by Bruce Bethke
I dropped into the chair, pulled it closer to the desk, and banged into the electronic clipboard folder. A window wiped open on the monitor screen, and Amber’s beautiful brown-eyed face appeared. “This is a private message for Max Kool,” she said. “So before you can hear it, you have to answer one question. Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?”
I laid my fingers on the keyboard and typed my response: IT’S A SNUBNOSE.
“Oh, you remembered,” Amber said sweetly. “Hi, Max.” Her video face froze, while the workstation drives clicked and hummed, and the decryption routines kicked in and unscrambled the rest of the message. The screen wiped and redrew itself.
Amber popped back onto the screen. “Hi, darling,” she said in a languid and sultry voice. “I understand what happened to you tonight. DON_MAC told me Gunnar was flying tail-guard for you.” She smiled, in a sexy way, and winked. “Personally, I’d be very careful about that. He sounds like a closet case to me.” (LeMat, standing behind my chair, took a step off to the side.) “Of course, that’s hardly rare. A lot of men get into big guns to compensate for feeling… small.” (LeMat growled audibly and bit a chunk out of the rim of his beer can.)
Amber smiled again, blew me a kiss, and tossed her head in a way that made her long black hair seem positively ravishing. “I would hate to think you’d never get another chance to find out what you missed tonight.” (This time, it was my turn to growl. At LeMat.) “So I’ll tell you what. The files appended to this message contain everything you need to know about my little problem. Why don’t you look them over, and do some exploratory work, and meet me in a few days to discuss how we can move ahead. Say, 0300 UTC, Tuesday, my place?” Pause. “Alone?” She slowly traced her thin but sexy lips with the tip of her tongue.
I really hated LeMat in that moment.
“Later, darling.” She smiled and winked one last time, then grabbed the edge of the window and pulled it shut behind her.
“Jack?” LeMat said. “Jack?” He waved a hand in front of my face. “Earth to Jack. Come in, Jack. Do you copy?”
I grabbed his wrist and wished I had the strength to tear his arm off and beat him over the head with it. “Yes?”
LeMat’s eyes were wide with wonder. “Is she always like that?” I could only grit my teeth and nod.
“God Almighty,” he said. “You’re braver than I thought.”
We decrypted and decompressed the rest of Amber’s files that night, but I crapped out sometime around 1 A.M. and hit the futon, leaving LeMat at the workstation, sucking Pig’s Eye Pilsner and scanning files. I’m not sure quite when I dozed off.
I do, however, know exactly when I woke up. “Jack!” LeMat shook my shoulder. “Wake up!” I rolled over, found my watch on the floor, and struggled to read it through sleep-fogged eyes.
“Huh?” I yawned. “Joseph, it’s—” I squinted at my watch again, “—three thirty-seven. I’m asleep.”
“I don’t care! You have got to see this!” The last time I’d seen LeMat this excited, it was because he’d found a Haenel M42 in mint condition. Experience had taught me the only way to deal with him in this state was to humor him, so…
“Okay. Gimme minute.” I rolled up to a sitting position, rubbed my eyes and yawned, then groped around on the floor until I found something to put on my bare feet. Shoes, I think they’re called. “This better be good.”
“Trust me,” LeMat said, “you are gonna love this.” He helped me stagger to my feet, guided me across the room to our work space, and parked me in the chair before the glowing video monitor. “Here,” he said, tapping the screen. “Read.”
It took a minute or so for me to get the monitor glare adjusted to a comfortable level and both my eyes in focus at the same time, and another minute or so for my brain to kick in and start processing what I was reading. When it did, though…
Well I’ll be double-dipped in Godiva chocolate. Amber’s setup was too beautiful to be true.
My mystery client, it turned out, was both a nutritional scientist and a tachycomestible engineer—that is, a person who designs fast foods. But she wasn’t just any Ph.D.-te; my client also had a strong claim to being the lone genius responsible for the latest franchise fast-food restaurant craze to sweep the nation: Captain Calamari’s Original Fried Squid.
