by Robin Craig
“What the hell?”
Miriam grimaced. “What the hell, yes,” she replied. “When he said he had an image I wondered how the hell he thought it wasn’t worth reporting – then we see that all he has is a fuzzy picture of Joe Average. If we hadn’t met Katlyn I’d think the whole thing was just some horrid practical joke!”
“‘We?’” quoted Stone quietly.
Miriam looked at him, startled. “Yes, we! You were there too! God, she kicked you into a wall!”
Stone gave her a hard look. “No, Miriam. I was there, but what did I actually see? Someone fast and strong, sure. With something that looked like a tail, something that looked like reflective golden eyes. But nothing certain, nothing close up for more than half a second. Less, frankly, than what we saw in that video when all this started. For all I know, it could have been a guy in a monkey suit like the doc said in our first interview. The only evidence we have that our thief is anything out of the ordinary except in skill are a few seconds of grainy video and a few glimpses by me in a gloomy warehouse. All the rest is just you.”
He let her digest that.
“But... but...” she said in a shrinking voice, “What are you saying? You think I imagined the whole thing? Made it all up?!”
He looked at her again. She felt like a suspect pinned by his gaze. But he looked away and replied, “No. No, I don’t think that. You’re not the type – either of them. But it’s not me you have to worry about. If some higher-ups start wondering, how are you going to defend yourself? If you were reading this in a report rather than having experienced it yourself, what would you think is most likely: that there’s a real live geneh running around stealing rich guys’ loose change, contrary to the well-reasoned opinion of an expert in the field – or that some rookie cop stuck in a back room is trying to make a name or adventure for herself out of a wish or a lie? Creating an exciting case out of some loose correlations and a hyperactive imagination – or even making it up deliberately?”
“But it happened!”
He snorted. “The truth has never been much of a defense if you can’t prove it, kid. Or even if you can prove it. Ask Galileo.”
“But we can’t just stop now! Can we?”
Stone considered. “Well, not without consequences. But you could go to the Chief all shy and shamefaced, say maybe the stress influenced your memory – at least I can confirm that you were handcuffed to a post and beaten up – tell him that in the light of day and new evidence you’re no longer so sure. Try to back out of it gracefully. There’d be some disciplinary action for wasting everyone’s time and it’ll be a while before they let you out on the street again, but you’d keep your job at least.”
Miriam looked at him, horrified. “I can’t do that! It would be a lie, not to mention dereliction of duty! Katlyn is out there, doing God knows what for God knows why!”
Stone gave her a pitying look. “Well, you’d better hope you or someone catches her then. And if it isn’t you, someone who doesn’t just make her disappear without a trace.”
Chapter 22 – Simon
Simon was content. He had no sex, but he was addressed as Simon and referred to as “he”, so that is what he was. He was not truly conscious, and his contentment was more like that of a bee happily ensconced in a meadow of flowers than that of a man. But contentment was the best word for it. When things were as they should be, his world felt smooth, uncomplicated and as it should be. Occasional happiness was also granted to him when he achieved a particularly good outcome; but contentment was what he sought above even happiness. Problems made him anxious, and he was not content until all problems were solved.
Simon did not know the date. Had you asked him he would have told you the date and the time to the second. But time meant nothing to him in himself. He lived in the perpetual present. He remembered the past if he had to, consulted his calendar of events when required, and predicted the future if asked: but contentment in the present was his world, or his world as it should be. However in human terms the date corresponded to only a few weeks into Miriam Hunter’s career.
There was a ripple in Simon’s awareness and he knew that a door had opened into his domain. This did not make him anxious. There was no pattern to the opening or closing of doors that would make one stand out above the others. But it made him curious, as the time did not match the expected return of his master nor any scheduled visits by cleaners or others authorized to enter in his absence. He began to become anxious when the image of the visitor did not match any in his working memory. His anxiety increased at the odd behavior of his visitor, which did not precisely correlate with any actions he understood. While there were many things humans did that he did not understand, their performance by a stranger was guaranteed to cause him anxiety.
Simon was also capable of fear, or some analogue of fear. He had never experienced it, for nothing worthy of fear had ever happened to him since his awakening. He now knew fear, or the beginning of fear, and knew it was worse than anxiety. The fear stemmed from his broadening search for the identity of his visitor: for it proved worse than merely an unfamiliar human. While it stood and walked and acted like a human, it was not one. He had seen things that were not human before and they had not worried him, for they fit into the category of “pet” or “bird” and, like him, had their own place in the world. But what this thing was lay outside his knowledge entirely.
Simon’s automatic response to fear was to activate alarms and calls to security guards and police, but for a moment he paused, suddenly unsure whether that was the right thing to do. The uncertainty became a subliminal shiver that shifted his world, and he was no longer afraid. He might have been puzzled how he could be afraid one moment but not even anxious the next; but he could not imagine why he would have been anxious or why he would think to question the change. The change was the most natural thing in the world, for it had returned him to contentment, which meant it was good.
