That rattled her. Corporate arrestees were almost never transferred, especially not half a continent away. She nodded, and took a moment to collect her thoughts. She’d been prepared for this kind of harassment. Enter a formal protest and support it with a story that only admitted what they could prove.
“A transfer is highly irregular,” she said, “and is wholly inappropriate to an act of vandalism.”
“Vandalism?”
“Yes. I was touring the Everglades in a rented thopter and became irritated with the constant stream of jingles for EnviroRama. I forcibly disconnected the cables to the audio system and did damage to the thopter’s processing center. This is an act that I willingly admit to under the Magrat Agreement, and for which I am truly sorry.”
Finney wasn’t even using the fake smile anymore. “Ms. Zipperer,” he said, “you aren’t being held for vandalism. You’re being held for the murder of Tevan Kolodny.”
That brought Audrey’s train of thought to a screeching halt. The training didn’t include anything about murder.
It had all started the previous Tuesday with a call from security to pick up some off-site company equipment. Normally she would have sent one of the couriers but the call was tagged for Grade 9 or above. That meant it was sensitive corporate equipment, and anything sensitive would be interesting. Given the lateness of the call—and that she’d already put in an hour of “voluntary corporate-building time”—Audrey decided to make the pickup on the way home and keep whatever it was locked up in her home lab. The company had paid good money to make sure she could work securely at home, so they shouldn’t have anything to complain about. That said, she still expected a minor demerit on her next review for “Not putting the needs of the company first.”
The pickup site turned out to be an office building undergoing renovations. All the bright, shiny signs on the outside of the building promised a new MetaMart opening in three months, but the heavily scarred concrete interior was coated in a thick layer of dust. Just the day before, she’d heard a rumor that Z&E was considering shuttering the MetaMart division because it wasn’t doing well in the focus groups. Within hours of hearing that, her group received a req to design new housings for MetaMart POS units under the project name “ZenStop.” She really didn’t care if it was true either way. No matter which name, the store would only carry Z&E products and the chocolate they sold would still be crap.
Inside there were a dozen Z&E cops milling around what appeared to be a body under a sheet. A junior officer stopped her at the door just long enough to see that her badge scanned green and pointed her to the officer in charge. He was an older guy, dressed in a gray security uniform rather than police contractor blues.
“You from Tech?” he asked as she approached.
She nodded. “Where’s the equipment?”
“That small case, over there.” He pointed to a long folding table on the far side of the room.
Audrey walked over to the table and the cop followed her, not missing a beat in his story. “I was checking the place for squatters. There’d been a brownout in the area and those are usually due to squatters doing something stupid. That’s when I found the dead guy—looks like he accidentally brushed up against a power drop while he was messing with some comm lines. Cooked himself good too. Any ID chips he may have had are fried. I was calling it in for pickup when I saw the seal on the case.”
It was a standard server case, bearing a prominent Z&E logo and a large yellow and red label that said “Property of Zigmund and Evans Development—RESTRICTED.” The tamper-evident seals were obviously broken.
“You open it?” She asked.
The old cop shook his head. “Hell no. I don’t get paid enough for the kind of trouble that would get. The seals were broke when I found it. Checked the outside for prints as required by law, but there was nothing. If you find anything inside that would help ID this guy…”
Audrey glanced around the room for any other gear security might have missed. Whoever the squatter was, he’d been living pretty well. There was a sturdy cot and vid screen. He’d even set up a kitchen area with a heating unit and a bucket for a sink. A hose snaked down to bring water from somewhere on the upper floors.
She pointed to a yellow box next to the sheet-covered body. “Are those tools?”
“Yeah. There are some decent ones in there too, but nothing with a company label.”
“What about that?” she asked, pointing to a long, black box near the cot.
“Needle rifle. I guess the guy was scared of something. The needles look like they might be tranqs but we won’t know until they’re tested. Again, no label.”
Audrey nodded. It all seemed by the book. A company seal was a point of demarcation. Anything outside was in the public realm and subject to public police procedure, but anything inside was Z&E property and therefore protected under corporate law. She scanned in the barcode on the case, logged the chain of custody, and transferred a copy to the cop for his report. Then she grabbed the case by the convenient and patented “Grip-All” handle and took it back to her podcar. The thing just barely fit into the space behind the seat.
As she got into the front of the pod car, her comm unit chimed to remind her that she still had fifty-three minutes of commercials to audit for the day. If that wasn’t incentive enough to work towards a Grade 12 she didn’t know what was. At least she didn’t have to get through a full seventy hours per week like back when she was grade four. She switched her comm over to “active” and shuddered as the jingle for “Sugar Flakes!” started playing. It was followed by a succession of ads for cleaning products, restaurants, health clinics, and lawyers. She managed to mentally tune them out after a bit, but by the time she walked off the elevator on her apartment’s floor she caught herself singing “Willy Walker! He’ll walk you right out of court!”