So far, so good. But my client had a serious problem. About a year before, she’d entered into negotiations with a major multinational corporation to license and expand the Captain Calamari’s concept. Somehow the negotiations went out of control, though, and before she knew it, the corporation had managed to swindle her out of everything. The recipes, the franchise sites, the onions, the secret sauce, the jalapeno peppers—the works.
INFONUGGETS
I couldn’t resist. So while we’re at it, how about just one more?
This being America, she immediately sued, of course. But the case had been dragging on for months now without progress, and barring a last-minute miracle—say, the sudden appearance of a “smoking gun” memo proving the corporation intentionally acted in bad faith—it was now mere days away from dismissal.
QUESTION
How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?
Answer: None. That’s a hardware problem.
And thus, in desperation, she was turning to me. My mission, if I chose to accept it, was simple: penetrate the multinational corporation’s computer system, find the evidence that would win my client’s case, restore freedom and justice to the fast-food universe, and not incidentally, secure for my client franchise royalty rights that were currently estimated to be worth about $25 million per year.
That’s not what got my attention, though. No, what my eyes locked in on was a small appended sticky-note file, which gave my client’s best guess at where I’d find the incriminating evidence. She had listed it by Net server address and URL code, of course, but she really hadn’t needed to do that. I already knew that address by heart.
MDE. Global EthniFoods Division. Corporate Headquarters. Building 305.
LeMat slapped me on the back and snapped me out of it “So, whatcha think, Jack? A million bucks to crack through a security system you helped design, and you get to spank MDE’s fanny in the bargain? Are we talking gratification here, or what?”
I thought it over. I started chuckling. I thought it over some more, desperately trying to see a downside in the deal, and all I could do was laugh harder. Amber—or whoever she worked for—was willing to pay me a million dollars to stick it to MDE? Hell, I’d have done that for free! I started laughing so hard I fell on the keyboard, sent the computer off into a fit of beeping and squawking, and bounced back from the keyboard to flop halfway over the back of the chair, laughing still.
“Gunnar, old buddy?” I said, when I’d caught my breath enough to speak in contiguous words. “This is almost enough to make me believe in divine justice. Hallelujah!”
An hour later we’d gone over the files three more times, the coffee maker was singing “Volare” at the top of its synthetic lungs, and we’d both, in our respective ways, sobered up. The trick, we realized early on, was going to be to crack into the MDE system without making it look like an inside job. After all, I was a disgruntled ex-employee, or potential ex-employee, or whatever the hell it was I was—I’m sure Kathé in the outplacement office had a nice weasel-word term for it—and no doubt security was already keeping several forms of organic and electronic eyes out for me. So MAX_COOL would have to break into the system without using any special knowledge that might point to Jack Burroughs. (This, of course, led LeMat and me into an extended argument worthy of a couple of sophomores in Philosophy 201: there was what I was expected to know to do my job, what I actually needed to know to do my job, and what I actually knew, and the three sets of information only occasionally intersected. So did we make our plans based on what I actually knew, what I was expected to know, what MDE thought I knew, or what we thought MDE might think I thought they thought I was think
ing… I mean, how can you really know that you know what you know, y’know?
(“Epistemology,” LeMat observed, “is why philosophers drink so heavily.”)
After we hashed through that mess to our satisfaction, we segued into a dandy argument over when we should attempt the job. LeMat was all in favor of hitting MDE instantly, if not sooner. (“The first rule of consulting,” he said pompously, “is always underpromise and overdeliver. If Amber is hoping you can show her an action plan Monday, just imagine how she’ll cream her jeans when you show her the finished job!”)
(I scratched my head and looked at him with narrowed eyes. “Wait a minute. Yesterday you said the first rule of consulting was, ‘Never do anything on spec.’”)
