by M M Buckner
The car plummeted, and his stomach levitated. “How does news travel so fast?”
“Viral chat. You know, office gossip. Word is, you want to hack the Ark, sir.”
Dominic wedged his shoulder against the ceiling and braced for another acute turn. “How many people did Karel tell?”
“Everybody knows, sir. And a lot of people are rooting for you. We don’t like an unprogrammed AI running our bank.”
They zigzagged through a loose fringe of aircars waiting for permission to land at the Trondheim Intercommercial Airport. Running lights diffused through the afternoon smog and cocooned each car in a soft rusty glow. As Offener steered closer to the main port, the traffic grew denser, like stars spiraling around the cloudy brown heart of a galaxy.
“Offener will set us down in the employee terminal,” Elsa explained. “We’ll travel as workers so we’ll be less conspicuous. I hope that doesn’t annoy you, sir.”
He laughed. “I can do that.”
“And, um, we have a disguise for you, sir.” She snapped open her purse and lifted out a sealed plastic envelope. Dominic read the label. “Inflatable body cast.”
He puffed his cheeks and blew.
They landed with a soft thud, and Offener shouldered open the one car door that would still move on its hinges. Already, a security siren was blaring as they raced away from the battered white car into the shelter of a luggage wagon. Hiding between stacks of suit bags, Dominic pondered the mysterious complexities of his fate as he tugged on the filmy, yellow “body cast.” While Elsa and Offener kept lookout for the security guards, Qi made him lie flat on his back while she sealed the tabs around his wrists, ankles and neck, then yanked the inflation ring. With a piercing squeal, compressed gas filled the suit, mashed the breath from his lungs and squeezed his entire body in a big yellow bubble. Qi chose that moment to kiss him on the lips. Then, with brisk efficiency, she wrapped layers of white gauze around his head and face.
“I’ll pay you back for that trick,” he mumbled through the gauze. “With interest. Compounded hourly!”
“Yeah, yeah. Cut the chatter.”
He could feel her slathering something cold and viscous all over his hands. It had a sharp chemical stench. “What is that vile gunk?”
“Fake scar tissue. Elsa found it at Jack’s Joke Shop. She says it’ll disguise your palm print when we go through security.” He could feel Qi blowing on his hands to dry the fake scars. Then she paused. “Your little friend Elsa, I like her.”
As soon as the gunk hardened, Qi tossed him over her back in a fireman’s carry. He couldn’t see what happened next because Qi hadn’t left him an eyehole. But he could smell tar and jet fuel and feel her sharp bony shoulder gouging his groin as she sprinted across an open surface, up a short stair, and through an echoing hall. He heard a pitter-pattering step that was probably Elsa, and a loping run that had to be Offener. And something rolling on wheels. Qi flopped him down onto a hard cottony pad that jounced on springs. A rolling hospital stretcher.
“This is for you,” Elsa said.
“Thanks,” said Qi. “I like to play doctor.”
Dominic heard the rustle of fabric. Qi was changing clothes. Then the rolling wheels creaked louder, and he sensed rapid movement.
Bars of fluorescent light glared through his gauze as they traveled down endless noisy concourses. Strangers bumped into his stretcher and did not apologize. Several times, they passed through, security checkpoints where guards stopped them for questioning, and he heard timid Elsa spout outrageous lies. In the mildest tones, she gave false names, phony credentials, bogus itineraries, and she must have flashed fake ID chips, too. Only her soft bashful voice made her wild fabrications sound credible. She also paid liberal bribes.
Somewhere along the way, his stretcher crashed into a group of people who shoved and yelled curses. Qi shouted back that this was an emergency, her patient was experiencing acute respiratory failure due to toxic exposure. Dominic thought that might not be far from the truth. Then everything went quiet, and he heard the cool, self-important voice of an executive.
“You people are holding up traffic.”
Dominic sensed a shifting of feet, then a pregnant stillness. “You’re out of uniform, nurse. What Com are you with?”
“ZahlenBank,” Elsa’s small shy voice spoke up. “We’re all with ZahlenBank, sir. Our clothes were contaminated with toxins, sir, so we burned them.”
