Analog SFF, September 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  She continued talking, but her mention of mortgages had reminded me of Trevor. Soon, I either needed to get to an ATM myself or take one of his pills. Briefly, I took inventory of my body. Nothing itched. Nothing ached that didn't normally ache. For the moment I seemed okay, and I really didn't want to start gobbling Extension in her presence.

  Luckily, another of my skills is tuning out without letting anyone realize it, and I didn't appear to have missed much.

  “...not really ill?” she was saying.

  The question appeared to be rhetorical, so I grunted and, reassuringly, she continued. “That was the end of that project. But it got us thinking. Was there a way to differentiate phony sick calls from the real thing? When the body is under pressure, it makes chemicals called stress proteins. It also produces various neurological responses, all chemically triggered.

  “It didn't take long to realize we were onto something a lot more valuable than a tardiness nano. What our research was leading to was a lie detector that could be linked to any effectuator we wanted. Combined with an asthma nano, for example, it's a pretty powerful incentive to tell the truth. The version you got simply makes it easy to tell when someone isn't."

  “Wait a second. Are you saying you slipped me a nano?"

  She ducked her head but didn't look particularly repentant. “Yeah, I know it's illegal. The nanos were on my hand when you shook it, and enough to do the job were in your bloodstream by the time you said hello. Want to give back my money?"

  “Not yet."

  “I didn't think so. Besides, what the law is really concerned about is giving harmful nanos without permission. This one didn't hurt you. All it did was make you flush. I know I told you not to, but go ahead, tell me a lie."

  “Such as?"

  “Anything. Tell me it's raining."

  “It's pouring.” I said it as calmly as possible, but sweat broke out on my forehead, and again I felt my cheeks redden. “Wow. How long does it last?"

  “The flush? Only a few seconds. The nano itself wears off in a few hours, though we could have made it last forever."

  “So you're telling me you've developed a nano-based truth serum."

  “Not a truth serum. A lie detector. A truth serum would force you to speak. This merely shows when you're lying. And it's not perfect. A good liar can hide parts of the truth without triggering it—as you did when you told me about your ‘usual’ billing rate. And if you really believe the moon is made of green cheese, it's going to register as truth. It's probably also useless on pathological liars."

  “That's all very interesting, but what's it got to do with me?"

  “I was getting to that.” She tugged again at the skirt, though as far as I could tell, she was showing no more leg than before. “Our lead scientist is Darryl Marnier.” She pronounced the first name as Darr'l and the last in the French manner, as Mar-nee-ay. Must be a Southern thing, though for all I knew, the “southern” in SNS meant California. “Or maybe I should say he was our lead scientist. He's vanished. I'm hoping you can track him down."

  “Uh-huh,” I said, thinking about the nano and what I could and could not get away with promising. I'd done my share of missing persons work, but it was mostly heir searches or hunts for runaway kids—depressing work because all too often I wasn't doing the parents any favor. Hi, here's your drug addict back. You owe me another $500. See you again, next time she runs away. Contrary to what you see on the vid, PIs don't get many chances to hunt for adults who want to stay disappeared.

  Still, how hard could it be? It's almost impossible to live without generating a gazillion electronic footprints. With the nano reading my mood, though, I didn't want to sound too optimistic.

  Fortunately, uh-huh appeared to be truthful enough.

  She paused a heartbeat, then continued. “I'm worried about him. We were coworkers and ... friends.” She blushed, and I realized that the nano must work both ways. How intriguing. She tugged yet again at the skirt and I decided not to embarrass her by pressing for details. Senior researcher Darryl. Beautiful whatever-she-was. I could connect the dots. I'd seen it often enough in my divorce work.

  “Married?” I asked.

  She looked puzzled. “No. I'm single."

  “Not you. Him."

  She shook her head. “I told you, we were just friends.” But she blushed again, and sweat was beading her brow. I tried to feel sympathy, but having been the victim of the truth gizmo, what I felt was vicious delight. Still, she was paying me a lot of money, so I again let her off the hook.