Fortunately, after a few minutes of butting our matched pair of pig-heads together, a number of realities asserted themselves and brought the issue to a close: the most notable one being the knowledge that it was fast approaching 5 A.M. on a Saturday morning, and even if the interface did make me a virtual god of cyberspace, there were still some things beyond even my amazing abilities. For example, “Captain, I cannah change the Laws of Corporate Accounting!” At this time of day, on the third Saturday of the month, the bulk of MDE’s available computing power would not be standing idle, but rather would be devoted to such exciting and CPU-intensive batch processes as freight bill cost allocation and manufacturing material requirements planning. The only normal incoming data traffic at this time would be the weekly Profit & Loss downloads from our Pacific Rim subsidiaries; the only normal outgoing traffic, a summary P&L statement sent Sunday afternoon to the INH Executive Inner Coven in B100, Paris.
“So,” LeMat said, yawning rather pointedly in the middle of my explanation of LIFO cost accrual methodology, “this just means there’s less chance of anyone else being in the system and tripping over us, right?”
“Wrong-o, moosebreath,” I answered. (It was 5 A.M. We were both getting pretty punchy.) “They run this crap in batch on weekends because it really bogs down the system when it’s going. If Max Kool jumps into the MDE network right now, it’ll be like he’s wading through hip-deep virtual butterscotch syrup.”
LeMat pursed his lips. “I bet Amber would get off on that.”
“If we try to break in now,” I said, ignoring that last remark, “we’ll be as conspicuous as someone rattling the doors of a jewelry store at midnight. No, the time we want to make our move is Monday morning, just after eight o’clock.”
LeMat cocked an eyebrow and fired a glance at me. “Why then?”
“Because the weekend processes will be finished,” I said. “The local net will be running at top speed, all the East Coast field reps will be trying to log in at the same time, and half of them will be too hungover to remember their passwords, so there’ll be lots of failed logins.”
“Ah,” LeMat said, the light of understanding dawning slowly on the bloodshot red horizon of his eyes. “So our attempts to pick the lock—”
“Will blend right in with the normal Monday morning traffic.”
LeMat thought it over, and nodded, and nodded some more, and kept on nodding, and after a while I realized he wasn’t being unusually agreeable, he was just falling asleep on his feet. Grabbing him by the upper arm, I steered him over to the army-surplus folding cot he’d brought from home and let him collapse onto it. Then I unplugged the coffee pot, put the workstation to sleep, found my way to my futon and, I believe, actually managed to lie down on it before I conked out.
Around 7 A.M. the dawning light of a better tomorrow crept in through the east windows, rousing the pigeons in the rafters to noisy life and strongly reinforcing the idea that we had to get some curtains.
A little before noon, I returned to the land of the Somewhat Lifelike. LeMat was already gone—no note or anything—so I brushed my teeth, ran my fingers through my hair to simulate the effect of combing, and decided to drive back to Mom’s and pick up another load of stuff. When I got out to the alley, I discovered that someone had jacked my Toyota up, put it on blocks, removed my bald and mismatched Montgomery Wards tires, and replaced them with a matched set of mag wheels and Michelin radials.
I shrugged and drove over to Mom’s.
URGENT NOTICE
From: J. Gotti Student Loan Servicing Center
To: John F. Burroughs 1783 Ivy Street St. Paul, MN 55103
Dear Mr. Burroughs,
We have just learned of the change in your employment situa tion. And believe us, we under stand how difficult it can be, to be faced with an intimidating debt load and an uncertain financial future. No doubt there are times when you wish you could call us, to discuss the possibility of a revised repayment schedule with a sympathetic financial counselor.
Well, we have just two words for you:
FORGET IT!
You’ve got two weeks to furnish us with proof of a new job. Otherwise—well, nice kneecaps you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if anything were to happen to them.
The back door was open. Psycho Kitty’s litterbox stank to high heaven. “Hi, Mom, I’m home!”
“Jack?” From the living room, I heard the groan of sofa springs and the creaking of floorboards as she shifted her weight and tried valiantly, once, twice—
With a heaving pant from exertion, she sank back into the couch. “I’m in the living room!” she called out. I hesitated a moment on the landing, then changed my mind and trotted upstairs. She heard me coming and cut the volume on the TV. In a faint and tinny way, the repeated oofs and thuds of All-Pro Wrestling wafted through the house. “You just missed it, Jack,” she said, as I came into effective communications range.
