The Dinosaur Heist

by K. B. Spangler

  “Two!” I feigned offense.

  “That’s a compliment,” she assured me. “I almost always break a man in under seven days.”

  Rachel burst out laughing, and walked past us into the basement of the Smithsonian. Jason pocketed the business card, and muttered, “I’ll call in a month.”

  Chanda turned to me. “A month?”

  I wiggled my eyebrows at her.

  She snorted. “I’ll hold you to that.”

  “I hope you do.”

  We followed Rachel and Jason inside. Rachel had headed down the hallway to Chanda’s office, straight as an arrow, with Jason trailing behind her.

  “How do they know where to go?” Chanda asked.

  I tapped my temple. “We’re chatting with each other.”

  “Really?!” Chanda lit up in a wide smile. “That’s fascinating! What’s it like?”

  Rachel’s voice came down the hall: “Tell her it’s both convenient and annoying, like all other forms of communication.”

  “Smoke signals were a bitch!” Jason shouted.

  “Hey, they were cutting edge back in the day,” I said.

  Chanda was laughing. “You guys are great,” she said. “Is everybody in OACET like you?”

  “Mostly.” I shrugged. “We have our personality clashes. But it’s hard to stay mad at each other with the link.”

  “The link?”

  “It’s what we call our connection,” I explained. “We’re linked into each other, like computers on the same network.”

  I didn’t mention that, unlike Chanda’s network, there was no way to permanently sever ourselves from the link, not without brain surgery. That was a conversation best saved for a long night with a lot of Kleenex and alcohol at hand.

  We turned into Chanda’s office. Rachel was leaning against a crate, pretending to inspect her nails. Over in the corner, Jason was on all fours, examining the giant skull.

  “What is this?” he asked Chanda.

  “A reproduction triceratops skull,” she replied. “It’s based on outdated research, so they threw it down here to get it out of the way.”

  “Nice,” Jason said appreciatively. “You think they’d let me buy it?”

  “Maybe,” she replied. “But I hope they don’t sell it. It’s useful.”

  “Useful?”

  Across the room, Rachel went into a coughing fit.

  “Jason, let me show you what I found in the server,” I said quickly.

  Jason rolled his eyes at me. “Sex thing?”

  “Why do you think I’m standing over here?” Rachel asked.

  There was some more laughing and joking, and then Jason and I took a seat on an oversized femur to get down to business.

  “Deep dive?” Jason asked, holding out his hand.

  I shook my head. “Shallow, for me. I’ll show you what I found, and then you can go on from there.”

  Jason nodded and shut his eyes. I did the same, and mentally led the way into Chanda’s server.

  “What’s a deep dive?” Chanda asked Rachel.

  “Cyborg stuff,” she replied dismissively.

  Without opening my eyes, I said, “Chanda’s a techie. She built these computers.”

  “Really?” Jason sounded intrigued.

  “Fuck,” Rachel muttered. “I’m the worst person in OACET to explain this… All right, imagine going inside a computer.”

  “Okay,” Chanda said.

  “It’s not like what you see in the movies, with fake glowing roads and shit. That’s the Hollywood visualization of something that humans aren’t designed to comprehend. In reality, linking your mind into a computer is like sticking your head into a waterfall. That screams at you. And punches you in the face until you give up and get out.”

  “No,” Jason said. “That’s not it at all.”

  “Rachel’s a cop first,” I said. “Cyborg second. Her experience in diving into a computer isn’t like everybody’s.” As I spoke, I moved through Chanda’s server, showing Jason the same path I had taken. “Rachel’s right; it is like a waterfall. But you don’t fight it. You move along the currents, testing what’s there, testing what’s missing.”

  “Or you know what you’re looking for, and you go right to it,” Jason interrupted. “Josh is showing me the holes he found in your data. That’s a shallow dive. Once I know the shape of what’s missing, I’ll go deeper into the server. I can check to see if it’s been moved, or erased, or…”

  “…or stolen,” Chanda finished for him.

