by John Klima
“Really?” A log hole meant an AsManD discrepancy, a mismatch between electronic data and physical assets. “Where?”
More banging. “Patent Directorate Asset transfix to FinD, part of SI & R.”
Back to that again. The Systemic Introspect & Reorganization. The end of CorEsp brought about CILR, which in turn, led to the i3Cee. Prescott Four, during the media blitz showcasing the new era of ICE applied valuation, had been caught on-feed wondering how couriering packages could offer humanitarian reform. As a result, every division and directorate suffered through a costly self-analysis resulting in a number of early retirements, ROI layoffs, and internal restructuring. The SI & R.
SecD had been defanged, and those of us who remained as desk monkeys became as inflexible and intractable as the extruded furniture in our three square meters of office space. Entropy was turning us into statues, one joint at a time. So much for humanitarian reform.
PatD got swallowed by FinD, who, IIRC, had been mandated to become a visible asset, i.e. they had to operate black and not be a cost center any longer. The first response—like every moment of brain trust panic through the ages—had been to cut staff. While it had certainly helped FinD go black the first turn following the SI & R, it hadn’t done much to the IQ ratio of the Directorate.
This was good news, after all. The GTAC/GMAC had belonged to one of the patent agents. I didn’t have a spoofer. One of the SI & R rifters had taken their terminal with them, and through some typical AsManD data contrafusion, the terminal had never been properly retired. Not entirely surprising, really. For a turn or two after the SI & R, there was an impenetrable flow of re-hires and consultants among the brain trust. “Who?” I asked Trip.
“Kip Birmingham Sandeesh, Prime Doctor.”
“Where can I find him now?” Suddenly, it seemed like my clever (read desperate) plan might actually work.
“Deceased.”
Or not.
“Family?”
“Grandson.” More key banging. “RPC null.”
“That’s interesting,” I said, falling back on a phrase of Prescott Four’s. My theory-brain tried to construct a viable scenario. If the terminal still had its original GTAC/GMAC, then it should be visible on the iStructure dashboard. That would, in turn, give us a Ring Positioning Coordinate. It would follow that the son’s GPIT—if he was indeed behind this blackmail—should be readily available.
Since it wasn’t, that certainly made the case for his being my prime suspect.
“When did Prime Doctor Sandeesh expire?”
“EOL 3T post-EOE.” A pause, inserted by a hairy thumb resting on a space bar. “Anniversary of EOL: 1Cyc.”
“This rotation?”
Trip triggered a noisy sound effect. His equivalent of confirmation.
“Well, now . . .” I mused.
Grandfather gets WTFed during the SI & R. Dies three turns after leaving the company. The anniversary of his death was the first cycle of this rotation—the cycle before the arrival of the first package.
The best part of this revelation was that I had an excuse to call Sophie.
*
While in-transit to the domicile still registered to the Sandeesh Familial Asset Library, I called her.
Halfway through the protocol handshake, she was there in my head. “Hello, Max.”
“You were right.”
“Of course I was. Data integrity is not ICE’s—”
“No, when you said there was a ‘but.’ You were right about that.”
“Thank you, Max,” she said, her voice changing timbre somewhat clumsily. “I appreciate you acknowledging that point.”
“But it wasn’t a spoofer. The terminal wasn’t properly retired. I’m going there now to retrieve it.”
“What is your intention?”
“I’m going to find the guy, and—”
“With the terminal.”
“Oh, ah, yank its data and melt its processor core, probably.”
Her voice went cold on me. “Place it in electrostatic suspension and cede it to my Corporate Persona.”
“Hang on—” My mail icon blinked. And look, she’s gone and started a document trail. “Okay. Can we discuss this first?”
“There’s always room for discussion, but not on this topic. I have a security breach that requires reconciliation. I must protect my assets.”
A mental image of Yullg and his large knuckles flashed through my head.
“Of course,” I said, my mood deflating. “We’ve all got to cover our assets.” I glanced at the mail icon, triggering the menus, and marked the incoming message from her as R & U. “There.”
“Thank you, Max.” She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice had returned to its softer tone. “You’re not happy. I can tell.”
“No kidding.” I raised my eyes toward the ceiling of the ’tubebus and shook my head. “It’s just—you know what? Never mind.” I should have ended the handshake, but I left it open. My theory-brain had nothing to offer.
“I like your face better when you are smiling,” she said quietly. My head snapped down, and theory-brain started looking for Eye—
Monitors along the seams of the cabin. “You can see me? Right now?”
