Vegas School of International Business, due to an “incomplete” mark received
on a course in Economic Linguistics. There was an issue with a position
paper. I knew this because both Prescott’s wayward term paper and a copy of
the dean’s letter to Prescott Three (which mentioned the word “plagiarism”
in all caps quite prominently) had just been automat-delivered to me by one
of our own couriers.
“Where did you pick this up?” I asked.
The iDeeBoy beeped at me, and it extended its ICEPane for my Package
Receipt Acknowledgement key. As a member of the Security Directorate at
ICE, the automats would allow me to open a package without signing for it,
but they wouldn’t go away until I had officially tagged the COCT.
I swiped my ICID instead, and the iDeeBoy froze, the image on its v-mon
panel caught midway between a happy and a sad face. After a fraction, the look
of constipation vanished and was replaced by the automat’s terminal interface.
I called up the PDL manifests and discovered the ICEpak on my desk had been
in-system less than three windings. A local delivery, picked up from—
My hand retreated from the v-mon panel as it were hot, and I suddenly felt
a little constipation of my own.
The package had come from a “B” series station. Depot 12-B4. One of the
old stopdrops.
The stopdrops were first-gen stations, put in right after the GTI Accords had
been ratified. They had been a marketing tool, really, one stolen from one of
the other CorCongloms, and there had been one or more every radian inRing.
P2P fulfillment went one step further, making the stopdrops obsolete, and a lot of them had been removed during the Retail Interregnum when Ring real
estate demand was in flux; the rest had experienced a renaissance during the
CorpEsp Reconstruction as a useful way to disseminate confidential information
MARK TEPPO
in an anonymous manner. Sometimes the best message is the one that can be
submitted and delivered without leaving your GPIT all over it.
IIRC, they were supposed to have been End of Lifed as part of the ICE SI & R.
The iDeeBoy beeped and its v-mon changed back to the smiling face of
everyone’s favorite delivery boy. It tapped its ICEPane against the edge of my
desk, completely oblivious to the fact that I had been touching its internals.
It wasn’t going to leave until I iSigned for the package.
I signed and licked my thumb. The iDeeBoy, sensing the motion it was
programmed to wait for, rotated its ICEPane and scanned my thumb,
registering both my DNA and the physical print of my thumb. Satisfied that
my GPIT matched its PDL, it trilled happily and trundled out of my office,
leaving me with the mystery of this package.
Why had someone sent me an old term paper belonging to our CEO? Why
were they using old channels that weren’t supposed to exist? The term paper
was a minor embarrassment, even with the issue of plagiarism. LegD had
spent two turns scanning every document Prescott had ever touched before
signing off on his appointment to CEO. Something like this wouldn’t be
newsworthy enough to last more than a few media cycles.
I glanced at the opening page of the thick document, and the first sentence
of the abstract made my eyes cross. Autonomous Microphalengeal Retrieval as an Extra-Biologic Currency Acquisition System. I didn’t even understand what that meant.
The paper was a headache waiting to happen, and not just because it ran
two hundred and forty-six pages and it had so many footnotes that it looked
like another paper entirely lived down there in the margins. No, the delivery
was a symbolic gesture. It was a message, delivered via our own delivery
system, using an unsecured backdoor. Which was surprising in itself, as
intercorporate espionage had been outlawed for nearly ten turns now.
Who was the target, though? my theory-brain asked. Me or our CEO?
My name is Max. I work in what is left of SecD—Security Directorate—and
it’s my job to be paranoid. I call it the “theory-brain,” the part of my job that’s all about figuring out how things worked. Not mechanical things; I don’t
have that sort of aptitude. No, straight-up subcognitive theoretics and
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abstract extrapolation, with a focus on social wetworks, viral superstition
mimetics, religio-aesthetic visual cues: you know, the sort of thing that a
SecEd Tag in Pre-Collapse History is good for.
Using the stopdrops as a way to send anonymous messages had been my
idea. It had labeled me with a Director tag, and until the Systemic Introspect
& Reorganization, I had been in charge of security for InterCore Express.
After that, well, I fared better than a lot of people at ICE in that I still had a job, but with the i3Cee’s kinder, gentler approach to corporate intrigue (read: none), the ROI of a fully staffed Security Directorate didn’t pass budget
audit. SecD got broken up—most went to SysAdmD, the knuckle-draggers
given new uniforms and new offices (EnforD), and me and a few others were
downgraded to desk jobs. I went from “Director” to “Theorist,” and had a
few turns to really sink into a never-ending depression, a hole where I could
theorize all I liked.
I had a SysAdmD Section Manager, who really didn’t know what to do with
me, and I was pretty sure he was hoping that I would EOE voluntarily, saving
him the headache of doing my PIPe every turn. I wasn’t about to give him the
satisfaction. He got back at me by never bothering to R & U any of my GPARs.
