by E. M. Foner
“I get it,” Jesse said. “The bartender matches the drink umbrella to the shade umbrella so the waitstaff can deliver the order. Is that where I’m going?”
“No, though the resort where you’ll be working is also on a beach,” I replied. “I’ve limited the catalog selection to worlds with Earth-compatible atmospheres so—”
eBeth jiggled the joystick, and several scenes blurred past before locking in on a grassy rolling plain that seemed to stretch on forever. A head that could have belonged to a prairie dog popped out of a burrow and regarded us with a quizzical look. Spot was through the portal in a flash.
“—the dog won’t asphyxiate if his instincts get the better of him,” I concluded. “Spot! Get back in here. You’ll never dig him out of that burrow, and you’d only get indigestion if you did.”
We all ducked reflexively as clumps of dirt flew towards the portal, but the filter was smart enough not to pass them through. Plenty of people, using the term in its broadest sense, think that the portal filters are there to prevent poisonous gasses from seeping through, but they wouldn’t pass sound waves if that were the case. The main purpose of the smart filters was to minimize invasive insect species and airborne spores, but they also prevent fast-moving projectiles from crossing over, and fortunately the ejection matter from Spot’s excavation matched the criteria.
“If he does get indigestion, there’s plenty of grass to eat,” Jesse observed.
“I’m going to count to three,” I threatened in my sternest tone. “One. Two. Thr—”
Spot darted back through the portal and gently took the pieces of the Milk Bone treat that eBeth had just snapped in half.
“When you explained about the inter-dimensional portal, I never dreamed it would be just like stepping through a door,” Jesse said.
“Intra-dimensional,” my apprentice portal operator corrected her while bringing up the next selection with the joystick. “Inter-dimensional would mean between different dimensions, and Mark says that we couldn’t survive in any of them. Intra-dimensional means within this dimension, where we fit.” She nudged the game controller forward, and displaying reaction times that would make a robot jealous, stopped just as the resort’s reception desk flashed into existence. “Got it!”
“We’re going to miss you around here, Jess,” I told her. “Donovan already screwed up this week’s orders.”
“Good thing it’s only Tuesday,” she replied, shouldering her backpack. “Shouldn’t I be more nervous about this?”
“It’s a great deal for both of us. You’ll tend bar at the resort for a year or two, learn useful sayings in a few alien languages, and come home with enough money to buy your own restaurant. As long as you stick it out through your initial contract, I’ll get a finder’s fee that’s equal to what I make out of this place in two months for placing an exotic alien bartender.”
“Who’s the exotic alien bartender?”
“You,” eBeth told her. “I’ve got your Facebook password, and Mark subscribes to an Australian photo site, so I’ll keep your page up-to-date. If anything really important comes in the mail, Mark can contact the resort.”
“Thanks again,” Jesse said, taking a final look around the basement office. “Well, here goes nothing.”
She stepped through the portal and strode up to the reception desk without the slightest sign of hesitation. I congratulated myself again on my instinct for people, closed the portal, and restored the security field.
Three
Living around humans must be rubbing off on me because I was starting to feel a little guilty about using official equipment for my personal business. It’s not that there was any expense involved, the conservation of energy just doesn’t work that way in portal dimensions, but technically I was violating the terms of my employment. Rather than hanging around for the singing, I brought eBeth and Spot straight home and then spent the night cut-and-pasting from Wikipedia to create a voluminous report on the history of human technology. I’ll probably get the “Best Observer” reward at the next banquet.
First thing in the morning, before regular business hours, I brought the minivan by Paul’s garage. He was already at work, which wasn’t surprising since none of my team benefit from sleep. When I lifted the roll-up garage door, Brutus shot out past me, tail-stump wagging, then stopped in disappointment.
“Sorry, boy,” I told him. “Spot’s at home sleeping.”
Brutus snorted and began to head back inside, then he changed his mind and went on fence patrol, no doubt hoping to scare an early morning jogger. The runners never seemed to figure out that for all of his snarling and jumping at the chain-link fence, the dog always stopped before the driveway, which wasn’t even gated. Brutus was on the garage’s payroll as a security specialist, if you were wondering. Not a pet at all.
“What’s up, mighty leader?” Paul asked, popping out from under an SUV on his home-made mechanic’s creeper. It looked just like a regular creeper, but the wheels were only there for show. He’d actually converted it from a hoverboard, a real one, not one of the motorized things humans wheel around on. I never inquired about how he had smuggled it through our portal without triggering the advanced technology alarm but my guess would be some form of Rynxian cloaking technology. At least, that’s how I bring in the goodies that help make life on Earth bearable.
“eBeth had to slam on the brakes for some idiot stopped in the middle of the road,” I explained, skipping over the part where I had blown up the idiot’s phone. “Somebody must have cracked open a fire hydrant nearby, because she drove through a deep puddle going around the car and the cold water didn’t mix well with the hot rotor.”
“Puddles in the middle of the winter,” Paul said, shaking his head. “So why didn’t you fix it?”
