Borderless (An Analog Novel Book 2)

Home > Other > Borderless (An Analog Novel Book 2) > Page 4
Borderless (An Analog Novel Book 2) Page 4

by Eliot Peper


  The color drained from his face, and his eyelid twitched.

  “Look,” he said. “Everything has already been requisitioned. I’m not going to back-channel with every branch of the goddamn government.”

  She recognized the brittleness in his voice.

  Fear.

  Someone else had been asking the same questions.

  “I know, I know,” she said. The Diana he thought he knew would know, and there was nothing to be gained from breaking the illusion. “Don’t get paranoid. That’s the weed talking.”

  “It’s not paranoia if it’s true.”

  “And he’s back,” she said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Witty rejoinders and all.”

  The playfulness might have been forced, but at least he cracked a smile.

  “Look,” she said. “Humor me, okay? For old times’ sake.”

  Old times. Diana needed to get her answers and get out before this city ate her alive.

  CHAPTER 6

  Diana bit the tip of her tongue as she inserted the pin-size recording device into the center of the sunflower. Sunflowers actually sported two types of flowers. The long yellow petals, or ray flowers, formed their distinctive halo around the darker orange circle that was made of hundreds of tiny disc flowers. She turned the blossom this way and that, trying to catch any hint of something unusual, but the recorder was indistinguishable from the disc flowers. No glints of reflected light from odd angles. Nothing indicated that everything within range would be captured and transmitted. Satisfied, she moved on to the next sunflower in the bouquet.

  Finding out the time and location of the Commonwealth board meeting had been straightforward. Sofia had provided inside intel, including typical amenities provided at board meetings and what facility-services contractors were on call that day. From there, Diana had arranged for the florist’s regular delivery guy to win a backstage pass to see his favorite band, something he was guaranteed to skip work to attend. Trish at the nursery had provided a warm introduction to the florist, who was relieved to have someone who could cover the shift on short notice. With that, Diana had her ticket into Commonwealth. Espionage was mostly logistics.

  After straightening her uniform, Diana collected the bouquet and opened the back door of the delivery van. The forest of sleek skyscrapers that was Commonwealth headquarters soared above her. The tops of the towers were lost in a blanket of fog, silver pillars holding up a gray sky. The conglomerate had gobbled up block after block of downtown San Francisco, and its employees filled the streets, sipping on macchiatos, sketching algorithms in their feeds, or debating technical problems and internal politics.

  Summoning her feed to overlay the most efficient route, Diana made her way toward the entrance to one of the towers.

  Governments around the world had long ignored Commonwealth’s growing influence. The company’s policy of maintaining the feed as a neutral piece of global infrastructure helped sustain the illusion that politicians were still the ultimate power brokers. The feed was a tool. A useful one, to be sure. But the people who used tools were the ones in charge, not the people who made them. That’s why, from Washington’s perspective, Silicon Valley was the nation’s inventor, not its ruler.

  But all that had changed when Commonwealth included a mandatory carbon tax in its terms of service update three years ago. Outrage was rampant, but pundits relied on Commonwealth just as much as countries did. Opting out of the feed meant opting out of the global economy. No nation could afford a denial of service, so the carbon tax immediately became de facto international law.

  A few short years later, the decision remained controversial, but nobody could deny that carbon emissions were down and fossil fuels had been effectively phased out of mainstream use. Environmentalists crowed as unemployed oil workers protested. But only a handful of people on earth knew what Diana had done. That Dag had forced Rachel Leibovitz, Commonwealth’s legendary chairwoman, to implement the historic policy.

  Diana’s stomach twisted. She didn’t want to see the unread messages from Dag in her feed, didn’t want to feel the weight of obligation. She had been avoiding him since getting back from DC, getting home late, leaving early, and keeping conversation to a utilitarian minimum. More than anyone, he should understand that the mission required total focus and that he was a distraction. The fact that he did seem to understand, was happy to give her space even though she told him nothing about her work, was the most maddening thing of all. Guilt leaked around her blunt denial until she plugged it with the affirmation that spies couldn’t afford real relationships. She couldn’t help what she was.

  Pushing away the unwanted thoughts like spiderwebs, Diana stepped through the entrance and into the skyscraper. Her breath caught in her throat. She was standing in an atrium that took up the entire ground floor of the building and rose hundreds of feet into the air. But the cathedral space itself wasn’t as surprising as the dozens of fully grown redwoods that filled it. It was as if she had stepped off the downtown sidewalk and directly into the grove on Mount Tam. Artificial mist circulated through the trees’ upper branches, and flagstone paths connected the doors and scattered seating areas to a central elevator bank.

  Diana’s feed automatically logged her presence and authorization, prompting a welcome message. She dismissed it and hugged the bouquet to her chest. Much easier to secure an official excuse for being here than to try to outwit the world’s most sophisticated security apparatus.

  Her ears popped as the elevator whisked her up into the building’s highest reaches. Emerging into what appeared to be an art gallery, she maneuvered through various abstract installations interspersed with lounge areas where employees chatted or stared off into infinity, fingers twitching as they manipulated data in their feeds.