  “What I meant was, is there anyone other than you who'd miss him?"

  She was still blushing, but composed herself nicely. “Well, the whole company does. That's why I'm here. The project can't proceed without him, and the president, Graham"—she pronounced it Gram—"figured I'd be extra-motivated to find him.” The blush deepened and I wondered why she didn't just come out and tell me they were lovers. Did she really think I'd care?

  “But you already have a perfectly good truth nano."

  “Sure. And we can clone as much of it as we want. But Darryl never made an antidote and wherever he went, he took his lab notes with him."

  “Why don't you just reverse engineer an antidote?"

  “Because Darryl used a 96-bit encryption code.” She read my look, sighed, and leaned back. “Look, you know how nanos work, right? Each has two codes, one for Extension, the other for Fulfillment. Sometimes three, if it's for a recurring obligation that you want to be able to reset without terminating."

  “Like a rent nano,” I said, my mind again wandering to Trevor's little envelope.

  “Right.” She hesitated, probably trying to assess how stupid I was.

  I tried to look smart, but in her field, the answer undoubtedly was very dumb.

  “Most nanos use a 24-bit code,” she said. “That means there are about 16 million possibilities—good enough for most uses, but not for something you really, really want to protect. Darryl's code allows something like 1020 times as many possibilities. It would take forever to reverse engineer."

  “So you're saying the nano's worthless without the code?"

  “No. There are uses for which an antidote isn't necessary. We were going to call our product the NanoGraph and start by test-marketing it as a replacement for the polygraph. But our first big market would have been for trials. You know, ‘I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—’”

  “'—so help me, nano.’”

  Again, a hint of the smile softened the corners of her mouth. “Something like that. You were a lawyer. You can see the value of it."

  I certainly could. Lying witnesses are one of the banes of the profession. Though sadly, a truth nano would put yet more lawyers (and PIs) out of business, because you wouldn't need as much trial preparation. On cross-examination, you could do a lot with a single, all-purpose question: Is there anything important you failed to mention?

  “So why do you need Darryl?” I hated to ask—what if I talked her out of hiring me?—but the more I understood, the better were my chances of finding him.

  “You mean why do I want the antidote?” No trace of a blush. Either the nano was already wearing off, or she'd worded the answer carefully enough to steer it away from whatever extracurricular relationship they might have had. “It's not needed for formal settings like polygraphs or trials. But there are a lot of ... let's call them informal settings, in which it would be nice if the questioner were more free to ... tweak ... the truth—and where the nano might have to be administered in ways that make it likely both people would be infected."

  “Like you and me?"

  “Among others.” She didn't say police interrogations, but it didn't take much imagination to see how much the police might love such a thing. Would it be permissible under the Fifth Amendment? An effective, painless lie detector would raise interesting questions about why we have a right against self-incrimination. It's one thing to let the guilty clam up because we
don't want the police beating confessions out of those who might be innocent. But do criminals really need an absolute right to their secrets? Part of me—the part that had been tricked into revealing my lowest, cut-rate fee—thought privacy was important. But another part liked the idea of being able to probe other people's secrets. And with the nano, you could ask at random whether people were terrorists or child molesters and immediately catch the ones who were.

  “So why not just redesign it with different codes?” I asked.

  Her sigh suggested that I'd fallen on the technological-intelligence scale from very dumb to whatever lies below. “That's not possible. Nanos are comprised of two pieces: the detector and the effectuator. On most, the detector's not much more than a molecular clock, but for security reasons, you always make sure that it and the fulfillment codes are inextricably linked. That way, someone can't just clone your nano and peel off the codes. Unfortunately, it also means you can't peel off the detector from the codes. With the NanoGraph, the detector's the important part, and only Darryl knows how it works. Bottom line: you can modify the effectuator all you want, but you have to know the codes to do anything else."

