies who were often the lowest dregs.

But then, for someone like Corrine, who was strong enough to stand here in the basement without any qualms about her self-image, it was just a part of existence.

In an odd way she was proud of what she'd been able to accomplish; she was on InterNIC's list of the ten biggest spammers and always one step ahead of efforts to block her work. One step ahead of most of the other spammers out there, even; she'd developed techniques others had incorporated. So that made her something of a Bottom-Feeder Leader.

She smiled, started spooling the latest e-mail message into her database of more than ten million harvest addresses. Desperate as some people might think she was, there were always people on this list of addresses—roughly half a percent, day in and day out—who would respond to the e-mail and make her some money. Add in the account numbers from phishing scams, the ad revenue from ghost sites for search engine keywords, the comment spams from blogs linking to yet more ghost sites . . . well, as bottom-feeders went, she ate well.

Still, she had to admit, even though she scoffed at the people who felt they were somehow better off than the others around them, she wasn't immune to the behavior herself.

She realized this shortly after being diagnosed with lymphoma. How easily, before, she'd been able to see stories of people on the Internet who were paralyzed in car accidents, who tremored with Parkinson's disease, who sank into vegetative comas, and think:
At least I'm not there
.

But now, she was there. Had been there for four months, one week, two days, and sixteen hours. A cancer patient.

Luckily, because her only real contact with the outside came through e-mail and the Web, she hadn't been subjected to the pity of those around her. Yet another benefit of being a bottom-feeder.

But these things did gnaw at her when she went to see Dr. Swain, when she showed up for blood draws or chemo sessions. She saw the pity in the eyes of the staff and the nurses, and that, almost more than anything, killed her.

The first time she'd been sent to see Dr. Swain was the worst. Just before her biopsy, just before her diagnosis, just before the whole nightmare began springing to life around her. She checked in at the desk, filled out forms with her address and financial information, then turned them in.

The woman at the receptionist's desk had looked over the forms as she pulled out an electronic tablet and handed it to her.

“What's this?”

“It's a survey.”

“A survey for what?”

The receptionist had looked at her and offered a well-practiced smile. “All of our cancer patients here fill out the survey every few weeks or so, to help us get an idea of how they're feeling.”

Corrine stared, then slowly took the electronic tablet. The receptionist had said “cancer patient.” She was here for a
consult
with Dr. Swain. She didn't know that she, in fact, had cancer. Neither did Dr. Swain. No one did, least of all this woman wearing a too-tight blouse and handing her an electronic tablet. That's why she would need a biopsy, follow-up blood work, and scans.

Coming in for a
consult
did not automatically make her a cancer patient.

Fuming, Corrine retreated to a chair in the corner and pressed the power button on the tablet. The screen told her this was a five-minute survey to help her medical team offer the best possible care, and that the answers would not be shared with anyone else. Fine. She touched the Continue button with the stylus.

She answered a few demographic questions about her age, health history, family history. Then the questions took a turn. During the last two weeks, had she felt depressed?

Well, yes. Being told you may have cancer (emphasis on
may
) does that.

The questions continued, all of them very concerned about what had happened to her in the last two weeks. Had she cried uncontrollably? Had she vomited after chemotherapy? Had she entertained suicidal thoughts? Had she noticed bleeding gums or skin ulcers?

She wanted to scream at the tablet, tell it what she hadn't told the woman in the tight shirt: I'M NOT EVEN A CANCER PATIENT YET. I'M JUST HERE FOR A CONSULT. But of course, that wasn't an option on the touch screen; only Yes or No buttons to be pressed.

She started by answering No to these kinds of questions, but after a few minutes she changed tactics and clicked Yes every time. Put that into their statistical models. Bloody stool? Yes. Tingling in her hands and feet? Of course. Hair loss? Oh, yes. They wanted her to act like a poor, pitiful cancer victim, she'd give it to them.

At the end of the survey, she was given an option of connecting wirelessly to an Internet support forum that would help answer more of her questions about cancer.

She smiled. Some light at last.

She pressed Yes, indicating that she did want to get information, and gave one of her many e-mail addresses to log in.

Later that night, after her first visit with Dr. Swain (who even then, that first time, felt most comfortable explaining everything to her while referring to his notes), she replied to the cancer subscription e-mail in her in-box. She stripped the header information from the e-mail, tracked down the fixed IP address where it originated, pinpointed the server that hosted the forums. A couple hours later, she'd hacked all the e-mail addresses from the forums and planted a robot script that would harvest additional e-mails from member address books whenever they logged in.

After that, she'd managed to break into the network and software that controlled the electronic tablets in Dr. Swain's office. She left a little something in the system for them. Call it a welcoming gift from their newest
cancer
patient
: a self-replicating virus that would paralyze their whole network.

Two weeks later, after a couple more appointments with Dr. Swain, she'd told the receptionist it had been two weeks since her last survey, and it was time to take another.

The receptionist, wearing another shirt that was just as tight, seemed a bit perturbed at her cheerfulness, as if such emotion had no place in a facility that treated cancer.