  “And if it was stolen, that’s where Rachel comes in,” I said. “Her team handles tech crimes.”

  “Can you get it back?” Chanda sounded so eager that I nearly opened my eyes to see the expression on her face. “Rachel, if it’s stolen, and you find out who stole it, can you take it back from them for me?”

  “I could,” Rachel said, “but I won’t. I’ll follow procedure and get it back for you that way.”

  “OACET doesn’t participate in anything illegal,” I added. “People are already freaked out about the concept of cyborgs who can take control of their machines. We don’t do anything which might make that problem worse.”

  Chanda took a deep breath. “All right,” she said. “I can understand that. I guess I’ve lost a week’s worth of work.”

  “Maybe not. Jason is OACET’s tech consultant for the police,” I explained. “If the data was overwritten but still exists on your server, he can get it back for you.”

  “If you’ve got a backup drive handy, I’d like to see your old data,” Jason told her. “It’ll help me know what to look for.”

  “I’ve got a drive stashed in a filing cabinet in the Regents’ office,” Chanda said. “Let me run upstairs and grab it.”

  She left the office and let us work.

  I plunged back into the data. It swept along, a chattering stream of information. Rachel is right. This is like a waterfall, I thought to myself, as it carried me along.

  “No, she’s not.” One of the problems with sharing a link was that private thoughts were no longer private: Jason was there inside my mind, and I was inside of his. The feeling of disagreement which came from him was both emotional and physical, as if he was about to stroke the quills on a porcupine the wrong way and I was preparing myself to watch him make a stupid, painful mistake. “It’s a library.”

  I love hearing how each of us interact with data. I don’t think any of us do it the same way. When I moved through a server, it was like swimming through a river, or maybe jogging across a river of sand, all of it moving fast and smooth towards destinations that I could never quite see. If I held the image of what I was looking for in my head, the current would eventually push me into it, and I could examine it. And if I had been there before, I could get there again: I had taken Jason straight to the spot where Chanda’s dinosaur used to be, and now he was walking through the holes.

  “Data is a library,” Jason continued, speaking within our mental link. “It’s a galaxy-sized library of information written in a language we don’t speak. Our implants translate it for us, but we have to know what we’re looking for. If we don’t, there’s too much information and it’s all meaningless.”

  “What does your implant tell you?” I asked, curious.

  “That giant chunks of data have been copied, erased, and then thrown into a burn program. It’s not recoverable.”

  “Did Chanda do it?”

  He paused. Since we were sharing a tight link, I could feel his reluctance to answer. “Whoever did it used her login information, but that doesn’t mean it was her.”

  “Hey, Chanda?” I asked.

  “She’s not back yet,” Rachel replied.

  I turned to Jason in our link. “You got this?”

  “Yeah.” I couldn’t see him, but I felt him sifting through data, his full attention on finding anything the burn program had missed. He was deep in his work; he had no use for me anymore.

  I stepped out of our link and closed the con
nection with Jason so he could concentrate. There was the usual sense of discomfort; even a shallow dive is intensely close and personal. It always hurts me to leave it.

  I looked up to see Rachel smiling at me. The link between the two of us was still open; Jason was off on his own, but she and I were still able to talk.

  “Chanda’s cute. How’d she find you?”

  Rachel knew that I volunteered at the community center, so I showed her my memory of Chanda bursting into my office. As I did, I felt Rachel flinch within the link.

  “What?” I asked.

  “She called you ‘cyborg,’” Rachel replied. You couldn’t tell by her face, but she was a bundle of concern, worry, and more than a little anger. “Her very first word to you.”

  “Well, yeah.” I was a little surprised by her reaction. “People have said that to me before.”

  “To me, too. I don’t forgive them, and I sure as hell don’t plan to sleep with them.”

  I could have told her that Chanda had been under intense stress. I could have explained that Chanda was basically a sex unicorn, and if I blinked she might disappear, taking at least a month of phenomenal experiences with her. I could have said a lot of things but I didn’t, because Rachel was right.

