It took a few days for Aporkalypse to decipher the two files Bernley had sent to us. In the meantime, I wandered the Santa Fe galleries, and thought about her. I thought we were really having some fun together; she was a sweet fey. But there was this wall between us, a distance. Probably because I was the same old Eddie to her, while she seemed so new to me.

There was a wall between us.

When she broke the code, she called me back and showed me what it was.

"Ok, here's the file from SENU's disk. It's the back door program to get into the Bob graphic interface. See, it comes in masked as a fax redial, and once it's accepted it spreads across these control APIs ... " I could barely follow it.

"And the other file - Wrenny's program - is a replicating royalty agent. It's a very intelligent virus. Once released on the net, it will seek out every Bob GUI and use the back door program to gain access. Then it goes to work. First it copies itself several dozen times, and throws those copies back out onto the net, to go search for more Bobs. Then it inserts a new piece of code for figuring adspace royalties. Now, five percent of the royalty from ad watching is funnelled to this new bank account - Wrenny's account, owned by his fake company, Global Image. And it's sent through the eldorado remailer so it can never be traced!"

Almost eerie, how smooth this was. I could see that Porky was impressed. I began to do the math in my head, and asked her to check it:

"Let's see, there's 8 billion people out there, and Bob is on 2 billion of their computers, paying 60 cents a day to those people for watching ads. That's $1.2 billion paid out every day to viewers of online advertising. If five percent of that was skimmed off and sent through the remailer to a thief's bank account, it would amount to - whew! - $60 million every day!"

"That's a major heist!" said Porky. "But the average Bob user would be missing only three cents a day. It might not be noticed by anyone for a long long time."

Porky had run some benchmarks on the royalty agent. They indicated that the program, if released, would spread rapidly around the globe, taking about 40 minutes max to insinuate itself into every Bob program on the planet.