The newspaper article said the emerald would be on display for three weeks, starting tomorrow. That didn’t give her a lot of time. There would be bribes to be paid, equipment to be purchased, and plans to be made—all without raising the suspicion of the local cops. Pepper was fairly certain they’d given up on pinning the Shaashavaslabt heist on her by now, but you couldn’t be too careful on a job like this. If anybody at YPCPD caught a whiff of her being involved in anything that smelled like a heist, they’d find some pretense to arrest her and hold her until after the emerald had moved on. Being behind on her mob dues, she couldn’t count on Sam to help her with the cops—and once the YPCPD realized she was no longer under mob protection, they’d throw the book at her. No way around it, this was a risky proposition.
Chapter Three
The next day, Pepper left the CLOSED sign up on the bar window and took the hoverrail to the Yanthus Prime City Museum. After paying the admission fee in the lobby, Pepper made her way into the museum, meandering from one exhibit to the next, trying to muster what might pass for genuine interest in surgical tools from the Yanthus Prime Civil War and fossils from the Yanthusian Interdiluvial Period. Eventually she wandered into the wing that housed the gems on display as part of the jewelry consortium tour. The main attraction, the Emerald of Sobalt Prime, was ensconced in a glass cage in the center of an octagonal room in the middle of the wing, with entrances to the north, south, east and west.
Pepper entered from the west and strolled slowly around the display, taking it in from all angles. She smiled at the guard standing at attention in the corner, and he regarded her quizzically. Whoops, thought Pepper. I really need to avoid smiling. She had stuck plastibone inserts in her cheeks to confuse the facial recognition software used by the museum’s security systems, and they had the effect of making her look a manically cheerful squirrel when she smiled. The important thing was that they would prevent the museum’s security from flagging her visit—as they undoubtedly had her on a list of theft suspects. Fortunately there were enough visitors to the exhibit that she didn’t draw much attention.
She glanced around the room just long enough to get a comprehensive 360 degree view, making a note of the plasteel shutters that would slam down in case of an attempted theft. Then she meandered through the rest of the wing, forcing herself to linger at a few other exhibits before returning the way she had come. The entire visit took less than an hour.
Back at the Wobbly Monolith, she climbed the stairs to her tiny apartment, made herself a sandwich, and popped out her contact lenses. She placed the lenses into the nanoplug interface reader connected to a computer. A light went on, letting her know that dozens of cilia-like tendrils were connecting to microscopic interface points around the edges of the lenses. A paper-thin screen unfurled like a sail from the computer, expanding to its default size of nearly a meter in length and two thirds of that in height. The screen showed a circular progress indicator that was filling up with blue as data was downloaded from the lenses. It stopped a few seconds later at eighteen point six terabytes. She had bought these ultra-high-resolution recording lenses nearly two years earlier, when planning another heist that had fallen through at the last minute. They weren’t cutting edge anymore, but they would certainly give her the information she needed.
Both lenses had been recording the entire time she’d been in the museum, producing a complete stereoscopic record of the wing that housed the emerald, as well as much of the rest of the museum. The traveling exhibit wing was her main concern. She tapped a few buttons on the image processing interface on the screen, telling the computer to render a three-dimensional model that she could explore in real time. The program would extrapolate from the data it had received, making it possible for her to view the wing from any angle. As it began to render, though, a warning appeared:
Audio data missing. Proceed to render without audio?
“Whoops!” Pepper exclaimed. She’d forgotten to remove her earrings, which had recorded stereophonic audio from her trip to the museum. The audio data was of little direct use; its value lay in what it could tell the software about the interior of the museum. The echoes of the ambient noises—the hum of the ventilation system, museum visitors chatting, the shuffling of feet—would be interpreted and added to the visual data to determine the thickness, texture, and composition of the surroundings. Pepper pulled off the earrings and put them in the receptacle along with the contact lenses. The reader connected to them and downloaded the data. When it was finished, she restarted the rendering process.