“That’s right,” Qi said. “This patient’s contaminated, too. You wanna inspect him?” The stretcher lurched forward.
“What the hell! Get that away from me!”
“We have to go, sir. Most sorry. It’s an emergency.”
Dominic pictured himself bouncing like a yellow squeeze-toy as the wheels of his stretcher bounced down the concourse, rounded a sharp corner, jogged down some steps and jolted over a curb. Then hands seized his wrists and ankles and swung him up into the air. He flew into darkness and landed with a rubbery squilching noise. People pressed in beside him, and he heard breathing and felt hands nudging his yellow bubble. From the quality of the sound, he sensed an enclosure. Someone slammed a metal door.
Then Qi sliced the gauze away with her knife and wiped the sweat off his face. “How they hangin’, Nick-O?”
“They ain’t,” he said. “They’re squashed. Get me out of this rubber ducky.”
“Hoo-hoo! Nick makes a joke!” Qi punctured the body cast with her knifepoint, and the gas whistled out like a high-pitched fart. Everybody laughed.
As Dominic sat up and peeled the gummy scars off his fingers, Offener slipped behind the wheel of the van—another rental, Elsa explained. He darted out at breakneck speed and dodged through traffic as if he were playing a video game. Dominic peered over his shoulder at the speedometer. Offener liked to drive fast. Their van raced through the congestion circling the airport, then swerved down into a tunnel. They went deep, deep into the suburban levels under Trondheim, deeper than Dominic had ever been before. Already, he missed the sun.
“Here, sir. Put this in your pocket. You never know when you might need it.” Elsa handed him a fistful of coins, and he laughed aloud.
They wound through tunnels just wide enough for two cars to pass. He never knew tunnels this narrow existed in Trondheim. Long stretches of light tube had failed, and only the van’s running lights illuminated the gray concrete. Pedestrians pressed against the tunnel walls, sometimes two or three deep. He wondered why pedestrians were walking here. Wasn’t it dangerous? He tried to see their faces in the dim light, and then he noticed other things. These people weren’t wearing uniforms. They were carrying sacks and baskets and jugs of water. And they were all headed in the same direction. They were runaways.
“Sir, we have two choices now. We can take you straight to a med clinic for cell hygiene. You need it, sir. Both of you. I’ve-lined up a doctor who wants to help.”
“Or?” said Qi.
“Or we can go to a safehouse where you can uplink to the Net.”
Dominic checked his watch. Very soon, the colony would run out of air. Then they’d have to float those windmills and give up their freedom forever. But maybe he could still do something. He met Qi’s eyes. “Safehouse?”
“Yep.”
Offener emerged into a populous worker neighborhood and braked to a skidding halt in front of the Rest Nest Hotel. The Rest Nest was an inexpensive tube lodge patronized by vacationing employees, Elsa told them. She’d booked a suite of interconnecting sleep tubes with Net access, and she charged the van, the lodging, and other miscellaneous expenses to an obscure office maintenance account at ZahlenBank. She said the auditors wouldn’t find her trail for years.
“Elsa, you astonish me.”
“I know it’s wrong, sir. I hope you’re not offended.”
In answer, Dominic hugged her and kissed her brown hair.
Qi elbowed him in the ribs. “Enough sappiness. Let’s check in.”
“Offener’s going,” Elsa said. �
�He’ll return the van.”
Dominic turned to thank the young man, but Offener was already careening the vehicle away and hurtling toward the tunnel. A man of few words.
Dominic had never patronized a tube lodge before. At the Rest Nest Hotel, guests paid by the hour for cylindrical cubbyholes stacked one on top of another like drawers in a morgue. The tubes were sized to sleep single, double or triple, and they came equipped with bedding, power outlets, small storage bins with sliding doors, and for an extra fee, a Net node. Lockers and coin-operated public bath stalls were available at the lobby level. To reach their tubes on the sixteenth row, Dominic and his party had to climb a ladder. It felt like old times.
Elsa had reserved two contiguous triples with a pass-through window, and she’d filled one of them with computer equipment. “I hope I remembered everything,” she said, pressing a finger to her lips.
