Asimov’s Future History Volume 9

by Isaac Asimov

  Immediately to the right Coren found a lamp propped on a three-legged table. He switched it on and turned off his own light.

  Vacant. He closed the door behind him.

  He studied the room carefully. Jeta Fromm had struck him as a fastidious person, neat and methodical. This place did not. He sat down on the edge of the cot.

  Disks, small pieces of paper, items of clothing, scraps of unidentifiable detritus littered the floor. A chair lay on its side to the left of the desk. The cot itself was angled away from the wall.

  It appeared to Coren that she–or someone–had left in a hurry, possibly in a panic. Jeta peddled data–rumor, software, illicit downloads, even documented fact when she sold material to the newsnets as a stringer–so any of a number of deals could cause her to run.

  She had been very professional when he met her, but it seemed to him now that there had been an undercurrent of desperation. She managed it well and he had been in a hurry, so he had neglected to pay it enough attention.

  Coren stepped up to the desk. The clutter consisted mainly of components from old, salvaged readers, scanners, and bits of datum units. He saw a control panel from a commline. Tools lay mixed with the debris. Two bare spaces suggested removed equipment. He guessed, given her range of services, that she owned a pathburner, a very expensive microcircuitry cutter. Probably a very good decryption datum. The cost of those two pieces would be more than his own yearly salary.

  What he saw here convinced Coren that Jeta was on the run. Someone–maybe the same someone who had rolled him in Petrabor–had come looking for her. She had duly disappeared.

  He knelt down and shuffled through the papers and disks on the floor. The disks were labeled by numbers. He could go through them, but he doubted she would have left anything behind worth the trouble.

  The papers mostly contained scribbled comm codes, cryptic notes– “Jam on B-stras, 3s” or “Cram Seef for Rudo, level 12”–and a couple of doodles. One caught his eye that said “B meet at seven’s place, 2shift” followed by a comm code. He slipped it into his pocket and stood.

  He turned off the light and stepped outside.

  To his left he glimpsed someone watching him from a doorway. The door slammed shut. Coren reached the cubicle in three long strides and shouldered his way in.

  In the pale light he saw a small man shoving himself in the comer behind a large chest of drawers. Coren shut the door and stepped closer.

  “I didn’t! Stop! I didn’t!” the man cried.

  “You know Jeta?” Coren demanded. “She ask you to watch her place?”

  “I don’t–nothing to say, gato–please–”

  “Don’t ‘gato’ me, shit. Dump it now. You’re a friend of Jeta’s?”

  He nodded once. He was not quite as small as he at first seemed, but the clothes he wore were too big and his head was long and shaved bald. His sleeves half-covered his hands.

  “You ‘re watching for her, right? Who came to visit before me? Who’s looking for her?”

  The man shook his head a little too quickly. “Don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what? Who, if, when?”

  “Never saw them before.”

  “Them? Two? More?”

  “Two. Man and a woman.”

  “The man,” Coren said. “Short, stout, yellow skin?”

  A scowl flashed across his face. “No, it was–I don’t know. Leave me alone.”

  Coren resisted the urge to grab the smaller man. Strong-arming would do no good, but he wondered just how far subtlety would get him.

  “Listen, gato,” he said gently, “Jeta’s in trouble. If I don’t find her first she’ll be dead. Savvy? Now, who came?”

  “Never–I–” The man swallowed loudly and closed his eyes. “Dead?” he whispered.

  “Very dead.”

  The man nodded weakly. “She–two days ago, third shift, she says time to go, she’s sorry. Be back in a few days for her jumble–”

  “Her what?”

  “Jumble–her stuff–”

  “All right, go on.”

  “Asks me just to spot who comes looking. Like you guessed.”

  “And?”

  “Three hours later this tall gato, long coat, tosses her cube. Didn’t see me. Stayed in her place maybe twenty minutes.”

  “Tall. Anything else?”

  “Dark skin, like he’s seen sun or something. Didn’t blink.”

  “Didn’t blink... his eyes?”