“We're having some troubles with our survey system right now,” she said.

“That's too bad,” Corrine had replied with a straight face. “It was really comforting and informative for me.” She knew the woman would love those words.

The receptionist had
unexpectedly reached across the desk and patted her hand. “Do you want to talk with one of our social workers?”

“Social workers?”

“Sure. Just to talk. Many patients say it helps.”

“Do the social workers have electronic access to my

medical records?”

“Of course.”

“And can I keep in touch with them by e-mail? I mean, do they have access to the Internet with their computers?”

“Yes.”

Corrine had smiled. Ah, new back doors into the system. How wonderful.

“Yes, I think that would be very helpful. Even more comforting and informative.”

She offered a perfect pity-inducing smile, a smile she'd been able to perfect after knocking on the doors of thousands of people and telling them she needed their help to stay off the streets, to stay out of trouble.

31.

Over the weekend, she netted three thousand dollars just from click-throughs and ad revenue at her several shell sites. Not bad, not bad at all. And that didn't even count the value of the fifty names and credit card numbers she'd captured in phishing scams; on the black market, she could get several hundred dollars for each one. Or keep them for herself, if she wanted to do some shopping.

She rarely did that, though. No need to leave a trail. Let the others get caught for the identity thefts; she was happy to be the middleman. Middlewoman. Whatever.

She logged in to one of her Chinese servers, scanned the list of available IP addresses she'd reserved. Thousands of them, hosted by a fake company she'd set up with a couple other SpamLords. That's what they actually liked to call themselves, she found out after her first tentative contact with them some years ago. SpamLords. Evidently, everyone had to rule over a kingdom of one's own, no matter how small.

So she'd become a SpamLord too. And quietly, over the last two years, several of them had been building up their own backbone in mainland China, hosting their own sites and scams, even attracting some legitimate business. All of it housed on servers at a giant warehouse in northern China's Heilongjiang province.

China. The true final frontier, with apologies to Gene Roddenberry.

She'd seen photos of her warehouse, even done some quick translations of words, signage, and characters she'd seen in the photos. She quickly found out that Heilongjiang, the name of the province, literally meant “Black Dragon River.” She liked that. Black dragons.

The warehouse where her servers were stored had a simple sign on its chain-link fence, consisting of two Chinese characters. One character roughly translated as “cat,” the other translated as “fish.” It made absolutely no sense to her, but what of it? For all she knew, it had some specific meaning in Chinese culture; certainly, dragons and catfish were revered in the country, from what little she'd been able to glean online. And she was immediately drawn to the image of a catfish, anyway. The perfect bottom-feeder. Much like herself. So in her mind, she always called the warehouse the Catfish Compound.

The Catfish Compound, and the server farm it housed, helped her send millions of e-mail messages through the Internet, relaying them back and forth among dozens of active IP addresses and legitimate servers in other countries. Invariably, legitimate service providers tracked the originating IP addresses and blacklisted them. But she always had more. Always.

She selected a ten-digit IP address and began setting up a relay script when her cell phone rang.

She looked at the caller ID, again recognizing Swain's number. Monday. Right. He had promised to call back today. Lost in her work, she'd forgotten the
cancer
word for a while.

She sighed. But never for long; cancer was never out of her mind for long.

She picked up the phone, answering with a quick “Hello?”

“Corrine,” Swain's voice said. “Dr. Swain.”

“Hi.”

“I said I'd call you about the donor registry,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe you could come in, and we can talk about it.”

Oh, so here was Swain, trying to pretend he had a bit of human warmth. Wanting to deliver bad news—and it had to be bad news—in person.

“I'm a big girl, Dr. Swain. Just tell me what's going on.”

“Well,” he said, “we're not finding a good match.”

She pursed her lips. “A donor match, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“So no go on the transplant.”

“Well, right now . . . that's right. No good match for a transplant.”

She smiled. As if continuing to repeat “no good match for a transplant” somehow sounded better than a simple
no
.

“Okay.”

“I . . . well, I would like you to come in so we can talk about some different options.”

“Such as?”

“A clinical trial, maybe.”

“We already did that.”

“Well, yes. We looked at Phase II and above. But I think there might be some Phase I trials we can look at.”

Translation: time to start grasping at straws. Phase II through IV trials were designed to fine-tune treatments already proven in Phase I trials. They experimented with dosage, timing, routes of administration, that kind of thing. Phase I trials were always one step away from lab mice, rolls of the medical dice. Important, yes, but often the last hope.

“How about if I transfer you to the front desk, and they'll schedule you for an appointment this week?” Swain sounded desperate to end their conversation.

She stared at the IP addresses glowing on her screen. “Yeah. Sure.”

She waited, and he put her on hold. When she heard the soft tinkling of the hold music, she hung up the phone.

36.

Late that afternoon she sat staring at her screen, a jumble of information cramming her mind. She'd spent the intervening time looking up lymphoma information on the Internet, had visited at least two dozen sites, followed several rabbit trails for treatment.