“I can always see you, Max.” Her voice was almost a whisper, as if she was embarrassed to have been caught watching me, and then the handshake suddenly ended.
But she kept watching, and when I nearly died at the Sandeesh domicile, she triggered the iMed alert that saved my life.
*
Prescott Four made a personal visit to my private room in the ICE infirmary. I caught sight of Yullg and Grimester outside as he shut the door.
He dropped an opened ICEpak on my lap. “I’ve rechained your mail to Yullg,” he said. “This came a winding ago.”
My hands were immobilized, and when Prescott Four didn’t make any effort to help me, I surmised that whatever had been in the package was already gone. Pre-censored for my protection. “What was it?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
I blinked up the time, and realized it was still post-meridiem of the same cycle. “It came through the normal service?” I asked.
“With the Gen-Y lot,” he said.
The last run. “Two deliveries in one cycle?” My theory-brain pushed the question out of my mouth. “Why two?”
He looked at me. “You told me there weren’t going to be anymore.”
“No,” I clarified, “I said I was working on it, and that I had some ideas—”
“Too many, evidently.”
I shook my suspended arms. “Well, it got complicated.”
“I can see that.” He sighed. “I sent Yullg to the Ring Positioning Coordinates from where iMed transported you.” He shook his head. “They chargeback us for these sorts of unscheduled deliveries, you know. A commensurate deduction will be attached to your PIPe.”
“Of course,” I said. “Glad I could help offset the corporate deficit.”
“Don’t mention it.” He waved off my thanks. “Unfortunately, Yullg only found . . . well, you made quite a mess.”
I had very little recollection of what had happened. There had been something large and metallic waiting for me in the entry of the domicile. Something with bright lights and sharp bits. “Not my intention, sir.”
“You’ve been at a desk for some time. I suppose that’s to be expected.” Even though he was being understanding, he still made it sound like it had been my fault. He pursed his lips. “I still need you, Max. Yullg has singular direction, and when there is no direction in which to point him . . .”
I lay there, with my arms in slings and my lower body immobilized by the straps of the bed, trying to look more capable than I felt.
He stepped over the panel beside the bed and stroked the lit column of the iNurse. “Yes, Mr. Prescott,” a hermaphroditic voice answered.
“Mr. Semper Dimialos is returning to his assigned duties,” Prescott said.
“I am?”
“The current status of Patient Semper Dimialos indicates a high probability of—”
“Hmm,” Prescott interrupted. “Not relevant to my previous statement.”
The iNurse modulated immediately, “—however, with a precisely calibrated, time-release pharmacopoeia, Patient Semper Dimialos will be able to resume his job functions.”
“I will?”
An iDoc arm telescoped out of the wall, and bent over my chest. Before I asked any further questions, the smooth tip of the surgical tool exploded into a confusion of knives, needles, and suction tips. It felt like a squid falling onto my chest, followed by a sharp prick of pain right through my breastbone, and then the iDoc arm retreated.
“Patient Semper Dimialos is scheduled for a nominal bioscan next cycle at the ninth winding. Room 74.”
“Don’t be late,” Prescott said as he left. “This affair is rapidly approaching critical mass, Max. There is already too much of a documentation trail. It must be archived before the media worms can scan it.”
I looked at the strip of new skin on my chest, and wondered what had been put in me. It was starting to itch already, and Prescott hadn’t bothered to untether my arms from the ceiling mounts. Scratching this itch was going to be tough.
*
“Hello, Max.”
“Do you have Eyetime on what happened to me?”
“I do, Max.”
I took a deep breath, and tried to ignore the weird hitch in my chest. Something felt metallic under my skin when I tapped. “Can I see it?”
“It’s not very pleasant.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“More than once.”
“Ah—” More than once? “Why?”
She didn’t answer immediately, and I looked out the forward blister of the ’tubebus for something to do while I waited her out. “Would you like to see it?” she finally asked. She had switched to the officious voice, the cold and efficient one.
“Not particularly.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“I, ah . . . I wanted to know if there was anything useful. You know, some sort of clue. I must have been close to something useful to get jumped like that.”
“Actually, Max, you triggered the standard domicile defensive array.”
“Wait, there was nothing standard about that DDA. It nearly took—”
Her voice changed back to the silky one. “Would you like to watch the feed with me?”
*
The room was dark beyond her, lit only by the blue-tinged glow of v-mon pips on the wall behind her. She was wearing something that moved like velvet smoke, and she wasn’t wearing any shoes but she still had her glasses on.
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 POL 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 a 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 POL 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.