  The door to the conference room slid open at her approach. The interior was spacious and airy. Twelve chairs surrounded an oval table cut from a single piece of glass balanced on a granite boulder striated with tan and green mineral deposits. The entire far wall was a curved window. They were well above the fog, and its surface ebbed and flowed, the spires of the other Commonwealth skyscrapers rising from it like islands in a ghostly sea.

  Diana circled the table, appreciating the quality of the light, listening to the soft echoes of her footsteps, getting a feel for the space. She deposited the bouquet into the glass vase that had been set out for it and slid the arrangement into the center of the conference table. Because the vase and table were both entirely transparent, they created the illusion that the sunflowers were hovering a few inches above the apex of the boulder. The effect was beautiful and strange, dreamlike green stalks and vibrant petals invigorating the room with life and color.

  Summoning her feed, Diana ran a test. Audiovisual streams bloomed, each surveying the room from the perspective of one of the sunflowers. Seen from without, her own smile was a feral thing. Cut flowers were tributes to impermanence. But even as Commonwealth’s board members perceived the short-lived beauty of these sunflowers, they would themselves become objects of scrutiny.

  CHAPTER 7

  “We need to press the Prideful Seven harder,” continued a red-faced board member. “They’ve held out long enough. It’s time we extended the network into their territories. Mexico was supposed to be buttoned up years ago. What’s the problem? These people need their feeds to be faster, more reliable, more secure. Monopolizing hard fiber is a moat that nobody will be able to compete with.”

  Diana live-annotated the recording, dialing up visual opacity so it felt like she was staring out from the sunflowers. In the physical world, Diana was sitting in one of the lounge areas next to an impressionist sculpture the size and approximate shape of a bear made entirely from thousands of antique pennies. Having shrugged a blazer over her uniform, anyone walking by would see just another Commonwealth employee immersed in her feed. A few hundred feet away and behind closed doors, the board was two hours into their meeting, and things were getting heated.

  The Prid
eful Seven. Russia, Thailand, Iceland, Ethiopia, Mexico, China, and France all maintained their own domestic fiber-optic networks, with varying levels of performance. National leaders within the Prideful Seven considered their independence a point of pride, refusing Commonwealth’s repeated offers to update and standardize their physical telecommunications infrastructures.

  “A waste of time,” said Eddie Hsu, expression carefully composed. “That strategy is a straw man. Who cares whether or not we control the hard fiber? Everyone in the Prideful Seven still uses the feed. They’re just as dependent on us as anyone else. It’s the software that matters. The hardware is a diversion to keep them focused on the inessential. Extending Commonwealth fiber to the Prideful Seven is a PR stunt. We don’t need another moat against commercial competition. At this scale, political risks are the only real risks we face.”

  Age had etched wrinkles into Hsu’s weathered face, and his short gray hair and ramrod-straight posture gave him the appearance of an elderly general. But despite the fact that he’d orchestrated Taiwan’s political ascendancy over the preceding decades, he’d never held an official military or government position. Diana understood the value of pulling strings from behind the scenes, and Hsu was a master puppeteer. In fact, one of his only missteps had been to secure a major stake in Lowell Harding’s oil-and-gas empire right before the carbon tax had undermined the entire enterprise. Ever the pragmatist, Hsu had reinvested in Commonwealth via Taiwan’s sovereign wealth fund and now served as its representative on the board.

  “Look,” said Hsu, rubbing the pommel of his walking stick. “What we really need to do is organize back-channel conversations with governments and their UN representatives, assure them that the carbon tax was a . . . one-time thing. We’re not a threat to their authority. We’re not encroaching on their sovereignty. We’re a partner. We’re here to make it easier for them to run their own countries. This Lopez interview was a shot across the bow. If we don’t convince world leaders that we’re friendly and obedient, they’re going to ram new regulations down our throats.”

  “That’s the absolute last thing we should do.” All eyes turned to Javier Flores. Clad entirely in black leather, with dark-brown eyes, skin, and hair, his appearance might have looked affected if he didn’t inhabit it so comfortably. He was slim, and the slender fingers whose gestures illustrated his every word reminded Diana of a Javanese ballet dancer she’d slept with on a bender in Yogyakarta. “Open your eyes. Nation states are dying. The economy, the environment, the feed, everything is global now. Governments are so focused on ensuring their institutional survival that they’re failing the people they claim to serve. Even if they tried, they don’t have the tools to deal with global problems.”

  Javier was a Commonwealth alumnus, a star software architect who had dropped off the map after helping engineer the feed’s famously resilient security protocols. Three years ago, he’d reemerged at the head of a new foundation with a generous endowment and a sweeping mission statement. Investing the entire endowment in Commonwealth had earned him a seat at this table, where he lobbied tirelessly for user rights.

  But secrets defined people, and Diana knew some of Javier’s. He had spent the mysterious intervening years leading a group of activists who had hijacked the feed to manipulate what they saw as a broken system. Under the tutelage of mastermind Emily Kim, Javier and his team of hacker psychologists had finely tuned the feeds of linchpin individuals to sway major national policy decisions. Results included tax reforms that were empowering the middle class, liberalization of the draconian immigration laws implemented during the fall of the EU, better anti–human trafficking controls, and increased funding to education and scientific research. Nearly every progressive victory of the past decade could be traced back to Emily and Javier.