  * * * *

  Megan and I had a lot more details to go over, but there was one question she would be expecting me to ask, whether I wanted to or not. “Why me? There are a lot of other PIs out there."

  “What makes you think you're the first I tried? Maybe you're just the first to meet my requirements."

  “And those are?"

  “Oh, several. You came well recommended."

  I made a mental note to thank Lorencz Biggle.

  “You're a smooth talker, but not so smooth you can evade the nano. Also, I know you really will keep things confidential. You wouldn't believe how many of your competitors flunked that one. Maybe they just blab to their wives or girlfriends, but I'd rather they didn't. As I understand it, you have neither, right?"

  “Correct,” I said, then remembered the nano. “Well technically, I'm still married. But we're not on ‘blabbing’ terms."

  “Good enough. I want to find Darryl, but I don't want to risk one of our competitors getting wind of the project."

  It wasn't the first time she'd said I, not we. Maybe Megan was a bit more than Darryl's lab assistant. Maybe she was the boss and he the beautiful assistant. Who just happened to be the brains behind the project? Nah. More likely they were peers and I'd been led astray by her looks and the fact that every time their relationship had come up she'd lied about something or other. I'd presumed it was just their romantic involvement, but was she clever enough to use an obvious lie as a smokescreen for a not-so-obvious one? Not that it mattered. It was a neat way to trick the nano, which wouldn't care whether you were telling one lie or a hundred, but if by holding back, she made my job more difficult, my fee would simply be that much larger. I could live with that.

  Megan unsnapped her briefcase and handed me a small glass vial. “A sample. You might find it useful. A drop or two is all you need."

  * * * *

  She spent another hour filling me in on details, but when she finally departed, my first job was to deal with my nanos. That required a trip to the credit clinic because even Trevor isn't naïve enough to allow his codes to be accessed by a non-secure machine.

  Before leaving, I took one of his pills, just to be on the safe side, then dumped the envelope in a drawer. Damned if I knew the shelf life of his brand of Extension—it was another of those things I really didn't want to learn by experiment—but that didn't mean it made sense to throw away the pills.

  As always at month's end, there was a line at the credit clinic, but eventually I reached the auto-tech machine, keyed a payment to Trevor's account, and stuck my arm into the machine's maw while the bank transferred the funds.

  TRANSACTION COMPLETED, the screen flashed a moment later. THANK YOU FOR USING CREDIT CENTRAL. PLEASE WAIT WHILE WE EXTEND YOUR COMPLIANCE-ASSURANCE NANOBOTS. The ATM hummed to itself, flashed a series of status lights, and did whatever it does to reset my nanos so I don't have to worry about them for another month.

  Except that I was going to worry. Hell, I was worried already. I paused, my arm still in the machine, even though it was now wishing me a good day.

  “Hey man,” a voice behind me said. “You wanna move it?"

  “Just a moment."

  Ignoring the ensuing theatrical sigh, I queried for a description of the nano and was informed it was mock ringworm, ten percent body coverage, six weeks’ duration, intensity just below true medical emergency.

  I tried to imagine ringworm as a near “medical emergency,” and shuddered.

  But I didn't have to live in dread. For the first time in months, I was solvent. The rent had dented my newfound lucre but I had a lot left, and it looked like that was just the beginning.

  What if I went on the pre-payment plan? I'd have to check my lease to see how many months I'd have to pay in advance—probably at least six—but if I did, I could be rid of Trevor's nanos forever. No more arm in the slot. No more wondering what would happen if the damn thing malfunctioned and reset the little beasts for next Monday rather than next month. That isn't supposed to be possible, but I really hate having to trust so much to a machine.

  * * * *

  Missing-persons work is mostly computer drudgery. For years it's been possible to track people via credit card charges, phone records, EasyPay toll passes—anything that leaves a swath across the cyber landscape. Getting that information isn't a matter of skill, it's connections—as in what databases can you access, officially or otherwise?