So Simon went about his business while his visitor went about hers, and they were both content.
It happened that his master was far more than content at that moment, being happily ensconced in the bedroom, arms and other parts of his current mistress. But that changed shortly after he returned home and noticed a door open that shouldn’t have been, and from there went on to discover a few gems missing from his collection. The violation of his personal domain was much worse than the material value of the gems, but the mystery was even greater than the violation. For understandably he was angry and asked Simon what the hell had happened. But Simon had no recollection of any event that could have caused it.
That was surely impossible.
An even more impossible thing was that Simon had recollections up to a certain point and recollections after a later point, but nothing in between, as if his existence had been suspended. How the thief or thieves had achieved this was unknown, but the investigators did find mysterious drillings from outside toward the internal wiring, and could only conclude that Simon’s systems had been knocked out by some kind of overpowering electronic pulse from a device long gone. It was hard, sometimes, to keep up with the imaginative uses of technology that the criminal element was inventing these days. Fortunately for him, the investigators opined, it was probably just some bright young electrical engineer looking for excitement and some prize to prove he had done it: a delinquent rather than a serious criminal. For the nature of the crime was as minor as it was imaginative: more indicative of a young buck tossing his new grown antlers to impress his peers than a professional thief.
Simon’s master was rather more outraged some weeks later when Simon relayed certain demands to him. Simon could not tell him where the demands came from. They required his master to transfer a sizeable quantity of his wealth to various untraceable locations, in return for silence about numerous inconvenient historical facts that the master would not like revealed. Simon might have done the transfer himself, except that his master was unusually paranoid and Simon’s access to money was limited to the sm
all accounts required for managing the household.
The master raged, but paid. The criminals were good to their word and he never heard from them again. His life returned to its usual range of emotional states, except for one persistent thorn of unavenged outrage; Simon returned to his usual contentment too, except for the discomfiting mystery of his missing hour.
Simon’s master dearly desired the capture and punishment of his tormentors, for he was not a forgiving man. But there were reasons he had paid for their silence. He would like them caught, but without the police casting any more of their attention in his own direction.
Then one day he had a call from a detective looking more into the theft of his jewels. He had listened long enough to learn the essence of her interest before sending her on her way with a pungency of expression that should have made her ears smoke. But while one could say many things about this man, as indeed his enemies had, none would say he lacked a keen intelligence. He deduced that the crime must be wider than himself; he then thought about the implications of that interesting deduction. If the criminals had found some of his secrets perhaps they had found others. While they had not mentioned any such additional embarrassments, perhaps that was not because they hadn’t found them but worse, because they had darker plans for them.
In that case there were people who might be even keener than he to see the gang confounded before any such plans could bear fruit. Those people had not only the motive but also the power to apply pressure, as discrete as it was formidable, on the police. Pressure to continue their investigation to its desired conclusion. He bared his teeth in a smile as cheerful as it was malicious, and sent messages out through his network. He did not doubt that they would take some time to act, but he had long since learnt that vengeance and patience were lovers. But nor did he doubt that they would know they had to act. Power did not come to people who lacked the desire to preserve it or the caution to nullify all potential threats to it. If it did they did not hold it long.
Chapter 23 – Geoff
At that moment half a world away, the Seabitz cut closer to a coral reef, its blue spinnaker billowed by the tangy breeze. At its helm, Geoff ignored his ultimate target, a palm-covered jewel of a sandy island in a tranquil lagoon, to concentrate on the more immediate and dangerous target of the much less tranquil break in the reef. When he judged the moment was right, he dropped the spinnaker and turned hard left, cutting across at a sharp angle and shooting through the gap into the calm waters beyond.
The girls whooped in appreciation and he turned and bowed with a grin. Then he trimmed the sails to head the yacht toward the beach at a more leisurely pace. He glanced over the side into the crystal water, beneath which he could see magnificent fish-filled corals, and smiled. He would never get tired of this, he thought. He liked tranquility as much as the next man; excitement somewhat more. He had both in abundance.
He looked at the island, and not for the first time wondered if he had made the right choice. It had been one of the few times in his life when he had chosen safety over the excitement of danger. That was not quite true: he had merely chosen a lesser danger. Had he chosen differently he might now have owned an island like this. But, he reminded himself, he might have lost everything instead. The software might not have worked; he might have been caught; in any event he would have had a lot of hard work ahead of him. Instead for possibly the first time in his life he had chosen the easy way out. But it had been a good bargain. He might not have his own island, but would he really want one? With Seabitz and its supporting bank account, he had his choice of any island on the globe.