Dominic examined the neat stack of peripherals and modular add-ons in matching dark green cases. Very tasteful collection, he thought. “Everything for what?”
“You know, sir. To hack the Ark.”
“But Elsa.” He tried to explain why that plan was no longer viable. If everyone knew he was coming, how could he sneak in? The Ark was the most fiercely guarded databank in the world, and now the NP would throw up even more impregnable blocks. It couldn’t be done.
“We know you can do it, sir. I’ll help.”
But Elsa, what can you do? he started to say. Then he remembered her dogfight with the cop cruisers, her bald-faced lies in the airport, her joke shop scars to hide his palms. Soft-hearted Elsa. He’d underrated her too long.
With a sigh, he folded his long body into the tube with the stylish green computer equipment and picked up a set of cybernails, brand-new in their cellophane packet. He tore the seal and dumped the shiny claws in his palm. “This office maintenance account,” he said, slipping the claws onto his fingertips, “show me.”
Elsa’s eyes gleamed.
They worked for three hours, as measured by the tube-lodge billing meter, which ticked off the minutes on a big round dial mounted to the wall. There was no desk or chair. Elsa positioned the Net node on top of a green case, and Dominic tried sitting lotus fashion for a while, but that hurt his knees. He had to keep shifting, stretching his legs, rearranging his long body in the short space.
He opened a separate browser to monitor market news, and the projection shimmered in the air like a pane of glass reflecting colorful shadows. He programmed an agent to watch for news of the miners, then muted the sound.
Qi asked for some of Dominic’s spare change. Then she slipped out for a bath and came back with wet hair. She brought protein jerky, noodle soup and strong black tea from the vending machines in the lobby, and after their meal, Elsa cleared away the empty food cartons. Neat as a column of figures, that Elsa. Toward the end of the third hour, Dominic’s one good eye went bleary, and he began to calculate how long since he had slept. His senses were off kilter, and he wasn’t making any progress cracking the cross-coded, self-referential shell maze of ZahlenBank’s office maintenance account.
“Meta-mobius, isn’t it?” Elsa tapped her finger against her lips.
“Who set it up?” he asked.
“Sorry, sir. The account was there when I came to the bank. It just popped up on my menu one day. Weird.”
The account concealed its traces with baroque layers of back-loops, but something nagged at Dominic’s senses. Those loops seemed familiar. He scrutinized the binary strings till his eye blurred out of focus. He couldn’t keep going on food and tea. He needed rest.
“Major, by my count, the miners are running out of air now.”
“Maybe not.” Qi rocked back and forth nervously. “It depends on how many new people show up, and whether Millard brings another pump online, and how fast Anzie’s team can brew more alcohol.”
He slumped forward. “A moving target, right.”
“If they floated those windmills, we’d hear about it on the news,” Qi said. “Trust their ingenuity, Nick. Don’t give up yet.”
He shucked off his cybernails and ran fingers through his ragged hair. “I can’t see the screen anymore.”
Elsa said, “Shall I rub your back, sir? I’m trained in shiatsu massage.”
“I’ll handle the massage.” Qi started poking his shoulder blades with her knuckles.
“Actually,” he said, “I’d like you to look at this code, Major. The way it kinks back on itself, it puts me in mind of the miners’ broadcast Remember how the signal echoed back and forth through all those servers?”
“Hoo-hoo, kinky code. Sounds like my kind of fun.” Qi pushed him out of the way and sat cross-legged in front of the Net node. “Rest for a minute. I’ll take a crack at this Ark of yours.”
Elsa opened a pass-through window into the next tube. “Climb through here, sir. I’ve made your bed.”
“Elsa, you stick with me,” Qi said. “I may need your help.”
Qi didn’t look at either of them. She bent over the holographic interface and squinted at the icons with a serious expression. When her blue-black hair fell across her face, she pursed her lips and blew it away. Then she started humming. Dominic watched her cybernails flick through the light matrix, and he experienced an unreasonable desire to kiss her nose.
“She’s right, Elsa. You’ll make faster progress together,” he said.
When Qi cast him a sideways look, he winked. Then he tumbled through the window into the next tube and fell asleep.