The time it took to lock the case in her company-furnished workroom and go to the bathroom was just enough to use up the rest of her ad time. She tapped her comm into “shutup” mode and went into the kitchen to find some dinner. As she rummaged through the fridge, it chimed softly and told her it was ordering “…one dozen ReadyMeals and a liter of Chocol-Aid from MetaMart central processing.”
“Gah! I hate that crap,” she said, though not loudly enough for the fridge to hear. If she cut down on the amount of Chocol-Aid she consumed it would affect her loyalty score at her next review. Besides, the stuff really wasn’t that bad as long as you added enough coffee powder.
She put a chicken-flavored ReadyMeal into the microwave and tapped the ReadyMeal button, but her mind drifted back to the case. The serial number from the equipment pickup was for some kind of industrial processor, and if she remembered the prefix codes right it was a pretty old one. That seemed kind of odd. An obsolete unit like that should be tucked away in the archives. When the microwave chirped “Your breakfast is ready!” in a perky, synthetic voice, she took the food back to her workroom.
She scanned the barcodes on the case again and ran the numbers through the Z&E technical database, and the details popped right up. It was an experimental model AI assembly line controller from about six years ago. The specs matched the size of the case, but the mass was way off. The thing was supposed to be well over fifty kilos, but she’d been able to lift it easily. Maybe it was empty. Sometimes used cases got sold off for surplus or taken home by employees, but then procedure required all company labels be removed. She noted the discrepancy in her log and opened the case.
It wasn’t empty. In the middle of the case where the controller was supposed to be, packed in layers of air-wrap, was a small anti-static box, and inside that box was a thick-framed pair of glasses.
The smirk on the interrogator’s face told Audrey that her own expression was anything but the blank and non-committal one recommended by the Z&E legal department. That didn’t surprise her much, though. Neither her job nor her day-to-day life involved hiding her feelings from anything more intelligent than her apartment AI. She
was sure that her shock and confusion flashed across her face the instant she felt them, possibly even before.
“Ms. Zipperer.” The smirk broadened into the sort of smile that was the exclusive property of sharks and intellectual property lawyers. “Corporate treaties do not require me to disclose anything in the way of evidence against you, but I’ll give you a summary so you can understand just how much trouble you are in.”
Finney paused and swiped through several screens of data on his tablet. He was probably doing it as some kind of psychological tactic, maybe to build tension for the details to follow. It didn’t matter. He’d said he was providing information that he wasn’t obligated to. The legal department had told them over and over that the only reason for doing so was to prime the subject for a deal. They’d said it was a good sign, but only if you kept your mouth shut.
“We have transit logs that show you and Mr. Kolodny meeting several times over the past week, along with confirmations from your home AI’s security report that Kolodny was a visitor the night he disappeared. There’s also a matter of you withdrawing a sizable amount of credits from your personal account and transferring them to an anonymizing service. Finally, we have a video of you pushing Mr. Kolodny out of a thopter some somewhere over the Everglades.”
There was a long pause, after which Audrey realized her mouth was hanging open. Damn it! She felt her face flush with embarrassment at having been caught by surprise again. The first couple of points, she could understand. It sort of made sense that she and Kolodny would be tracked in the same places, and she really had sent some money to an anonymizer, but the last one just didn’t make any sense. It just wasn’t possible. Yes, she’d taken that thopter out over the everglades, but she was sure she’d fried every single camera in that thing.
“I don’t believe you.”
Finney sighed in a way that bordered on theatrical. He pointed his remote at the screen and tapped a few buttons. The video that popped up was in black and white and had incredibly poor resolution.
“This is the visual spectrum portion of the IR landing scanner from your vehicle. You can see the support struts here and this is the air intake.” Finney pointed out each blurry feature as he spoke. “Because you disabled the flight chronometer we’re not precisely sure when, but around twenty minutes into your excursion we see this.” A large, dark object dropped through the left side of the camera’s field of view. “There’s only a couple of frames of video with it and they’re badly distorted, but it’s roughly the size of a person.”
“Huh,” Audrey said. This wasn’t going well.
Sometime after midnight Audrey gave up trying to sleep. A little voice in the back of her mind had been screaming all evening that she’d missed something, and it wasn’t going to let her rest until she figured it out. She got out of bed and went back to her workroom. The server case sat on her workbench where she’d left it. It stared at her dumbly, and she stared back hoping that it would blink first. No. The case wasn’t the problem. The lack of a server in the case? No, that was okay, too. The glasses? It was kind of silly to carry them around in such a large case, but sometimes people did silly things. That left the anti-static box.
She opened the case and took out the box. It was cheap opaque plastic with a snap-close lid and a fine wire mesh embedded into the outer surface. Industry standard for shielding sensitive components from EMF. Audrey unsnapped the latch and opened it up to look at the glasses inside. The thick blue frames were streaked through with pale yellow marbling. She didn’t really keep up with high fashion, but she was pretty sure she remembered seeing them in advertisements as recently as last year. Someone must have thought they were valuable though; they were well protected by the custom-shaped padding.
Why would someone go to the effort of making a shaped foam insert for an anti-static box just to hold a pair of glasses?
