The Hollow Prince

by Mark Teppo

  I took the hint and left my shoes in the foyer, along with my coat, belt, and ICID. Taking my hand, she led me into the single room of her domicile. Other than the tiny points of lights on the wall that were the anchors for a flood of virtual monitors, there was a uVert couch and a PedTrac mounted on a low stool.

  She sat next to me on the couch, our thighs lightly touching. She spun the PedTrac expertly with her toes, and the wall disappeared beneath an octal grid of monitors, where we could—among other feeds—watch the footage of me, getting pulped by an automated security system. Just like she said.

  About the time it had picked me up by the hands (so that’s how the bones had been broken), I noticed how rapid her breathing was. She noticed that I had noticed, and I stopped feeling the sympathetic pains from the ass-kicking I barely remembered.

  We slid down on the couch, hands exploring. I lost my shirt. Her smoke robe dissipated. I discovered she had nice nipples. I spent some time with them before exploring further.

  I kissed and nuzzled my way down her torso. She sighed, her stomach retreating from my mouth. I paused at her hips. Rising in an arc between the peaks of her pelvic bone was a tattoo. Gothic, late 20c script. Secrets aren’t.

  “Keep going,” she said, pushing my head further down.

  Later, we watched octopus sex.

  “This is weird,” I opined.

  “I find it relaxing. Its 20c footage. A pre-Union European filmmaker named Jean Painlevé. I thought you might like it.”

  I tried to relax, found it easier than I thought it would be.

  “Oh,” she said, and then it was her turn to go exploring.

  *

  I survived the experience (both the sex and the fact that it came out of watching vid of me getting assaulted by a security automat), only because the pharmacopoeia inserted by the iDoc automatically dispersed nootropics and painkillers when I was threatening to overtax myself during the . . . activities. The downside of this distribution method meant that, after we were done, I couldn’t sleep. Too wired.

  She had a smaller, single-screen v-mon pad in the bathroom, and I used it to track down a niggling itch. Not the one in my chest. The persistent tap-tap from the theory-brain. You’ve missed something. I iPriv’ed in to ICECORE and accessed my delivery log.

  The third package was the anomaly. Why? Why had it come late in the day, and not with the morning run? Why was it a Gen-Y delivery and not a Prior-R?

  When I filtered the PDL to just the three packages, I saw the pattern. My mystery shipper was using all anonymous stopdrops, timing deliveries so that they arrived in a specific order on specific days. He hadn’t realized that a Gen-Y—a general issue delivery—had a modified schedule for ICE HQ: post-meridiem.

  His first mistake.

  I queried for the RPCs of the remaining stopdrops, all the way to the edge of outRing. Forty-seven, was the response. That stopped me for a few fractions. Was he going to use them all? That was a lot of blackmail material.

  Of course, Prescott Four probably had more skeletons than that buried.

  But he was going to send Yullg out before then. He already had, and EnforD had come up empty. That’s why he needed me out of bed and back in the field. There was something coming—and coming soon—that he really didn’t want to be made public.

  “Hello, Max,” she said in my ear, and I jumped because she was actually there, standing beside me.

  “Ah, hi,” I said. When I glanced up, I could see an reversed image of my screen along the lower rim of her left eyeglass lens. I should have known. Of course, she’d be monitoring her own house. Private network tunnel notwithstanding. “Just seeing if there was anything new.”

  “He’s using your own system, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. Yes, he is.”

  “So you’ve been just as compromised as I have.”

  I thought about a position we had recently been in. “Compromised” was one way to put it.

  “What’s in the packages, Max?”

  “Ah, term papers. DNA reports. That sort of thing.”

  She blinked, fish-eyed behind her glasses. “That’s only two.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’ve only suggested two items. There are three packages that have been delivered and signed by you.”

  “Signed?” I had been unconscious for the last one. “I . . . I don’t know, really. I didn’t get a chance to see it.”

  Her eyes flicked left, and I saw the screen image on her lens churn. My stomach tightened unconsciously. She was accessing ICE PDL. That was a violation of—

  Her focus snapped back. “Yes, I see that now.”

  “You know, it’s a little creepy how quickly you are able to retrieve my corporate assets like that.”

  She stared at me for a long time, her face impassive and unreadable. Then, the icy impasse broke and her face melted into a warm smile. “Max,” she said. “I’m keeping an eye on you. Don’t you feel more safe?”

  The iMed call. If she hadn’t triggered it, I wouldn’t be here.

  “Ah, yeah. I guess so.”

  Something flickered in her eyes. I wasn’t sure if it was a reflection from her glasses or something more . . . internal. The rapidity with which she moved between personalities was a little intense.

  “Based on the PDL from these stations, there are eighty-five more packages scheduled to be delivered to you. They’ll arrive over the next few cycles, in increasing number. Each wave utilizes a different sequence of the stopdrops.”

  “I’ve realized that.” Little boxes of blackmail.

  “They can’t all be—”

  I shook my head. “Probably not. He’ll have anticipated us figuring out he was using the stopdrops. We could query for all mail coming from those drops, but not all of them will be blackmail boxes. We don’t know which ones are hot.”