“Where am I going to find a rotor in the middle of the night?” I responded.
Come on, don’t play dumb. You could have taken off the wheel and straightened that rotor between your palms.
If I was an advanced AI inhabiting a very expensive encounter suit rather than a human, you mean. Just treat me like you would any other customer.
“Alright, Mark. Let me just put it up on the lift and we’ll see what the problem is.” He took the keys from me, drove the minivan into his second bay, then started removing lug nuts with an air ratchet before the lift was done moving. He pulled off the driver side front wheel and made a show of inspecting the damage. “Yeah, warped all right. You’re looking at eight hundred bucks for new rotors and pads all around. More if I have to bleed the system and retrain the anti-lock processor bearings.”
“What! I just checked online and I can get all four rotors and pads for under $150 with free shipping.”
“I know you’re kidding, sir, because I don’t see a smartphone in your hand. I can show you the invoice from my parts supplier if you want. All I’m charging is the book labor.”
“What if you only change the one rotor?”
“My insurance would never allow that. You did say to treat you like any other customer.”
I wilted in defeat. “Alright, just fix it.”
Paul gave me a wink, whistled for Brutus to stand watch, and lowered the garage door. He added some thick washers to the wheel studs and put the lugs back on to hold the rotor, then started the van and shifted it into drive. We both watched the rotor spinning and it was obviously several mils out.
“Cheap steel,” Paul commented, pinching the rotor between his thumb and forefinger until the metal began glowing a dull red. Then he grabbed two heavy steel blocks from his workbench, one in each hand. He crouched a little to get his eyes in the right position, killed the engine remotely and slammed the blocks together on the rotor, one from each side. “Bet you I got it on the first try.”
“How much?” I asked, having my doubts about the success of the operation. I’d seen similar chunks of steel lying around every serious welding shop I’d been in on Earth, but I always assumed they were off-cuts used for doorstops or
spacing. Learn something new every day.
“Double or nothing on the repair?”
“And what’s getting doubled?”
“Well, there’s the facilities I have to pay for, you know. The lift, the air compressor, my labor. How about twenty dollars?”
“Done.”
Paul restarted the engine and shifted into drive again. We both watched the rotor spin a few hundred times, then I got out my wallet and handed over forty dollars. He stuck it in his breast pocket.
“How about a receipt?” I asked. “I can take that as a business expense.”
“A receipt will cost you a hundred. If you figure my own taxes, insurance, workers comp—”
“Never mind,” I interrupted and killed the engine remotely myself. “Other than cheating on your taxes, are you keeping your nose clean?”
“You know me,” Paul replied, which was exactly what I was worried about. “What are you doing out so early anyway? I thought you’d be home making your human breakfast.”
“She’s not my human and she takes care of herself,” I shot back, even though I sensed that he was baiting me to change the subject. “We’ve only got a few months to go before we can tell the whole world we’re here, and it would be nice to make it without any incidents. Oh, and I’m out this early because I promised to go fix the booking computer at the police station.”
“Tell them to stop watching porn.”
“They claim it’s part of the job. Anyway, if it’s the same ransomware outfit that nailed them last time, I’m going to consider taking a vacation to Russia and paying a visit.”
“Now who’s causing incidents,” Paul said. He spun off the lugs and washers, remounted the wheel, and snugged it home with the air ratchet. He checked the final torque between his thumb and forefinger. “You watch out for those hackers. They take threats to their business model seriously.”
“And you know this because?”
“I know lots of stuff,” he said, dropping the van faster than OSHA standards should have allowed. Outside, Brutus barked twice. “That’s his ‘customer’ bark. I’ll get the door, you hop in and back out of here so I can make some real money.”
“See you next Tuesday,” I called through the window as I drove past him. On the way downtown I stopped at a drive-through to buy a box of donuts, and three minutes later I pulled into the municipal parking garage where Helen had stolen a car the previous afternoon. It was still three-quarters empty at this hour, and some of the cars were town vehicles that were garaged there when they weren’t in use. The impressively titled ‘skywalk’ which soared fifteen feet over Taft Ave led into Town Hall, the basement of which was shared by the police department and the tax assessor.
“We’ve been locked out of the system all night,” the desk sergeant greeted me. He pointed to the holding cell. “I had to book those clowns on paper.”
“In duplicate?” I asked, wondering if the sergeant knew about carbon paper.
“Naw. I couldn’t find the old forms so I just got their particulars down.” He indicated some napkins from a Chinese take-out place that were now liberally covered with indecipherable printing and doodling. “I’ll enter everything as soon as you fix it.”
I placed the box of donuts on the counter and sat down in the rolling office chair at the computer used for booking. The screen showed instructions for paying ransom in Bitcoin in return for a decryption key to recover the hard drive’s data. All of my team do a little Bitcoin mining on the side, since we’re overpowered for our assignments and the money is just sitting there, but I wasn’t about to hand any of mine over to a hacker.
