system to slow discovery of their malfeasance. The term paper wasn’t an
isolated delivery. There were more coming. You didn’t need a Theorist to
spec that.
My phone icon bounced in my right peripheral. I glanced at it, noted it didn’t
have any tags, and accepted the handshake request. “Max Semper Dimialos.”
“Hello, Max,” she said. I was a little surprised that it was her. I mean, I
realized a split fraction after I took the call that I was hoping it was going to be, and the thrill of hoping and receiving took me a little by surprise. “Would you meet me for a coffee?” B-R’s EyeSpy asked.
“Ah,” I said, involuntarily glancing back at the rounded hump of the
Baskin-Robbins Emporium, even though I knew she wasn’t onsite. Visual
Monitoring was done out of B-R HQ in Chrysalis. “Now?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m sort of busy right now.” Mentally kicking myself as I said it, even
though it was true.
“So am I.”
“Ah,” I repeated. I was presenting quite the erudite image of the ICE Security
Directorate. “I’ve got a bit of a red flag at the moment. I don’t really—”
“The Bliss Canopy Rotunda,” she cut me off. “Verdigris Level. One
winding?” She paused, but not long enough for me to gurgle out a response.
“It’s not that sort of meeting.” And then the call terminated.
I shoveled the rest of the ice cream in my mouth to cool down the flush
rising in my cheeks. I hadn’t thought—
Okay, I had. I mean, it’s not like anyone went to Starbucks for just coffee any more.
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• • •
She hadn’t gotten a room; she sat in plain sight, on the stool closest to the
coffee bar. Taking advantage of our need for nostalgia, Starbucks’s interior
design hadn’t changed. They even still made their coffee by hand, using
anachronistic, steam-driven espresso machines. My heart skipped a beat
when I saw her sitting there, in the noisiest spot in the room. Such security consciousness. A small demitasse cup sat on the green counter, and on a nearby plate was a half-eaten Starbucks bar.
She was wearing a long white coat with white feather trim, and a solar flare
head wrap that matched her shoes. She still wore her glasses and, when I got
a good look at them from the side, I realized they weren’t the sort that one
took off casually, even for bed.
I ordered tea, generating some confusion with the barista, and sat down
next to the Eyes of Baskin-Robbins Emporium 31.
“You should be a bit more discreet,” she said.
“Coffee makes me twitchy,” I explained. “And if I had ordered coffee, it’d
just sit there on the table. And no one would notice that in a place like this.”
“You could have said something.”
“You didn’t give me a chance.”
“I—” she stopped. Her glasses darkened several shades as she glanced
around, reading heat patterns, microwave signals, and who knew what other
manner of electromagnetic waveform. “I’m sorry. I don’t do this very often.”
“This?” I asked.
“Meeting people,” she said. The corner of her mouth twitched, an unconscious
emotional tell. “I . . . spend a lot of my time logged in. My UVEI is less than 8.”
I had noticed. But it wasn’t an unhealthy color. Not like the grid lizards you
find nesting next to the heat vents down in the UPS farms.
“I’ve gotten off to a bad start, I see,” she continued. “Let’s try this again.”
“Okay.” I held out my hand. “Max.”
She took it. Firm, but not demanding. Supple, but not too soft. A working
hand that was well-cared for. “Sophie.” Her fingers twitched as she let go,
tickling my palm.
“Nice to meet you.” I swiveled around on my stool so we were both facing
the same direction, as if we were watching the parade of ads on the wall of
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jumbo v-mons. “So, Sophie,” I continued, trying my best to appear completely
at ease, though truth be told, I was just as badly out of practice. “What can I do for you?”
“Earlier, when you asked me to retrieve the visual feeds from the lines at
that Emporium 31 . . .”
I sipped my tea and nodded.
“. . . I told you the closest time stamp match I had was four windings prior.
Exactly four.”
“Right. Your security policy was written either by an overzealous LegD or
you had a bunch of baboons as consultants.”
“It’s not,” she said. “It’s actually sixty-four windings. Or, at least it was. A new policy went active at cycle change, precipitating a systemic data purge.”
She gave me one of those smiles. Hinting at a wellspring of laughter, one that
hadn’t quite breached. “I need to thank you, actually. If you hadn’t asked to
see the data, I wouldn’t have had a need to access the archives. It may have
been a full rotation before I noticed the change in policy. That would have
been . . .”
“Catastrophic?”
“Bad, for my PIPe. I have a mid-turn review next rotation.”
“Good luck.” I raised my cup.
“Thank you.” She put her hands in her lap. “But that’s not what I wanted
to talk about.”
“No?” My voice rose on the second letter, a rather awkward squeak as if I
was attempting to impersonate one of those autonomous miPets.
She shook her head. “The change was executed via a shell script. From a
root login. On a system within our network that had been zombied by a
terminal with a GTAC of ‘1E78/BF001.’”