  “What else you got that blinks?”

  “Did he talk to you?”

  “No,” the man said indignantly. “I said he didn’t see me.”

  “You said a woman?”

  “Came yesterday. Looked around Jeta’s cube, stayed maybe an hour, then left.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Wore a mask. Not too big, though, but–”

  “Nobody stopped her?”

  “The other one was with her, stayed outside.”

  “You don’t know where Jeta might have gone?”

  “No,” the man insisted.

  Coren grunted. He took a gamble. “Who’s Seven?”

  The man frowned. “‘Seven’? I don’t know...” He seemed honestly ignorant, so Coren dropped it.

  “Did these gatos talk to anybody else?”

  “Might have.” The man paused, thought it over for a moment. “Yes, did. Cobbel and Renz. They got the first cubes at the edge.”

  Coren suppressed a smile. “What did this tall gato sound like?”

  “Kind of raspy-voiced, like he had trouble breathing. But it came out of his chest, real deep. Cobbel and Renz didn’t like him too much.”

  “Did the woman talk to anyone?”

  “No.”

  Coren considered. Then he stood. “All right, thanks. I’m not here to hurt Jeta. You tell her the gato that paid her twice market for that last data she sold needs to talk to her again. Tell her to find me if she wants to stay alive. Savvy?”

  “How’ll she find you?”

  “Same way she found what I wanted. She’ll know. You see her, you tell her to stay on the move, though.”

  “Serious shit?” the man asked.

  Coren nodded. “Very.”

  He backed out of the cubicle and reentered Jeta’s cube. He took out his palm monitor and adjusted it, then turned a slow circle till a light flashed red.

  From up in the corner, tucked in a crack between the wall and the ceiling, he removed a small button. He repeated the scan and found another one, on her desk amid a jumble of electronics, pretending to be a relay switch.

  If there were more, his monitor missed them. He opened a slot in the side of the monitor and dropped them in. They barely fit.

  At the edge of the hab collection, he paused. Then he knocked on the nearest door.

  A woman looked out at him. She said nothing, only waited expectantly.

  “Cobbel or Renz?” Coren said.

  “Renz. What?”

  “The tall gato talked to you about Jeta Fromm.”

  She frowned. “What about him?”

  “Did he give you a code to tap if you found Jeta?”

  “You police?”

  “Private.”

  “Ah.” She stepped out. She was quite a bit shorter than he, surprisingly so. “He tapped us. Ears allover the place. Cobbel’s still looking for all of them. We figured that, when he didn’t give us a code.”

  “He knew you’d lie.”

  Rena shook her head. “Wouldn’t lie.” She smiled. “Wouldn’t tell him anything.”

  “What was he like?”

  She frowned again, thoughtfully. “Scary shit. Never blinked. Skin looked wrong.”

  “Wrong how?”

  “Don’t know. Just wrong. Diseased, maybe. Too smooth. No veins.” She studied him narrowly. “Jeta’s in trouble.”

  “Looks that way. Bad trouble.”

  “You trying to help?”

  “My fault. Trying to cover accounts.”

&
nbsp; Renz nodded. “You won’t find her. Best she finds you.”

  “If you see her, tell her. I need to talk to her.”

  “Ain’t seen her in a few days. She knows how to find you?”

  Coren nodded. “I don’t think there’s much Jeta can’t find. Do you?”

  That elicited a sly smile.

  “Just out of curiosity,” Coren asked, “how long has she lived here? People in her profession move a lot, I know.”

  “Long enough,” Renz said. “longer than most–three months or so.”

  Coren nodded. That was a long time–for a data troll.

  “I’m going, “Coren said. “You see her, tell her. I need to talk to her soonest.”

  He went to the steps. He glanced back and saw people watching him now, openly. Something had passed through here that had scared them.

  Coren hurried down the steps.