  Thanks to my divorce work, my access is pretty good. Early on, I'd realized that as long as I was underemployed, it behooved me to take whatever work came my way—especially because there are forms of payment more valuable in the long run than money. There's nothing like helping a cop fleece his stockbroker wife to get you access to some dreamy databases. And my clients have included not only police officers, but folks in some very interesting bureaucracies. I suspect Lorencz Biggle sends them to me to improve my value for some of their messier divorce cases. Maybe referring Megan was a form of thanks.

  One reason she fetched up at my office, rather than half a continent away, was that Darryl began his escape by flying here, twelve days ago. Megan herself had traced him this far, via a contact in Homeland Security, for whom her company had once done “some work.” She'd not specified what type of specialty nano Homeland Security might want, and I was just as happy not to know.

  Darryl had taken vacation leave and bought a round-trip ticket with a return that would have brought him home last Sunday. He'd checked two bags, boarded the morning nonstop, and (needless to say) not come back. Megan must have been instantly suspicious, because the first day he missed work was when she discovered the missing notes. If he had friends or relatives here, she didn't know of them.

  Her Homeland Security agent must have had access to a lot more data than he'd shared, but he hadn't been willing to go very far out on a limb for her. My clients owe me their financial lives, and I'm not averse to reminding them of it.

  It helped that Megan either had a key to Darryl's home or had broken in and searched his files. Either way, she'd provided me with a list of his bankcards, etc. She'd even given me his customer loyalty numbers for two grocery chains, a movie theater, and a bookstore. (Don't laugh; I once caught a runaway kid when he cashed in his CineTower viewer points for a free movie and popcorn.)

  Except for buying a return ticket he never intended to use, Darryl made no attempt to disguise his airline trip. But once he was on the plane and done with security checks, he'd started covering his tracks. I started by searching for a car rental, then for any use of his bankcards or cell phone, but pulled a blank.

  That complicated matters, but bankcards and cell phones are fairly easy to avoid using, at least in the short run. Nanos are a different matter. Even if you know they produce electronic traces on the ATM, there are payments that even the most desperate
fugitive isn't likely to ignore.

  The hard part is getting access to the ATM records. The cops simply ask. Folks like me use worms. Back when Marion and I were on better terms, she knew people who knew people who could create such things. They're a violation of U.S. privacy laws, but that's not an issue offshore, and I can keep my hands clean, at least in theory, by simply asking for a report and pretending I don't know how it's created.

  Getting a report on Darryl and setting up an alert cost me $1,000. Hopefully, Megan would reimburse me. For an extra $300 of my own, I asked for a quickie report on Megan herself because she was obviously keeping at least one secret and there might be more.

  By 6:30, I was ready to call it a day. You can only do so much computer work in one sitting and remain sane. Darryl's electronic trail, if it existed, would still be there tomorrow.

  * * * *

  I'm not proud of what I did next. Marion's job involves long hours, but she's a morning person, not an evening one. It's one of those differences that seem inconsequential until you've been married a few years. Then you realize that neither of you is ever going to change and that trying to arrange your schedules to meet in the middle simply means you're both miserable. Me, I'm still going strong at midnight. Marion has trouble keeping her eyes open after 9:30.

  All of which is a convoluted way of saying it was now late enough she should be home from work.

  Her new home is in Bill's Landing, one of the most notoriously you-can't-get-there-from-here sections of town. I have no idea what kind of riverboats once docked there, but now it's a re-gentrifying residential district rising up the bluff behind a narrow floodplain. Every time I have to go there, I find myself too far up the hill, staring at tiers of chimneys and wondering how the hell you're supposed to get down there without levitating.

  Marion's apartment occupies the ground floor of one of the most inaccessible Victorian monstrosities in the neighborhood. I reached it eventually and found her car in the street, which has enough parking rules to keep the sign manufacturers in business for the foreseeable future.