  “What are you going to do next?”

  “I was thinking about you and I going back to bed.”

  She slapped me.

  Wrong answer, apparently.

  “Is that all I am to you?”

  “All what?”

  “A one-off.”

  “We did it twice.”

  “What about my security breach?”

  “You have one?”

  She slapped me again. “This is such a mistake,” she said, almost as if her personalities were talking to one another.

  My lungs seized as the pharmacopoeia triggered another dose of painkillers. My cheek went numb. That was nice.

  “Which?” I asked, intruding on her internal dialogue. “Beating me up or sleeping with me?” My tongue was loose too. The pain meds worked quickly. Too bad they couldn’t do something about the mood.

  She stepped out of the room, sealing the door shut behind her with a loud click of finality. Very 20c. That was nice too.

  The meds went right to the top of my brain, throwing open my skull and letting theory-brain get some air. It was the only explanation I had for the simple solution it presented to me a few fractions later.

  So very simple. So very nice.

  *

  The key to any system is to discern the simplest route. GoogleTube had, in their own way, discovered that the simplest route to data domination was to decrease data separation to nearly zero. And while throwing hardware at a problem may seem to be counter to Ockham’s Insight of keeping it simple, it actually was because they were thinking about the problem from a different perspective.

  And when I thought about my problem from a different angle, the answer seemed obvious. It was an issue of logistics.

  Sophie had marked eighty-five more packages in-system, and even if I could killnine all of the deliveries, the packages and their contents were still physically in the ICE chain of custody. For them to be summarily destroyed without being opened would take an Executive Order from Prescott Four, the sort of request that would require a document trail and LegD audit. Prescott Four might be able to ultimately archive what was in the boxes, but it would take some
corporate resources.

  Of which there were many, and that’s where I had gone astray. The point wasn’t to bring down ICE; it was to get someone’s attention.

  Mine.

  Once I realized that, theory-brain happily skipped to the next realization. If my attention was being sought, then what was the message? It wasn’t the packages. It was the way they were being delivered. Or more accurately, the way they were being put into the ICE system. By hand.

  Eighty-eight packages all together, hand-delivered to the stopdrops scattered across the Ring in a pattern that would—based on a fairly accurate model of ICE PDL—arrive in waves. In order to achieve that pattern of delivery distribution, the blackmailer would have to drop off the packages in an extremely precise route. One that could, if enough t-flops were redirected to model the permutations, be recreated.

  While Sophie’s emotive personality wasn’t speaking to me, her analytical persona was, and it didn’t take much to talk her into finding me the processor power to chart the most probable epicenter of the blackmailer’s route. My best theoretical estimate was that this location—within a few radians—was where I would find Prime Doctor Sandeesh’s grandson.

  “Hello, Max,” Sophie said in my ear.

  “Hello, Sophie,” I sub-vocalized back. Before I had left her place, she had upspliced a piece of military-grade code into my iView’s appstore. We were permanently connected now, handshaking on an encrypted link.

  It was almost better than sex. Almost.

  “I have the RPC.” Before I could read the coordinates she sent, I felt the ‘tubebus change direction. “Routing you there now.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Look, I’m sorry about what I said earlier.”

  My mail icon bounced. A R & U from her with a subject line of “Apology.” Read and Understood, but not Accepted. She was still mad at me.

  “I’m not very good at this,” I tried again. “So I guess I’ll just say it and . . . well, anyway . . . I don’t really know the proper protocols for . . . ” When she didn’t say anything, I lumbered on, “. . . this sort of relationship. I mean, how am I supposed to treat all your personalities? The same? Differently? It’s confusing to us single-core guys.”

  “It always is,” she said.

  I bristled slightly. “That’s not fair. You’re baselining statistics on me.”

  “And you aren’t?”

  “What? How so?”

  “My personalities? You think I’m splitcore?”

  I paused, and my theory-brain shuffled through a couple scenarios and couldn’t find one that didn’t end badly. “Aren’t you?” I tried, cringing slightly as I said it.

  The only answer I received was a weird sensation of having a black hole in my brain, an emptiness that came from an open link that carried no data. It was the weirdest sensation of loss I had ever felt.

  *

  Half a winding later, as I wandered around an Emporium 31 looking at jewelry, I tried again.

  I had found a holostat of Hammurabi Kip Sandeesh, the grandson, and I had loaded it into the surveillance mod of my iView. While my idle flops was doing facial recog on everyone within visual range, I had nothing else to do but wander around the RPC Sophie had sent me and try not to look too conspicuous.

  B-R had a nasty habit of enforcing their Minimum Transaction Requirement. I couldn’t keep buying ice cream if I was going to stay on-site; I’d have to upgrade to something a little pricier if I was going to be here long.

  “Do you have a favorite color?” I asked the void in my head, hoping—contrary to what it felt like—that she was still listening. I looked at a row of earrings, most of which were single-stone settings and astronomically priced. “Orange, perhaps,” I tried.

  “Vermilion,” she corrected, her voice rising out of the vacuum.

  “Okay, vermilion. That’s a start.” I cast about for something that matched the color shard I summoned in my internal display. “Like your shoes,” I remembered. “From when we met at Starbucks.”