  On the way back to the tube station, Coren stopped at a public comm and punched in the code he had found. The screen flashed DISCONNECTED SOURCE. He studied the note for a time, trying to decide if it would be worth his while to try to find this Seven. In the end, he fed the paper into a recycler. No time to be as thorough as he wanted. He tapped in the code for the Auroran embassy and began making his way through the maze of connections to find the person he needed to speak to.

  Third shift was just beginning in Petrabor Sector. Coren’s timing was close, arriving at the warehouse just ahead of the crew.

  He stood across from their entrance and this time they noticed him as they filed in by groups of twos and threes. He no longer wore the tattered leftovers of a warren ghost but the fine suit of someone in authority–an inspector or manager or perhaps a cop. As they saw him their friendly chatter died away, replaced by suspicion and silence.

  Coren had about half an hour before he needed to catch a semiballistic to D. C. He studied the faces that passed before him, matching them to his memory, but the sixteenth crewman failed to appear. No surprise.

  The foreman emerged from the employee access and came toward him. He was a short man, middle-aged and just beginning to lose the firm lines of a body made powerful during time working the bays instead of just supervising others.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, stopping a meter away.

  Coren held up his ID, which contained the emblem identifying him as a licensed independent security investigator. The foreman almost took a step closer to examine it, but Coren shoved it back into his pocket.

  “Last night,” Coren said, “you took your crew out during on-duty time. A place called Dimilio’s?”

  The foreman’s eyes became wary. “What about it?”

  Coren shook his head sorrowfully. “That’s not contract.”

  “The Guild send you? Management?”

  “What do you think would’ve happened if the routers had glitched with no one there to shut it down?”

  “Routers never glitch!”

  “They do if they’re hacked.”

  Now the wariness turned to fear. “Hacked...” He swallowed. “You’re talking about–”

  “I’m not talking about anything yet. I’m asking. Why did you think it would all right to walk out midshift, en masse like that, for a few drinks?”

  The foreman scowled at him. “I don’t have to talk to you.”

  Coren nodded agreeably. “That’s right, you don’t. But if that’s what you decide to do, the next people you talk to will be ITE inspectors. They don’t give a damn about contract protections.”

  The foreman took a tentative step closer. “Look–it was Oril’s birthday. Not yesterday, but the day before, but there wasn’t time then to do anything. Busy shift. Things slowed down yesterday, there were a couple of windows, we figured, what’s an hour or two? We’ve never had a problem–”

  Coren sighed dramatically. “Contract says someone has to be on duty–”

  “There was! We left the sub here. He didn’t know Oril anyway, no loss.”

  “The sub. I didn’t see any sub listed–”

  The foreman looked pained for a second. “Farom was out, he’s been having trouble with his kid. He’s already past his allotment for personal time and sick days–any more and he gets written up. We paid the sub out of our own pocket to come in for him so Farom wouldn’t get the reprimand.”

  “I need the sub’s name.”

  “I’m telling you, Farom’s a good worker–”

  “The sub’s name.” Coren leaned closer and softened his voice. “If I can keep this off the record I will–it’ll save me a lot of trouble. I don’t need the extra datawork. I just have to verify that you didn’t leave your shift unattended. Word is that management has some losses to explain to shareholders. You know how that is. Now there was a glitch in the logs for the time you were all toasting Oril’s good health. If it was operator error, then we can correct it on our end and leave you alone.” Coren reached out then and grabbed hold of the foreman’s coverall. “But you pull that kind of shit again, I’ll have your ass in front of management and the Guild conciliators. Understand?”

  “Yuri Pocivil,” the foreman said quickly. “He’s normally Second Shift at the Number Four yard. He had personal time.”

  “How did you come to call him?”

  “We used him before.”

  “Covering for Farom?”

  The foreman swallowed. “As a matter of fact, yeah.”

  Coren released him. “Yuri Pocivil. I’m going to have a talk with him. He explains the glitch to my satisfaction, you won’t see me again.”

  “We’ve never had any problems with him before.”

  “Happens when you step out of contract. Go back to work.”

  Shaken, the foreman almost bowed as he backed away. He’d recovered his composure by the time he reached the entrance. He gave Coren a last look–to which Coren returned a reassuring nod–then disappeared inside the warehouse.