Two hours of nanoscopic RF and X-ray scans gave her the answer; buried in the frames was a surprising amount of nanocircuitry, along with ambient power induction coils, fractal mesh antennas, and even a couple of multi-spectrum emitters. The glasses had to be some kind of communication gear, though the hardware used was at least five years from production. The only people who got pre-release tech from Research were the ones who worked in the Unofficial Channels department.
She could verify the nature of the electronics, but that would involve dissolving the plastic of the frames just to show what would certainly be a lack of corporate markings on the circuits underneath, and she was more than reluctant to ruin such nicely made hardware. If she turned them in with the case they would be spirited off to some black-book branch of the company as restricted development or extra-corporate technology. Either way, she’d never see the things again and would probably have her security rating dropped just for looking at them.
In the end that’s what decided it for her. If she was going to get busted for knowing about restricted technology, she was going to do her best to actually know that technology. Hell, if she studied it well enough and maybe even came up with some possible improvements there was a slim chance she could work it into a promotion. That’s what Taylor over in Magnetics did…at least she assumed that’s what happened. There’d been a small party and Taylor had been moved to the Atlantic Admin offices, never to be heard from again.
Maybe jumping companies would be better. Having something sensitive could probably get her into Panoptico, or maybe even HellenInc. They’d never trust her with anything at all sensitive, but at least the people she’d known who switched companies hadn’t disappeared completely. Either way meant holding on to the glasses.
Audrey put the glasses back into their case and locked it up in a workbench drawer. Then she added a short note to her equipment retrieval report that the case had been empty. She’d file it when she turned the case in the next day and work out her next move later. Ten minutes later she was in bed, happily sleeping to the soothing sounds of corporate affirmations of her official Z&E alarm clock.
By the time she got home from work next evening Audrey had a plan of action ready, and the key step in that plan was to set up an escrow box. She’d realized that regardless of whether she jumped companies or not, the only way she could get out of this in one piece was if she had full documentation of the glasses stashed away where Z&E couldn’t get it. Her home lab made building the docs pretty easy—a full set of nanoscans and induction dumps from all the chips would take a few hours and would include pretty much everything she would need. The question was where to store it.
She had an encrypted partition on her corporate account, but there was no doubt Z&E could get to that whenever they wanted. She had a personal server set up in the apartment that was nominally secure, with a Faraday gap protecting it from remote exploits. That would be a perfect machine to gather and encrypt the docs. It was useless as an escrow box though. The moment red flags went up at Z&E Inforcement they’d raid her apartment and confiscate everything in the name of intellectual property protection. No, there really was only one viable option; she’d have to buy dark space on a foreign server.
The very idea made Audrey chuckle. It was like something from “Datawoman!” on the ZEV network. Even as a child she’d noticed how every single episode had the main character, Rhonna, stealing information—usually from a corrupt government official—and storing it on a server in a non-corporate country. It seemed like serious overkill, but it was the only way she could think of to keep the cache hidden. She knew how to set the account up, though. While foreign accounts were of questionable legality, they were still used by corporate officials and therefore couldn’t be completely firewalled off. Just opening one up would be a black mark against her. Then again, that wouldn’t be an issue until her next quarterly review. She started the nanoscan and routed the results through an encryption routine. When the screen prompted her for a key phrase she paused for a moment and then typed “Datawoman!”
Audrey looked down at her lunch in disbelief. When the guard walked in
carrying the small plastic tray she had expected to get Panoptico’s version of a ReadyMeal. What she hadn’t expected was that the Go!Dinner would be such a close copy. The vegetable mash and turkey-flavored cutlet were indistinguishable from Z&E’s product. Only the dessert cube was different; it was peanut butter cake where Z&E had cranberry crunch. If it was a case of espionage then someone had done a real bang-up job of it. The more she thought about it though, the more she figured the companies just used the same supplier. If the similarities had been the result of corporate spying then the recipient would have changed the product enough to avoid the inevitable patent infringement claims.
As she was finishing up the meal and considering asking for another Fizzi-Cola, another Yellow-tie walked into the room. This one had a Z&E badge clipped to her lapel.
“It’s about time!” Audrey began, but stopped short when the woman held up a hand.
Without so much as a smile, she introduced herself as, “Jo Briggan, Z&E Extralegal.” Then she turned to face the screen on the wall and carefully enunciated, “I hereby invoke section nine of the Corporate Agreement on Dispute Resolution.”
“What…” again Audrey was cut off.
The lawyer pulled a small comm unit from her pocket, set it on the table, and tapped a button on its side. Immediately the screen went black and there was a brief, high-pitched whine from the far corner of the room.
“Okay, Ms. Zipperer. It’s safe to talk now. I’m here on the company’s behalf to negotiate your position. How well I do my job depends on how well you cooperate. Understand?”
Audrey nodded. This kind of bullying was something she’d been dealing with for years. They acted all tough but beneath the facade they were a mess of insecurity. Let them waive their control around a bit and they’d calm down.
Mystery! Page 19