By the time she’d finished her sandwich and a bottle of Peg-Leg Monkey (the best beer on Yanthus Prime), the rendering was complete. She tapped a key to enter the simulation, and the screen showed the foyer of the museum, where she had begun recording. Hand motions allowed her to navigate the museum as if she were walking inside it. As she strolled around the simulated museum, she took note of the security features: the guards, the cameras, the heat sensors, the motion detectors, the plasteel shutter doors. Pepper leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.
The main problem was the cameras, which were mounted in every room in the museum—in fact, most rooms had several visible cameras, and many more microcams were hidden throughout the wing. There were so many cameras, in fact, that it would be virtually impossible for someone to monitor them all. Creating a diversion of some sort to focus attention elsewhere might be helpful, but that was a tricky tactic: make the diversion too compelling, and it would summon the YPCPD and trigger a complete lockdown. The other problem was that no diversion would draw attention away from the completely automated motion detectors that would trigger an alarm if Pepper entered the exhibit room after hours.
Further complicating matters was the fact that the main cameras in the exhibit room were 3D-enabled and oscillated at random intervals to get a full view of the room. That meant the infamous Kokovoric Stamp Heist trick of unrolling hi-res displays of the room in front of the camera wouldn’t work. Reproducing an image of the room on a screen would be easy enough, thanks to the comprehensive recording Pepper had taken; the trick was getting the appropriate image on a screen in front of the camera. With 3D oscillating cameras, even if you could somehow position a large enough screen in front of a camera to cover its full range of view, the camera’s 3D calibration algorithm would detect the lack of perspective in the image and trigger an alarm. Fooling these cameras would require more finesse.
The obvious solution to the camera problem was to go smaller with the screens, rather than larger: She knew the company that manufactured her recording contacts also produced augmented reality lenses that were capable of projecting a hi-res image directly into the wearer’s eye. If she could have lenses engineered to the specifications of the apertures of the security cameras, there was no reason they couldn’t be adapted for this purpose. It would require some programming to match each camera’s movements to the image displayed on the lens, but she was fairly certain the rendering software she was using to tour her virtual model of the museum could be adapted for the purpose. She’d essentially be applying custom-designed contact lenses to the cameras.
The tough part was going to be getting the lenses over the apertures of the cameras without drawing attention. The guy behind the Kokovoric Stamp Heist had used dragonfly-sized bots to move the displays in front of the cameras, but there was a bigger margin of error with screens than with lenses. Lenses would have to be placed accurately to within a tenth of a millimeter or the image would be noticeably off. Additionally, the museum had recently installed sensors that would detect bots larger than a gnat. To further complicate matters, every ten minutes a weak electromagnetic pulse was sent out from a device below the museum’s floor, in order to fry the electronics of any bots that were too small to be detected by the sensors. The only reason the electronics in Pepper’s lenses had avoided being melted was that their electronics, being a few years old, were just large enough to be immune to the EMP.
So: how to place t
iny lenses on the apertures of the cameras without anyone noticing, and without using bots? Pepper considered the matter for an hour and came up with nothing. Eventually she fell asleep in her chair, only to be awakened by one of the insects buzzing near her ear. She woke with a start and smacked herself on the side of the head, missing the insect. “Damn you!” she yelled at the little green bug as it buzzed away. “You’re not getting your swamp back. Just die already!”
The insect landed on the wall a few feet away, watching her, as if assessing its options in light of her words. It was hard not to feel a little bad for the thing. Like Pepper, the insect was a victim of forces beyond its understanding or control. And like Pepper, the insect was acting out of desperation, doing the only thing it could think of to do—lashing out at those in power. “If only you knew how little power I have,” Pepper mused. “If you want to strike a blow against the establishment, you’d be better off buzzing around the mayor’s office or the…” She trailed off as she imagined the little bugs buzzing around the ears of the city’s movers and shakers at one of their fancy events at the City Museum.