  Yuri Pocivil had failed to report to work that day and his apartment was vacant. Coren was not surprised, but he was disappointed. It would have been simpler had he found him. Pocivil was a more direct line to whoever was running the operation.

  He made his way to the station, mulling over his next move. The routing had been modified in Baltimor. That, at least, was convenient to his next stop.

  Four

  DEREC AVERY WATCHED the screens with mild interest. The central view was a complex collection of concentric, overlapping rings. Where some of the lines crossed, pockets formed containing patternless amalgams of small shapes, like froth or dried, cracked mud, or a cloud of midges. The right-hand screen showed a similar view but without the pockets. The left showed only chaos.

  As he watched, the rings on the central screen expanded and shrank minutely, as if jockeying for position in a crowded container, occasionally sending waves through one or more of the broken pockets. One pocket suddenly dissolved, quickly forming its own node and growing a set of rings. On the opposite side another pocket, this one filled with what appeared to be different-sized pebbles, wavered on the brink of dissolution. The pocket changed shape, narrowing, nearly splitting in two, then reinflating. Abruptly, it solidified, the pebbles merging to form a smooth surface. Then the wall burst and pebbles spilled across the orderly waves of circles, rupturing them, forming new pockets of disorder, and within seconds the screen lost all sign of pattern.

  “Disappointing,” said a calm, genderless alto voice.

  “What happened, Thales?” Derec asked, though he already knew.

  “I lost a primary anchor in the matrix,” replied his office’s Resident Intelligence. “When it went, it caused a cascade.”

  “Did you know it was a primary anchor?”

  “No. That is, of course, the problem. I have to assign anchor points without knowing how they relate to the entire matrix. Some are unimportant and stable, others are primary and stable, but a few are primary and corrupted. When they go, they corrupt the entire system.”

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky next time, Tha
les.”

  The positronic intelligence did not reply. Thales had long since catalogued most of what it called Derec’s “sympathy concessions”: meaningless phrases used to soothe hurt feelings or disappointments that, according to Thales, seemed important to people not for what they contained–because they contained nothing useful–but for the fact that they were said. For the moment, it appeared Thales did not consider a response necessary.

  The chaos filling the screen in front of Derec, so far resist ant to Thales’ attempts at restoring pattern and function, showed all that remained of Derec’s ambition: the flexibility of a human mind expressed in a positronic matrix. He had always wanted to build a robotic intelligence that could cope with trauma–with failure–and recover from the brink of collapse. He had hoped to build a robot that would work through Three Law violations and retain a coherent structure, preserving memory and identity in the face of the unacceptable.

  He had failed.

  The physical fragments of what had been the robot Bogard filled a crate, awaiting shipment... somewhere. The positronic remnants of Bogard’s mind filled a buffer in Thales’ generously large, though currently abbreviated, memory. Bogard’s collapse had resulted from the death of Bok Golner–a death for which Bogard had felt responsible, indeed had inadvertently caused. Golner had been a killer, an anti-robot fanatic, and had been about to kill Derec when Bogard came to his creator’s rescue. But none of that mattered in the absolutist structure of a positronic brain which prohibited the taking of a human life, intentions notwithstanding. Thales believed the key to Bogard’s failure could be pulled from those shards. But after nearly a year, they had proved indecipherable. Thales continued to express optimism; Derec was not as sanguine.

  “Perhaps,” the RI said, “I should make a copy of each stage so that I can reset one step back rather than do the entire construct over. Of course, that would require a larger memory buffer than the one to which I now have access.”

  “Oh, well,” Derec said, standing. “Sorry.”

  “I understand, Derec. No need to apologize.”

  Perversely, Derec felt a pang of guilt. That lack of memory had been a problem throughout Thales’ attempts to reorder Bogard’s matrix. Thales simply did not have enough in its present configuration. Derec counted them both lucky to have as much as they did. Of course, any less might begin impairing Thales’ normal functions.