“A what?”
“A GoogleTube Access Cipher key.”
“I know what it is, it’s—”
“The key belongs to ICE, Max.” She spelled it out for me, as I appeared to
not be getting it. “One of your systems hacked my network last night.”
“Ah,” I said. There I went, reverting to monosyllabic responses again.
“Well,” I tried, but my head was filled with too many options, Theorist
paranoia overflowing my buffers.
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She stood up, and pushed her half-eaten snack closer to me. “Please, finish
this for me, will you?” She put her hand on my shoulder. “And please pull the
plug on whomever is accessing my dataform.”
She left, and I realized, as the aroma faded in her wake, that she smelled
like flowers.
When I touched her plate, I noticed it wasn’t quite flat on the table. I lifted it slightly and felt underneath. Stuck to the bottom was a tiny lozenge, a
mag-strip candy—a tasty treat that came with a data payload. As casually as
I could, I tugged the tiny lozenge off the plate and popped it in my mouth. As
it dissolved on my tongue, my iView registered two numbers. One was the full
GTAC/GMAC of the ICE terminal that had zombied her system. The other
was a directory access number.
I scrolled back through my call log.
Different than before. This one must be her direct line.
I didn’t want to call right away. Subtle signals aside, she appeared to be
focused on the business at hand, and I wanted to have something useful to
tell her when I did call. As a result, it was late—nearl
y cycle change—before
I did.
“Hello, Max,” she said without preamble before my iView had even
registered that the handshake protocol had been completed. As much as my
paranoia resisted, I found that I liked having her voice in my head.
“Hello, Sophie.” I remembered why I called her in the first place. “I found
the zombie maker.”
“But . . .”
“How do you know there’s a ‘but’?”
“There always is with men.”
“Hey, that’s . . .” Probably true. “Okay. So, yeah, there is a ‘but’—” I stopped and took a deep breath before continuing. EyeSpies always charted on the
SocDis spectrum; it went hand in hand with their ability to focus and
multitask. There was no point in getting angry with her. She probably
wouldn’t understand why I was upset.
“But,” I said, moving on, “the terminal was EOLed a half-turn ago, and
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for documentation of its recycle tab, but it’ll be post-meridiem before I hear
anything.”
“This news does not comfort me, Max.”
“Yes, but—”
“Every ’tube-ready object has a unique GTAC/GMAC key,” she said as if I
didn’t already know this. “It won’t accept power without one. You can’t reuse
a key.”
“I know, Sophie,” I interrupted. “But—” It was like I was stuck in a bad
code loop— but, but, but . . .
“So, if this machine has been recycled, how did its GTAC/GMAC end up
in my iNetMom dashboard yesterday?”
“I’m still working on that,” I said. “That’s why I’ve got the Query registered.”
She was quiet for a fraction. “This isn’t useful information,” she said.
“It’s progress,” I tried. “You know, forward movement on the situation.”
“What if the tag is present? What data does that give us?”
“Well, I don’t know if the tag is there or not. That’s why I’m asking.” I was
raising my voice again. Theory-brain was defaulting to my SOP with internal
SysAdmD communications. Everyone thought they knew something about
Theoretics.
“If the recycle tab is available, then you have a spoofer.”
“Yes, Sophie, I suppose that is possible.” I sighed. Somehow this conversation
hadn’t gone like I had hoped.
A spoofer was, like a zombie maker, a system that hid behind other systems,
though in the case of the spoofer, it falsified its GMAC to the ’tubes. Both
zombie making and spoofing were old hacks that had been bound out by the
23.r4 rev of iStructure. Of course, that was only true if SysAdmD was current
on its iStructure revs.
My confidence in ICE SysAdmD wasn’t that high, but I wasn’t about to
share that with an outside agency.
“What is your position on the presence of a spoofer, Max?” Sophie asked.
“I—look, why are you breaking my balls?”
“I’m . . . that’s rather odd syntax, Max. Rather aggressive.”
“No, I—it’s an idiom. Late 20c. Sorry. That was inappropriate of me.”
“Late 20c,” she replied, and for a few fractions, all I heard over the audio
link was a micro-noise that seemed like the sound of her breathing. “You
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know much 20c?” she asked finally, in a different tone of voice. Much less
brittle. Silkier, like this was an Avatar consultation.
“A little,” I said. “It’s a hobby.”
“A man does need a hobby.”
“And how.”
“Um . . . I . . . well, during your personal cycle time—”
“Sorry, another idiom.”
“Oh, yes.” She went silent again, and for the second time I wished this
handshake had included a visual feed. I couldn’t get a read on what she was
thinking, and the theory-brain was starting to wonder if I was talking to the
same woman. Her voice had changed enough that—
“I, yeah, I’ll know more about that tag in a few windings,” I said, shaking
off the professional paranoia. “I’ll let you know.”