“Any of the other machines affected?” I asked the sergeant. I inserted my custom recovery USB stick in the front-panel slot and rebooted the machine. Rather than containing an image of the hard drive, the device served as a high-speed wireless bridge to one of my built-in networks. When the screen came to life, I bypassed everything and began restoring the system from my internal backup.
I know, you thought I was going to retask one of my quantum computing processors from working on a weather forecast for the weekend to cracking the encryption. Sure, I could go that route if I wanted to, but let me tell you something about AI. Just because we’re really good at math doesn’t mean we get our jollies factoring for prime numbers or computing pi to a superfluous number of decimal places. There’s a reason that scientists and engineers use the term ‘significant figures’ to describe the digits that actually contribute to results. There’s fun math and there’s boring math. Cracking the crude encryption humans use falls into the latter category.
“I don’t know if any others are affected,” the sergeant finally answered after swallowing another mouthful of donut. “That’s the only computer they let me on.”
“This will take a bit of time and you’ll lose any records you entered after 5:00 AM yesterday,” I told him, that being the last time I had illicitly made a remote incremental backup of the system. You would think that some of my clients, especially the police and the medical offices, would wonder why I always seemed to have an up-to-date backup of their confidential data. But human nature is funny and they’re always too happy to get up and running again to ask questions.
“Great. Are you going to update our whatchamacallit software so it doesn’t happen again?”
I pushed back my chair and shook my head. “The best security suite in the world can’t help if you guys keep visiting compromised websites and opening attachments.”
“I only open attachments from people I know,” he protested.
“The return address on e-mail is no different than on regular mail,” I said, brandishing an envelope that was lying on the desk. “You can write whatever you want on there and the post office will deliver it.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
The young men in the holding cell who had been following our conversation for lack of anything better to do with their time burst out laughing.
“Yeah, you go and arrest everybody who spoofs an e-mail address, Sarge,” one of them suggested.
“I saw a story on the Internet that quantum computers are going to break all of the encryption systems in the world,” the other prisoner remarked. “That’s why I keep all of my money in cash, like I was trying to explain last night when the detective grabbed us.”
“Yeah, me too,” his companion said. “Since when is it illegal to go around with a few thousand dollars in your pocket?”
“And the drugs?” the sergeant asked tiredly.
“I don’t know anything about any drugs. I swear the lab test will come back negative, and if it doesn’t, that’s because the chemists are all high. I read another story on the Internet where—”
“Shut up and I’ll let you have a donut,” the sergeant interrupted. Both of the young men stopped talking immediately.
“Morning,” Lieutenant Harper said, coming around the counter. “Got everything under control, Mark?”
“It’ll take another twenty minutes but you’re only going to lose a day’s worth of data,” I told him.
“And there’s no way we can track these guys down and put them in jail?”
“Oh, you could bring in the FBI and eventually they’ll tell you that it’s some group working out of Russia or North Korea, but what’s the point? The real issue is getting your guys to stop surfing the web for—”
“I know, I know,” he cut me off. “Grab yourself a coffee and come into my office for a minute. I want to talk to you about something.”
I found my personal mug, which should give you an idea of how often I get called to the police station, and filled it from one of the portable urns at the coffee station, choosing the local Roaster’s blend that eBeth likes. All of the departments in town hall had outsourced their coffee production to the start-up owned by one of the mayor’s nieces, and from what I hear, the coffee is doing more than the mayor to keep the town running smoothly. I followed the lieutenant into his office and took a seat, prepared to nod s
ympathetically at some lame excuse as to why his own computer had been ransomed.
“There’s no easy way to say this, Mark, so I’ll come right out with it. Your friend Kim is too good at her job.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, simultaneously accessing the health department’s database to check on her performance reports. Had somebody really figured out that she was posing as human based simply on her stellar work? No, there weren’t any special notes in her personnel record.
“When you said an old school friend had moved to town and was having trouble finding a job in her field, I was happy to make the recommendation. But she comes in early, stays late, never makes mistakes, and worst of all, she’s too strict on inspections. You’ve got to explain to her how things work around here.”
“You mean the other inspectors are complaining?”
“Mark, we only have three inspectors in the entire department and one of them is the manager. Everybody is complaining, and I don’t just mean town hall employees. She’s too by-the-book. Didn’t she even hit you with a fine?”
“I kind of challenged her to find anything wrong,” I admitted. “She got us for mold in the ice machine, some minor documentation lapses on locally sourced ingredients, and a dog in the kitchen when I brought Spot to the meeting without thinking about it.”
“You’ve got mold in your ice machine?” the lieutenant asked with obvious concern.
“Not anymore.”
“Just talk some sense into her,” the lieutenant said. “It’s a small town and we all have to live together.”
“Will do. Is there anything else?”
“Well, as long as you’re here,” he said, and spun his monitor around so I could see the familiar ransomware message. “It must have gotten in over our local network or something.”
“That sounds probable,” I lied. “I’ll just grab my miracle fix-it stick from the booking computer as soon as it’s finished there.”