INFONUGGETS
That wasn’t an infonugget. It was supporting documentation.
“A really good body slam, Mom?” I took enough of a glance at her to be sure she hadn’t subsided into a festering pool of video slime, then went over to the buffet and started sorting through the accumulated mail. Bills, junk, bills—
“No,” Mom said. “There were two men here looking for you, not half an hour ago. Nice men. Very polite. They asked me lots of questions about you.”
I froze, a piece of junk mail unread in my hands. There’s that old cliché, My blood ran cold. I’d never before realized how literal it could be.
“Uh?” There was a terrified tremolo in my voice; I fought to control it and failed. “Did they say who they were? Mom?”
She hmmmed, and sucked her teeth, and scratched her head with her remote control. “You know, Jack, I forget. But they did wear very nice suits. I remember that. You should try wearing a nice suit sometime, if you want to impress people.”
Slowly, cautiously, I edged up to the archway that separated the dining room from the living room and stole a peek out the front windows. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary out there. No strange cars or people with binoculars, except for Mrs. Lundgren, and she’d been spying on the neighbors and tape-recording her weekly reports to the Venusian Empire since before I was born.
“Mom,” I said, trying to sound casual, “this is important. Can you remember anything about those two men that might help me figure out who they were?”
Mom made some more strange, thoughtful sounds, scratched her brassy blond hair until I thought about checking her for fleas, and got distracted by the excitement for a few moments when “Bad Bobby” Bradford threw Ted “The Lisping Liberal” Thurston over the ropes and into the audience, and the fans all swarmed in and started clubbing Ted with folding chairs.
“Oh,” Mom said, clucking her tongue, “I am such a ditz sometimes!”
(“Really?” I muttered. “I never noticed.”)
“One of them left his business card and said I should call if you showed up. It’s by the phone in the kitchen!” Dropping everything, I ran into the kitchen, and started tearing through the years of accumulated notes and newspaper clippings crucified with thumbtacks on the corkboard. “Wait a minute!” Mom called out. “I was wrong. Here it is!” I dashed back into the liv
ing room and just about ripped the card from her fingers.
It was a nice business card. Expensive printing, two-color green floral embossing. It read:
Todd Becker, Visiting Evangelist
The Church of Vegentology
“Thanks, Mom,” I said as my blood pressure returned lo normal and I wondered how many years of life this little bit of hysteria had cost me. “I’ll just be down in the basement then.” I started for the back stairs.
“Wait,” Mom said, stopping me just as I was about to cross the threshold into the kitchen. “Jack? I was down there doing laundry yesterday, and I noticed some of your stuff was missing. Do you know anything about it?”
I cleared my throat, and looked at the floor. “Uh, Mom? I moved out a couple of days ago, remember? Got myself an apartment?”
“Oh,” she said, nodding, “that’s right. I forgot.” Something happened on TV right then, and she shouted, “Whoa!” punched the volume up to twenty, and apparently also forgot that I was standing there and that we were having; a conversation. I took one last look around upstairs—there was definitely nothing I wanted up there—and headed down to the basement.
There were over a dozen messages on my answering machine. At first I was excited. Then, as I listened to them and realized that, except for the one message from Kathé in Outplacement—she really wanted that copy of Dress For Conformity back—they were all from T’shombe, my enthusiasm cooled rapidly. T’shombe, it seemed, was seriously pissed at me for something having to do with her getting stood up on Friday night. (I couldn’t remember: had I promised to go to some deranged church shindig with her?)
So I turned to my dresser and started pulling together the next load of stuff to move to the office. Clothes, mostly. And just one—okay, make it two—alright, five, and that was my final position—of my favorite model rockets. And my complete set of Judge Dredd comic books, of course. But I drew the line at the HO railroad stuff.