“Please do,” she said, and then: “Max?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you for calling.” And then she was gone.
Theory-brain was telling me she was a wethead who had VMed her brain,
splitting personalities to take advantage of the unused processor cycles in her brain. I went and took a cold shower, trying to drown theory-brain.
Theory-brain got back at me while I slept, filling my dreams with dozens of
Sophies, each one with a different personality.
I kept my sanity by holding tight to a loop of her last four words.
Ante-meridiem, another iDeeBoy was waiting outside my office. I iSigned
and took the ICEpak into my office. Flipping the bits that made my three
square a black box, I opened the envelope.
Thirty fractions later, I dropped the security screens and made a handshake
with Prescott Four’s XA. “I need thirty fractions,” I told him when the call
connected.
Micro-pause. “Next rotation. Four Cee—”
“No, I need them right now.”
“I’m sorry, Security Theorist Semper Dimialos, but your request is out of
compliance with your EnforD Registration. I cannot, obviously, comply.”
Prescott Four’s Executive Administrator was a rail named Equus Grimester, a
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man prone to fashion explosions and dismissive sniffing. I got one of those
sniffs now, coming through loud and clear on my audio link.
“Ask him about Giselle.”
“I will not, ST Semper Dimialos, and I would like to remind you that you
are in violation of i3Cee 7, part 11g, as well as i3Cee—”
“But, i3Cee 12, part 7a,” I interrupted, “states that any employee may
request—once a turn—a thirty-fraction window of the CEO’s time, so as to—”
“I know the i3Cee,” Grimester interrupted me, punctuating the sentence
with an especially loud nasal inhalation.
“Good. I want my allotted time with Prescott Four, and I’d like it now.” I
gripped the edge of my desk tightly to stop my hands from shaking.
Another pause, longer this time, and when Grimester came back, his tone
had gone all obsequious and musical on me again. “One fraction, please.”
It was more like a hundred fractions later when Prescott Four’s voice rang in my head. “Salutations and variations, Security Theorist Semper Dimialos,” he said, with an air of restrained jocularity. “My XA tells me that you’ve requested a 30fPA communication. I haven’t had one of these in . . . I can’t remember the last—”
“Giselle Akkwild Haussingterre,” I said, getting to the point. If I let him,
Prescott Four would ramble on for most of my allotted time, and then
Grimester would cut me off before I got more than a few words out.
“Excuse me?”
“Tell me about Giselle.”
A long pause, one that lasted well beyond my thirty-fraction limit, which
validated a few theories rolling around my head. When Prescott Four spoke
again, his voice had lost its levity. “She doesn’t exist, Max.”
Max. Not Security Theorist Semper Dimialos. Prescott Four might seem like an idiot on GoogleTube feeds, but he
came from a long line of corporate
fathers. All shrewd and cutthroat when the situation demanded it.
“What about forty-three turns ago?”
“That’s a very specific time period, Max.”
“I’m reading it right off a DNA report I have on my desk. A paternity test.”
“How did you come by this . . . dubious . . . information?”
“A better question might be to ask how this ‘dubious’ information came to
be. It’s a lot easier to find information than it is to make it up.”
“One of Security Directorate’s old truisms, yes?”
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“That it is, sir.”
“You’d better come to my office, Max.”
I went.
One of the corporate leadership perks was access to iReset, and RonTom St.
John’s Liberty Prescott Four used it liberally. The package had a more technical name and wasn’t entirely Apple’s design, but let’s face it: it made you sleeker, gave you a better face, reduced your need for peripherals, and doubled your
shelf life over the current regime of nootropic packs and neuro-linguistic
recombinatory therapy. Which meant, he looked liked a Studio Idol on the
cusp of legitimacy even though he was much older than I.
He didn’t look happy though, and the emotive ionic shades of his top-floor
office reflected his mood, making the enormous room seem both smaller and
larger with its play of shadow and grey light.
Standing inside the penthouse doors was an enormous presence. EnforD. I
knew him, in fact. Simon Yullg. A knuckle-dragger with a long reach.
“I’ve asked Chief Yullg to take some notes,” Prescott said, sensing my
unasked question.
“Of course,” I said, though we both knew Yullg wasn’t much for documentation.
There’s a story that someone in FinD submitted a form to EnforD that didn’t
have autofill, and Yullg tracked the poor bastard down and broke a digit for
every field that didn’t validate. When Yullg ran out of fingers and toes, he went to the next three square and continued to mete out EnforD’s displeasure. It
was, unfortunately, a rather long form.
Doing my best to ignore the hulk of muscle in the corner, I walked over and
put the ICEpak on Prescott’s desk. He slid out the single floppy inside and
fanned it. To his credit, not a single muscle on his perfectly smooth face
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