It’s a very unfulfilling relationship.
Which explains why I found myself leaving the office and heading out into
the field to investigate the mysterious package. I should have walked it over
to EnforD and let them go hit people, but that would have taken the matter
out of my hands. Plus there was the issue of the stopdrops. Eventually, a doc
audit would bring up the whole history of their use, and my Section Monkey
would be thrilled to find my tag all over the documentation. It’d be all the
excuse he’d need to WTF me.
I went Out of Office. As much as I hated that three square, it was mine,
and I had been there a long time. It’s funny what you’ll fight to keep.
Depot 12-B4 was still inRing, next to a Baskin-Robbins Emporium 31 on the
Malachite Layer. I took an express ’tubebus, and walked the few clicks from the depot. It was still ante-meridiem and the reflected sunlight wasn’t too bad.
The Ring circled the planet like a lopsided halo, cleaving to the ecliptic.
The outer edge was bubbled with a couple thousand climatologies where
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brain trusts kept trying to replicate moss and lichens in an artificial
environment. InRing was home to humanity and we sprawled across every
meter of space. By design, of course, regardless of the GoogleTube PR claim
to the contrary.
I wasn’t quite sure why they still maintained the conceit that the Ring was
meant as a data structure and not as a habitat. Old corporate habits, I suppose, but after the GoogleTube Infrastructure Accords, it was hard to believe they
hadn’t planned for this possibility. Especially after the white paper by the pa
ir of GoogleTube Extrapolationists was leaked. Sure, they had been ostracized
from campus for writing the document, but when your corporate mandate says
you never delete anything, it gets hard for the rest of the world to believe you wouldn’t actually use your own data. Even the theoretical kind.
Anyway, the GTI Accords opened up the Ring to the rest of the
CorCongloms and over the next couple of clocks, the Ring went from a
pristine packet landscape to a population density of a thousand per. The
Retail Interregnum cleaned house, so to speak, and in the resulting economic
vacuum, the SIX moved in.
Basing their dispersal theory on the New Modality of the Chicago School
Theory of Economic Rapture, the SIX remodeled the Ring into an economic
web that took advantage of the population density by maximizing isolation
variables while pushing separation anxiety to nearly zero. It was all high
throughput packet flow—1PB/f optimization to each node cluster, delivering
every sort of digital signal that a body could desire (for everything that was
still meatspace based, there was InterCore Express, the official package
delivery service of the Ring).
Food, though, didn’t travel through the ’tubes all that well, and if you
wanted to eat something that wasn’t extrapolated and reconstituted by the
iChef in your iToaster, you went to a B-R Emporium 31.
I entered the Emporium, and immediately blanked the notification option
in my iView. The B-R network was updating my profile and d/l’ing several
turns’ worth of advertisements and special offers. Blinking through the steady
flash of subliminal messageboarding, I pushed my way to the front counter
and flashed my ICID at the kid in the candy-stripe uniform. He googled the
holostat on my card, and his eyes got big. He stuttered slightly as he asked
what flavor I wanted.
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“Not interested in ice cream,” I said. “Not right now, at least. I need to talk to your Visual Monitor. Can you retrieve him for me?”
The kid’s eyes flickered to the right, the sure sign he was on the IM. Each of
the SIX modded their iStructure network to their own specs, but the baseline
basic employeenet was always the same: IM, Lifecycle Management &
Workflow, and MediaHub. It made the dissemination of corporate memos and
quality assurance training materials easier, and the 1024-character ceiling on
IM made it easy for the corporate substrate to live and die on that layer.
Through the SysAdm whispernet, I’d heard that a couple of the SIX were
no longer tracking IM data. GoogleTube still had a lock on cloud storage, and
rumor was they were starting to raise rates outRing. Something like per TB,
which was going to create all sorts of panic in FinD. No one wanted to be
caught on the wrong end of a billing cycle when that rate change came
through.
The flexible monitor on the kid’s uniform made snow for a fraction, and
then synched into the image of a narrow face, squeezed slightly more peevish
by the aspect ratio forced by the boy’s narrow chest. Red-framed glasses (the
same corporate shade as his slightly askew collar) told me this was the site
manager, and not the person whom I had requested. “What can—” he
started.
I cut him off by pressing my card against the kid’s chest. “Not you,” I said. The holostat would translate across even the zero-tech of the kid’s uniform. Outside of ICE, a SecD sigil still carried some weight. “I want to talk to your eyes.”
“I really—”
“Now.”
The kid yelped, and I wasn’t sure if it was from the tone of my voice or an
all-caps IM lighting up his retinal feed.
In a fraction, someone cleared their throat, and it was a much different
noise than the squawking noise the site manager had been making. Female,
for one. I lowered my card.