  “What’s really on your mind?” I asked. You couldn’t hide anything in a link: Rachel was forcing herself to keep from thinking about something. She had walled it away so she wouldn’t have to share it with me, but the strain of not thinking about it was shouting more loudly than if she had shared the actual thought itself.

  Rachel sighed. “Nobody tracks down someone from OACET to recover a few days of lost work.” Her thoughts came clearly and slowly, as if she was trying to jam them into my thick skull. “They eat the loss and get their backup data.”

  Her point connected as hard as if she had delivered it with the business end of a baseball bat. “You think she’s lying?”

  “She’s telling the truth about her data going missing, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t know where it went.” Rachel turned towards the door. A moment later, the knob rattled, and Chanda entered the room, a pained expression on her face. “Just be careful. You have no common sense when it comes to women.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Three hours later, Chanda and I were out to dinner. She was absolutely miserable.

  I couldn’t blame her. All of her data on the Tibetan raptor was gone. Not just the data on her server, but her backup drives were also missing.

  And Rachel had been right. There was something Chanda wasn’t telling me. I kept nudging the conversation towards the missing data, trying to pinpoint the holes in her story. Chanda kept saying she wanted to wait until Rachel and the police had completed their search before she gave up all hope.

  Oh, well. If Chanda was manipulating me, I’d wriggle out of it. It wouldn’t be the first time I had let myself get sucked into a honeypot, and it wouldn’t be the last. Possible reasons for a possible deception ran through my head: She’s a spy for the Chinese government… She’s after someone else’s data and she wants me to steal it for her… She never found a dinosaur at all and wants the publicity…

  The options were endless. Personally, I liked the idea that she had staged the whole thing and was after publicity. A researcher in OACET says the second-best way to become a famous scientist is to discover something revolutionary, while the best way is to claim you’ve discovered something revolutionary but you can’t duplicate the data. After my conversation with Rachel, I had checked into Chanda’s professional reputation. It was rock solid. If she was looking to pull off a long con, she had established the right background for it.

  Except Rachel had said that Chanda wasn’t lying about her missing data. More, Chanda was miserable. It was the type of deep misery you only experienced with profound loss, not the kind you got when the police showed up at your door to let you know your sixth husband had been in a terrible accident and you were now an even wealthier widow than you were when you had met him.

  “You want me to call you a taxi?” I asked her. “I’ve got the weekend off. We can pick this up tomorrow morning.”

  “Yes to tomorrow. No to me going home alone.” Chanda set down her fork as solid punctuation. “I’m not going to lie awake all night, waiting for Rachel and Jason to call. You are going to take me back to your place and screw the absolute sense out of me.”

  Our waiter, who had been about to refill our wine glasses, snatched our check out of his apron pocket, dropped it on the table, and walked away.

  “Sounds like a plan, except for the part where we go back to my place.” I said. “The building is being fumigated. Again.”

  “Roaches?”

  I shook my head. “Squirrels.”

  Her eyes went wide, and then she squinted at me in confusion. “Squirrels?”

  “Long story,” I said. “There was an infestation, and then there was a fire.

  “I really should have seen it coming,” I added. “Squirrels and wiring just don’t go together.”

  “You…probably should have,” she said, as if she had realized she wasn’t talking to someone who was entirely all there in the gray matter.

  “This is the third time they’ve tried to kill the damned things. They’re being too cautious, if you ask me, but they don’t want the squirrels to die inside the walls again. The exterminators are trying to drive them out first with scent bombs…” The look on Chanda’s face was sheer bafflement. “I said it was a long story. Let’s just say that all of my stuff is in storage right now, and we shouldn’t go to my place unless we want acute nervous system poisoning.”

  “Are you couch surfing?”

  I grinned at her.

  “Ah,” she said, as she grinned back. “Bed surfing. Silly me.”

  “So, hotel or your place?”

  Chanda opened her purse, took out some cash, and slipped it under the check. “My place,” she said, and led the way out of the restaurant.