She stared at the insect on the wall, and the insect stared back. Was there an intelligence behind those tiny, multifaceted eyes? It seemed doubtful. And yet, the squatters had been convinced that they had been able to communicate with the swarms. Pepper was also struck by the apparent spitefulness of the insects’ actions. There was no apparent biological reason for the flies to hang out at her bar. They didn’t bite, and they weren’t interested in the food or drinks. Their only purpose seemed to be to annoy her and her customers. But why? Were they attempting to exact some small amount of vengeance for the destruction of their habitat? Or were they trying to communicate something?
“What do you want?” she asked the insect.
The fly took off, buzzed around the room for a moment, and then landed on a napkin on the table in front of Pepper—the same napkin on which Pepper had drawn the interior of the museum. The insect was standing right in the middle of the octagonal exhibit room.
“Well, aren’t you an ambitious little bug,” Pepper said. “If you want the emerald, you’re welcome to it. You have a better chance of getting into that room that I do. If you need somebody to help you unload it, I can hook you up with my fence. Maybe we can come to some kind of arrangement.”
The insect just stared at her.
“Okay, you’re starting to creep me out a little,” Pepper said. “I was just joking around. I don’t really buy this claptrap about you being sentient.”
Still the insect stared.
“Seriously,” Pepper said. “Cut it out. Go back to buzzing around the bar or I’ll flatten you.”
The insect didn’t move.
“See, that right there is proof that you aren’t sentient,” Pepper said. “If you understood I was threatening you, you’d fly away.”
Still the insect didn’t move.
“Yeah, I get it,” said Pepper. “You’re calling my bluff. Also, if I didn’t harbor some suspicion about you being able to understand me, I wouldn’t be talking to you like this. That’s one in your column, bug.”
Still the insect didn’t move.
“Gaaahhh!” Pepper cried, unnerved by the insect’s indifference. She waved her arms in the air until the insect took off. It made a circuit of the room and then disappeared through the crack under the door.
Chapter Four
Pepper moved silently through the museum toward the Emerald of Sobalt Prime. As she neared the gem, she heard a loud buzzing behind her. Just as she was about to reach out her hand to grab the Emerald, a swarm of flies flew over her head and descended on it. The flies enveloped the Emerald completely and then seemed to take a humanoid form. After a moment Pepper realized the flies had transformed into the Malarchian enforcer, Heinous Vlaak. Vlaak looked just like he did the last time he came to Yanthus Prime. He was an imposing figure in a tight-fitting crimson leather uniform, his face obscured by a helmet festooned with peacock feathers. A luxurious fur cape billowed from his shoulders. Pepper turned to run, but the plasteel doors slammed shut, trapping her in the room. Vlaak drew his lazegun and fired, hitting her squarely in the chest. Pepper woke with a start.
“Damn bugs,” she muttered, sitting up in bed. She had a vague feeling that the insects had invaded other dreams of hers during the night too. Was this how the insects communicated? Or was she simply obsessing about them for no good reason? Heinous Vlaak’s appearance was strange as well; Vlaak hadn’t been to Yanthus Prime since he’d overseen the destruction of the Shaashavaslabt sculpture. Pepper was fairly certain Vlaak didn’t even know she existed, and even if he had somehow found out she was behind the theft of the sculpture, she couldn’t see how it concerned him.
Pepper got up, showered, and made some coffee. Then she sat down with her simulation again. Three hours later, she was no closer to figuring out how to foil the museum’s security. What she needed was something like microbots that could be programmed to apply lenses to the apertures of the security cameras—but they would have to be bots that wouldn’t trigger the museum’s motion sensors. That meant they would have to be very small and made mostly of organic materials. There was an answer that was as obvious as it was ridiculous, and after another hour of failing to put it out of her mind, Pepper broke down and called the biology department of Yanthus Prime City University. If nothing else, she could at least confirm that the idea was completely impractical so she could move on to a more realistic solution.