She was pretty in the way the internal guts of an iNuPod were: compact,
sleek, and incredibly efficient in design. Pale, in the way a good EyeSpy would be. A halo of synthetic d-cable twisted in her hair. She wore a simple black
tunic that gave me the subtle impression that I was talking to a floating head.
“How can I be of assistance to the Security Theorist of InterCore Express?”
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she asked. Her voice was about as bored as her gaze was unfocused, but I
didn’t take it personally. She was multitasking on a factorial level that would make my head explode. She would probably be able to Read & Understand
Prescott’s term paper.
“I need eyes from this morning,” I said. “A winding’s worth, seventh to the
eighth. Anything containing feed of the RPC minus one plus one from my
current location.”
Her eyes tracked left. “Query,” she said, and she rattled off a sequence I
figured was my current Ring Positioning Coordinates. “Processing. One
fraction please.”
I had nothing else to do for several fractions (and it’s never one, no matter
what they say), so I stared at her face. The kid squirmed a bit, and I reached
across the counter and held him still. Behind me, a tiny voice was chanting,
“Quadrilmint! Quadrilmint!”
Her eyes twitched and a slight moue dimpled the right edge of her mouth.
“One fraction,” she said again.
Not a good sign.
I glanced over my shoulder. Even with the haze of advertising, I could see
the stopdrop from here. Every employee in Emporium 31 could. She should
have multiple angles available. B-R SysAdmD shouldn’t have dropped that
data set already; the ante-meridiem shift was still on. Even if they were
crunching some serious t-flops to de-dupe it, there—
“I’m sorry,” she said, drawing my attention back to her composed features.
“That data is not available right now. Perhaps you’d like to inquire again
later?”
“Will my odds improve?”
Her lips tugged into a thin smile. “I do not have that information.”
“Of course not.” A thought struck me and I blinked, ghosting the Ring
Coordinated Time on my retina. Thirteen twenty-seven. “What is the closest
time stamp you can retrieve for me?”
“Oh nine thirty—” She blinked, “—eight.”
“That’s a four winding—” I stopped. A four winding retention window.
What sort of baboon-brain was in charge of SysAdmD at Baskin-Robbins?
“Ah, thank you,” I amended, keeping that question to myself.
She hung all her sub-processes, directing her full attention at me for a
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fraction, and then gave me a nod that went, I thought, a touch beyond
professional courtesy. I tried to think of something smart to say, but the kid’s screen went black. Eyes out.
He scratched his nose. “So . . .” he started.
“Yeah,” I said, clearing my throat. “Just give me a scoop of Rocky Road. In
a dish.”
Something to chew on while I considered this new wrinkle. Baseline
paranoia—the kind I got paid to explore—suggested that the individual who
used this station had known about B-R’s data retention window. They knew
ICE timetables too. Covering their tracks like a professional.
I wasn’t thinking about the Visual Monitor and that last bit of eye contact.
Not at all.
Depot 12-B4 was a half-shell unit—an electro-bonded extrusion of ceramic
with a pneumatic receptor and a battered 4ts-mon. Archaic, by any standard.
I had d/l’ed their Lifecycle Management Protocol during the drop to
Emporium 31. They had been EOLed shortly after the SI & R, but some
middle manager down-chain had modded the LMP to only remove them as
they broke down, a decision which failed to consider the high QA standard
for this early generation of pre-fab. They made them to last counterclockwise.
I could probably bit-sling responsibility of this mess over to Asset Management Directorate. My recommendation to retire all the stopdrops when the Corporate
Influence Limitation Regulations had gone into effect was in the GPAR
attached to the LMP, and with some serious butt-in-chair time, I could make
the later amendment pop when someone queried the LMP. But that meant
trusting the corporate chain to do the right thing and not panic.
I had spent too many years thinking about what happened when the brain trust
panicked. I had forgotten what a calm and rational response would look like.
Holding my half-empty dish of ice cream in one hand, I swiped my ICID
through the reader, and when asked for confirmation, I wiped off the grime
on the screen and pressed my thumb against the glass. Like the iDeeBoy, the
stopdrop promptly perked up and threw open its security panels to me.
As I suspected, there was nothing on the internal surveillance from earlier
ante-meridiem. Flicking back through the log, I had to go two cycles before I
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found a live image. The blurry motion of a flat object—on all three feeds at
once, I noticed. Boom. Blackout.
An alert in the log noted a security violation had been submitted to
ICECORE. I didn’t even have to log on to the central ICE network to verify
how much of a non-event that was to ICECORE. The vandalism would have
just flipped the Need To Retire bit on this stopdrop. The AsManD sweeps got
further and further apart every turn, and it would probably be a couple of
rotations before their automats recycled this drop.
Exactly what my message sender was counting on.
This individual wasn’t just covering their tracks; they were also using our
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