  “I’m not wearing them right now,” she said, using the other voice, the one I liked.

  “No, I don’t suppose—”

  “I’m not wearing anything.”

  “Oh,” I said. I wet my lips. “I’d like objective verification of that data point, please.” I wasn’t quite sure where she was going with this, so I thought I’d proceed cautiously.

  My mail icon chimed, and then irised into an image. We were fuzzy, but the pair of octopi getting it on the background were digitally sharp.

  I sighed and blinked the image away. She was gone again, leaving me with just the fuzzy suggestion of the two of us together.

  Still mad, I figured.

  I was spared further attempts to get her attention as well as getting squeezed by the Emporium 31 MTR by a different tone in my iView.

  Facial recog had a hit.

  *

  Hammurabi Kip Sandeesh waited for me at the uprise to his domicile. We rode up silently, both staring out at the cluttered landscape. The surface of the planet above us was still dark, the weak light of cycleflip just starting to crease the distant curve.

  “Tea?” he asked as we entered the austere family chamber. Unlike Sophie’s place (or mine, for that matter), Hammurabi had two rooms, and I didn’t disguise my interest in the second room.

  “Sure,” I said as I wandered over to the portal and glanced inside. Worktable with a few exploded tools on it. Couple of antique-looking terminals and a few holograms of exotic plant life projected into the corners. I didn’t have a chance to look at the terminals more closely before he returned from the iToaster station.

  “Soy?” he asked. He was carrying a tray with two small cups—also antiques—and a conDispenser.

  “Black is fine,” I said.

  He set the tray down on the low table between the two lacquered chairs and indicated I should sit. I did so, and watched him as he modded his tea. Pure-looking kid, no outward signs of plugs or rips. Kind face too, with quick and restless eyes. Not like he was chemical, but rather that he found everything interesting.

  He lifted his teacup in a tiny salute. “I’m glad you found me, Person Semper Dimialos,” he said.

  “It wasn’t terribly hard once I thought about it,” I said. “Please, Max,” I added.

  Hammurabi nodded. “My grandfather said that the best way to get a Theorist’s attention was to make him think. He would have liked you, I think, had things been different.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” With nothing else to add, I sipped from my tea. It was real leaf, and I savored the flavor for a few fractions, waiting for Hammurabi to tell me why I was here.

  He got to it eventually. “How many boxes did you receive?” he asked.

  “Three, but I know there more coming.”

  “A dozen more,” he said. “The rest are to distract your Enforcement Directorate and to confound your CEO.”

  “I’m sure they will,” I said. “But to what end?”

  He picked up a small plate that had a tiny dark square on it. “Try the sweetmeat.”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “The tea is plenty.”

  “Please.” He gave me a look that was so earnest it almost broke my heart, and would have if theory-brain hadn’t latched onto the intensity of his gaze. Something familiar there.

  I picked up the small piece of candy and popped it in my mouth. Its data payload was enormous, and I gasped as the upload threatened to overwhelm my buffers. After a few fractions, I could crest the data stream and skim the header waves.

  “Oh, my,” I said as an overview started to synthesize. Hammurabi had just given me an digital copy of everything in the blackmail packages—cross-referenced and indexed for quick assimilation.

  “My grandfather invented it,” he said. “Giselle gave it its street name: the Gripee.”

  “Autonomous Microphalengeal Retrieval,” I whispered. “The term paper. Prescott Four stole the whole idea.”

  Sandeesh shook his head. �
��It was supposed to be a joint paper. The three of them.”

  “But, what—” I closed my mouth and scanned more of the documentation in my buffers. The Las Vegas School of International Business. Giselle Akkwild Haussingterre. The paternity test. The CAPR from Las Vegas SecD. The LegD report to Prescott Three. The internal doc trail between Prescott Four and Hammurabi’s grandfather. Giselle’s name mentioned more than once.

  The last document threw me for a fraction. The menu list of Chromosomic Therapy options in the iReset. I didn’t understand why the man dump had been included, until I read the details of the Chrome23 options.

  Suddenly the doc thread between Prescott Four and Prime Doctor made sense.

  I flinched, and some of the tea in my tiny cup spilled out onto my hand. “What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked, suddenly not wanting this data in my head. Not wanting to have anything to do with this whole affair.

  “We were hoping you could talk to your CEO on our behalf.”

  “Our? Wait a fraction. You want me to become the blackmailer?”

  “He’ll listen to you.”

  “No he won’t—” The denial died in my throat. Actually, theory-brain pointed out, he would. Because you can spin a thousand variations on what will happen if the data spills into the medianet.

  It’s all about control, I had told Prescott Four, and I had never had it. I had been set up from the beginning.

  *

  On the long ride back to ICE, I pulled up the image of Sophie and I (fuzzy) and the octopi (not as) and left it there in my field of vision. Eventually, she filled the void in my head.

  “Hello, Max.”

  “Hello, Sophie.” I had been thinking, going back over the course of events during this crisis, trying to find a hole in theory-brain’s assessment. I hadn’t had any luck. “I’d like you to do something for me.”