  I was still grinning all the way to her house.

  Listen, I know what I sound like. Rachel once compared me to a vegan who can’t stop talking about how great a vegan lifestyle is, except with sex instead of veganism. She’s not wrong. I can’t stand how our society glorifies violence and cold clinical emotion, and turns any display of community or intimacy into weakness. Sex is a moment in time between people. That’s it. Any emotions we attach to the act are what we attach to the act! If we bring something positive into that moment—thoughtfulness, tenderness…maybe even love?—the world is better for it. I’ll stand by this until my dying day.

  Chanda’s house was a small, pleasant Craftsman-style cottage in one of D.C.’s more gentrified neighborhoods. It had beautiful landscaping and an old, rambling brick path which wound its way towards the front door between patches of flowers.

  “Cute place,” I said.

  “Thanks,” Chanda said. “It was my grandmother’s. My family has lived in D.C. for four generations.”

  As we got closer to the house, I noticed that several wooden benches on the porch were covered in shiny black throw pillows. It was a strange design element, especially as the rest of the cottage was a traditional suburban D.C. home, and the pillows were an out-of-place modern touch.

  Then one of the pillows stood up.

  “Uh…Chanda?” I began. It was dark and the lighting on the porch wasn’t great, but I was sure that pillows didn’t usually—

  “Oh, hey girls!” Chanda said, as she ran up the steps. “Did you wait up for me?”

  The other pillows stood up and shook themselves out. By now, I could tell they were crows. Sleek black crows, with long sharp beaks.

  Which Chanda was touching!

  “Uh…Chanda?”

  “Josh, come meet the ladies!” Chanda called from the porch.

  I came closer, ready to dive into the bushes if the scene took a sharp turn towards a Hitchcock movie. “Your porch is covered in crows.”

  “Yeah.” Chanda was laughing. “They’re
usually in bed by now. They have a permanent roost in the trees in the backyard. I guess they decided to sleep on the porch tonight.”

  “Does this happen often?”

  “No,” she replied. “They show up for food while I get ready for work, but that’s usually the only time they come into the front yard.”

  One of the crows hopped into the air and landed on Chanda’s shoulder. It stared at me, judging me in the same way a mother evaluates the boy who’s shown up to take her daughter to the prom.

  Then, it opened its beak and started going, Ah! Ah! Ah!

  Not Caw! Caw! mind you. These weren’t crow sounds. No, these sounds were very close to human, and very…familiar.

  “Is your crow making sex noises at me?” I asked.

  Chanda blushed. This was the first time I had seen her embarrassed, and I think she was mostly embarrassed for the crow. “She likes you,” Chanda said, over the sound of the crow’s passionate grunting. “They’re excellent mimics. This is what she does when she approves of someone.”

  Further down the porch, one of the other crows began to make the same sounds. Then another, and another, until the entire flock was grunting passionately at me.

  “This is a first,” I said, speaking loudly enough to be heard over a dozen crows grunting their way towards climax. “I don’t have too many firsts anymore, so this is certainly…something.”

  “Oh, my neighbors are going to be furious,” Chanda said, and began scooping up crows with both arms. She placed two of them onto my shoulders before going back for more. “Shhh, ladies, shhh! Hush, girls!”

  I like animals, I do. Dogs, cats? Love them. Birds? Sure, why not? I’m a city kid, though, and most of my encounters with wild animals happen at the zoo. Now, I was having what only could be called an intimate experience in surround sound with creatures that had bony knives attached to their faces.

  Well, Chanda had said their roost was in the backyard. I turned and walked off of the porch, and followed a bend in the brick sidewalk towards the rear of the house. The two crows kept shuffling around on my shoulders, but they finally fell silent as I put some distance between us and the rest of their flock. After a few moments, they leapt into the air and flew towards a large oak tree in the center of Chanda’s backyard, turning from animals with an extravagant number of pointy parts into quiet shadows against the night sky.