He woke to the smell of tea and fumbled for the cup in the darkness. He found it steaming on a molded plastic shelf recessed in the wall. How much time had passed? His luminous watch read 2339 hours. Nearly midnight. He pictured Benito lying in darkness, choking for air, and he rattled open the pass-through window.
“We’ve found something, sir.” Elsa bounced over to help him crawl through.
“You’re right about this kinky code,” Qi said. Her face sagged with fatigue, but her ink black eyes blazed. “Whoever rerouted that broadcast left the same autograph on this office maintenance account. It’s a beautiful piece of work. Either someone inside the bank helped the miners, or someone outside the bank diddled your books. I’ll lay odds it’s the same someone. My old boss, Gig.”
“I had the same thought,” Dominic said. “But why?”
“The point is, sir,” Elsa sounded breathless, “we found a way in.”
He set down his styrofoam teacup. “Into the Ark?”
Elsa nodded vigorously. Qi twisted off her cybernails and dropped them in his hand. With a broad grin, he shook them like dice and let the ladies blow on them for luck.
He worked another long session, well into the small hours of the morning, clicking through ranks and files of glowing holographic symbols. Having only one eye interfered with his concentration, but he ignored the tension headache and kept searching. The office maintenance account linked into every operational center in the Ark. There was no end to its cunning. He followed the pathways and deciphered strings of arcane programming that sometimes led to cul-de-sacs, sometimes to brave new worlds of creative accounting.
He couldn’t gauge the passing hours, but he knew precisely how many muscles in his lower back began to ache and how sandy his eye felt every time he blinked. Elsa and Qi hovered at his shoulders and offered suggestions, some of them useful. Elsa blotted his forehead with a linen handkerchief, and not to be outdone, Qi rolfed his shoulders. At last, he broke through the final firewall and gained access to his personal accounts.
His assets were not merely frozen. They were gone. Every account in his name showed a zero balance. The NP had transferred his money elsewhere.
“That’s theft!” He shoved the node so hard, it bounced and fell on its side. He gazed from Elsa to Qi, then back to Elsa. He opened and closed his hands, and the cybernails made small red dents in his palms. “The primacy of account ownership is our bank’s most sacred policy.”
“The Neural Profile issu
ed a new set of rules, sir. Last week.”
“Yes, but if we violate the principle of account ownership—even once,” Dominic stared at the cylindrical plastic walls, “who will trust our bank again?”
“Everybody’s irate about it,” Elsa said.
“That bit-brain’s destroying my bank!” Dominic rammed his fist against the sleep tube wall. Then he seized the Net node and reactivated the interface that had gone dormant when he knocked it over. He started flicking through the code again, and his cybernails clicked together with a sound like ringing steel.
“What are you doing, sir?”
“Composing a poem, Elsa.” Dominic clicked away, stringing new code together, unconsciously working his jaw. “Just a few unrhymed couplets of poetic justice.”
Breaking into the Ark had been difficult. The rest was a stroll in the mall. Inside the office maintenance account, he wrote a program to tap ZahlenBank’s profit stream and levy small fees, bare shavings of copper from every cent of markup that passed through the operational centers. On the directory, he labeled it VST, for value-subtracted tax, his private joke. Then he set up an automatic schedule to sweep the money into a new alias account. For account holder name, he wrote: Tooksook & Associates. In seconds, the new account began to fill.
“Sir, that’s—that’s—” Elsa sounded stressed.
“Embezzlement.” Dominic said the word aloud. He’d broken the cardinal rule of honor. He’d stolen from ZahlenBank. There was a time when he would have cut off his hand before touching the bank’s money. He squeezed his. eye shut.
Funny, he thought with a bitter smile, how the old lessons still wrung him with shame. What would Father say? That was the question he couldn’t help asking. After all that had happened, Richter Jedes was still the standard by which Dominic measured his worth. The NP claimed Richter programmed his son, but that wasn’t the right word. Richter inspired him with respect. Honor thy father’s values. But Dominic broke the paramount rule. And no matter how honorable his reasons, his heart still ached.
“Sir, that’s ingenious,” Elsa finished her sentence.
Qi punched him in the arm. “Sleek work, Nick-O. Now it’s my turn.”