Pepper asked the secretary if she could speak to the scientist who had published the paper about intelligent swarms of Yanthusian swamp flies. She was put on hold, and after several minutes the secretary explained to her that the author of that paper—Doctor Sully Harmigen—was no longer at the university. Pepper was unable to get the secretary to explain the reason for Harmigen’s departure, and it was only with considerable difficulty that she managed to obtain an address for him. Dr. Harmigen was apparently living off the grid in a mostly unsettled area about thirty klicks south of the city.
Her interest piqued, Pepper summoned a robocar and gave it the address she’d been given for Dr. Harmigen. The car dutifully navigated the city roads to the highway that connected Yanthus Prime City to the towns south of it, then veered off onto a poorly maintained dirt road. After several more kilometers, the car stopped in front of a primitive hovel on a small hill overlooking a vast tract of muck. Pepper got out and the car zipped away. She walked up a narrow sidewalk to the door. Hundreds of the little green flies buzzed about her head. She knocked on the door, and after a minute or so, the door opened. Standing inside was a pear-shaped creature about half Pepper’s height.
“Dr. Harmigen?” asked Pepper.
The pear-shaped creature glared at her with its tiny eyes. “Not what you were expecting?”
“To be honest,” said Pepper, “no.”
Dr. Harmigen was a member of the Gwildwanki species, with which Pepper was vaguely familiar. The Gwildwanki had originated on a backwater planet in the Perseus Arm. They were a largely non-sentient, bipedal ruminant species that was common throughout this part of the galaxy. It had been discovered purely by accident (by a very surprised farmer) that, due to a genetic anomaly, roughly one in a million Gwildwanki was not only sentient but possessed an intelligence that rivaled that of the geniuses of the most advanced races in the galaxy. Far from putting an end to the practice of raising Gwildwanki as livestock, this discovery vastly increased the incentive to raise them: sentient Gwildwanki could be sold to universities and corporations for a fortune. Many of the best financial analysts in the Crab Nebula were Gwildwanki who had been rescued from the cattle farms of Voltaris Seven. Pepper had never actually met a sentient Gwildwanki before, although she found Gwildwanki steaks delicious. She decided to keep this information to herself.
“If you’re a journalist,” Harmigen said, glaring at Pepper, “I have nothing to say I haven’t already said a hundred times. You’ll have to get your entertainme
nt elsewhere.”
“I’m not a journalist,” Pepper said. “I’m a bartender. My name is Pepper Mélange.”
“I don’t recall requesting a delivery, Pepper Mélange,” Harmigen said dryly. “Please go away.” He began to close the door.
“Wait!” Pepper cried. “I’m here about the insects. The little green ones.”
“Yanthusian swamp flies,” Harmigen grunted. “What about the them?”
“I have a proposal for them,” Pepper said, without thinking.
Harmigen stared at her for a moment. “You have a proposal. For the flies.”
There was no point in being coy now, Pepper thought. “You believe they’re sentient, don’t you? And that you can communicate with them?”
“The media sensationalized my research,” Harmigen said. “And cost me my job in the process.”
“So the flies weren’t trying to tell us to stay off their land?” Pepper asked.
“I think we can assume the flies would prefer that we not destroy their habitat,” said Harmigen. “There are those who claimed to be able to speak with the swarms, but my research was shut down before I could confirm the swarm’s sentience definitively.”
“But if you could speak to them now—”
“I can’t,” said Harmigen. “The university seized my equipment. In any case, the swarm population has been decimated. The potential for intelligence exists only in swarms of ten million or more. These days there are only a dozen swarms, of less than a million each. Half of them live on my property. As you can see, I’ve done what I could to give them a semblance of their former habitat, but it isn’t enough. I’m afraid that whatever you wanted to say to the flies, Pepper, it’s too late.”
Aye, Robot (A Rex Nihilo Adventure) (Starship Grifters Book 2) Page 22