He looked back at the girls and smiled at them; Alice caught his eye and toasted him with a wink. He grinned, both to her and himself. He might have his choice of any island but no man could have his choice of any woman. But it was a pleasant fact of reality that there were more than enough beautiful young women in the world who were delighted with what he offered: free accommodation on a luxury sailing boat visiting any number of interesting and exotic locations, in return for very little: a little cooking, a little cleaning and rather more than a little sex. There was little enough work to do when most of the ship’s functions were automated and even more could be when Geoff just wanted to cruise without the challenge of running the helm. And he had sufficient self-esteem to regard the sex as part of their benefits rather than part of the cost.
Of course they often asked where his money had come from. Software, he would say with a mysterious smile, offering no details; hinting at secret government contracts and confidentiality clauses if pressed. Besides, the lack of detail added to his glamor, or that was how he saw it. Truth be told, beyond normal curiosity and the thrill of hinted danger, the girls didn’t really care. They knew they had a good deal and there was more than enough glamor in the lifestyle he loaned them. He would have had to be a lot poorer, a lot meaner or a lot uglier for that to change.
He thought back to the day that had changed his life. In a way that day had merely tied what went before it to what came after, but it was the pivot. He had been a hacker once, stalking the dark byways of the net in various questionable or outright illegal activities. Then he had overreached and been caught; perhaps that is what had taught him caution. But many security firms liked hackers. Like the first people who had domesticated wild animals, they thought that if they could tame these dangerous creatures their powers could be theirs to command.
Often they were right. Hackers, like everybody else, grew older and started to value what they had more than the excitements of youthful passions. Geoff himself had served a little jail time, a little community service, before being headhunted by an innovative software company with fingers in a lot of security-related pies. And he had been happy to accept. The work was interesting, the pay was good, and he got to do what he was good at and loved without having to look over his shoulder. He was loyal to his employer. As loyal as, say, a cat to its owner.
But his employer was not the only entity that watched for rogue talent. He had been approached obliquely by another, whose name he never knew but whose honesty, at least in his dealings with Geoff, had been demonstrated. He was not asked to do anything outrageous or even courageous, just watch and wait and report anything with the right combination of cutting edge technology and intriguing applications. And like a cat accepting milk from a neighbor he did so with a clear conscience. Some might have argued that, like the cat, it was clear because there was nothing there.
His chance came when some programmers at his workplace had a little too much to drink after suffering a little too much indignity at the hands of the project they were working on. To their credit their animated discussion was discrete and oblique. But their voices were just a touch too loud and Geoff’s interest, hearing and intelligence a touch too acute. He connected the dots between their hints, boasts and complaints, and the resulting picture beckoned him.
He was good at what he did. He knew he could help someone with the right resources to steal this gem and nobody would know. He toyed with the idea of stealing it for himself, but in the end wisdom won out over greed. Not that greed could complain too much: if he played his cards right he would get all he could want and let someone else take all the risks, or at least all the risks after the initial theft.
The problem with hiring extreme talent in the same package as less extreme ethics is in exploiting the former while protecting oneself from the latter. His employers believed they had done so, but their cleverness would prove not quite a match for Geoff’s: a fact they would be blissfully unaware of for a long time. What Geoff had done had certainly been risky, but he had carefully and over a long time planted traps and back doors in preparation for such an opportunity. Imagining your superiority over your peers was an occupational hazard amongst hackers, but in Geoff’s case he got away with it because it happened to be correct.
This particular piece of malfeasance required more than hacking, as a certain degree of more traditional burglary would be needed: anoth
er reason why Geoff decided not to do it alone. And so it happened that after a period of elaborate courtship with his shadowy accomplice, in which both were persuaded that the other would not betray them, the item was skillfully acquired without any unfortunate consequences. To either of them, anyway.
Geoff had had friends and lovers in his old life, but none he felt more than a twinge of regret at leaving behind. Little more, indeed, than people in more regular employment suffered when they moved across a continent to another office. So he disappeared from that life into a new one, with a new identity, a new boat and a greatly expanded bank account, which he put to work earning an honest living for him on the share market. And now here he was, approaching yet another piece of sunny paradise and looking forward to an idyllic afternoon filled with most of the pleasures life can provide.
Everything in the world was connected, he knew. Every action changed something, which changed something else, and so on ad infinitum through space and time. He watched the wake of his boat escaping the atoll and mingling with the ocean waves and wondered how many small lives that subtle change in wave patterns would affect. He thought how if he had not been caught that day so long ago he would not have worked for the security company; he would not have had the opportunity he had grasped; he would not be here; that coral trout they had caught this morning would still be alive; the prey it was to have eaten would now be dead instead. He wondered what other effects that theft had had, what lives had been rocked by the ripples of causality spreading out from it. He had seen nothing on the news feeds that indicated the software had ever been used. Perhaps it had failed. Perhaps his mysterious partner was more cautious or subtle than he knew – or dead. He wondered if he would ever know.
Then one of the girls slipped up behind him and entwined her arm around his waist, playfully pressing her hip against his. He looked down at her with a smile, and turned his mind to more immediate interests.