  It was the greatest heist in human history. They were stealing hearts and minds.

  But their crowning achievement had been their downfall. Having spent years tweaking Dag’s identity by carefully curating his feed, they hadn’t anticipated that their newest agent would slip the leash. Shocked at discovering that he was at once their tool and their target, Dag had gone to Rachel at Commonwealth. Trading knowledge of the security loophole Javier and Emily’s ploys depended on for implementation of the global carbon tax via Commonwealth terms of service, Dag had achieved their mission and disarmed them at the same time.

  Dag. Pride, awe, and yearning echoed within her. At his most vulnerable, at the moment when everything had been taken from him, Dag had discovered the capacity to fight for something bigger than himself. Picking up the shattered remnants of his life, he’d orchestrated a bloodless coup.

  Diana remembered her shock when Dag had offered his entire feed archive to her, desperate for an explanation of the dark forces manipulating him. A person’s feed archive contained their entire digital life, every binary breadcrumb, every piece of detritus from the journey from cradle to grave. Granting someone else access to your entire archive was the digital equivalent of unlocking your soul. It was a vault protecting your personal data, your most intimate moments. Javier and Emily had cracked those vaults to pursue their own idealistic ends. But what Dag had given Diana was different. It was a VIP pass to his own head, extended voluntarily without reservation or constraint.

  There were discrete classes of secrets. There were the personal kind, secrets that orbited an individual life like moons, their gravity shifting behavior as easily as tides. And then there were the heftier kind, secrets that were stitched into the very fabric of world affairs, that directed the course of nations. Dag’s had been both at the same time, which made it such a precious gift. There was only one other secret in her collection that might rival it.

  Maybe the legacy of that secret was what made her relationship with Dag unworkable. She had peeled away the layers and peered into the deepest corners of his life. But as transparent as he was to her, she was opaque to him. Her life was secrets. Her life was secret. And romance could not bridge such a divide.

  “Let Lopez rant,” said Javier, emotion building up in his voice. “Instituting the global carbon tax was the greatest political accomplishment of the century. Politicians sat around debating the merits of this or that approach to reducing carbon emissions for decades as we burned through fossil fuels like a junkie through hits. The fact that the tax was implemented in the Commonwealth terms of service and enforced by the threat of denial of service is the only thing that made real change possible. Our terms are policies, and those policies are a tool that actually works in the modern, interconnected world. So let’s bring those tools to bear and make that world a better place. Adapting to climate change. Reducing inequality. Improving education. Managing public health. Pushing forward scientific progress. These are global problems, problems only we can tackle. I have a plan to—”

  “Enough.” Silence fell like a curtain across the conference room. She might be an octogenarian, but Rachel’s voice still carried the undeniable clarity of command. Her hands were on the table, and her silver hair was tied back in a ponytail. A thick scar ran from cheekbone to forehead, the eye it bisected dull and gray. Her good eye, violet and imperious, fell on each board member in turn. “This is a board meeting, not a forum for stump speeches.”

  She stood.

  “We are adjourned,” she said.

  And that was that.

  As the board members collected their things, Diana deposited the latest tranche of annotated footage into Haruki’s cache. She was surprised to find a message waiting for her there.

  Focus on Rachel. We need a detailed file on her. Key relationships, daily routines, physical layouts of home and offices, etc. Full take.

  CHAPTER 8

  As the board members filed out of the conference room, Diana did some last-minute mental gymnastics. Finding another excuse to get back into Commonwealth would require extensive planning, but she could still take advantage of her day pass as a facilities contractor. She would need to have a conversation later with
Haruki about when and how to communicate changes to the project scope, but right now she had a window of opportunity if she acted quickly.

  Dismissing the surveillance streams from the sunflower recorders, she buttoned up her blazer and stood. She let her fingers brush the surface of the adjacent structure as she circled around it to intercept the group as they made their way to the elevators.

  She had to focus to keep her gait nonchalant as adrenaline flooded her system. Her senses sharpened. The pennies were cool to her touch, their textured edges tickling her skin. Instead of the typical HVAC staleness, the filtered air tasted clean and fresh. Her clothing hung loosely on her small frame, offering freedom of movement but risking getting caught on something if it came to a physical chase.

  Which it wouldn’t. Actually shadowing people was a far rarer occurrence in intelligence work than the general public assumed. Hot pursuits complete with parkour and fancy sports cars were, unfortunately, rarer still.

  “Do I know you?” Javier’s eyes were larger than they had appeared on her surveillance cam. His smile was friendly and curious. Behind him, the other participants walked to the elevators in ones or twos. Rachel was hanging back in the conference room, taking a call via feed. “I swear I recognize you from somewhere.”

  “I get that a lot,” said Diana, giving him a small smile. “I look like everybody’s cousin.”

  When Diana was a teenager, she’d envied beautiful people like Nell and Dag, whose looks made them magnets for attention. Her own banal appearance had driven her into hormone-laden bouts of depression. Average height, average weight, average everything. But she’d soon found that competence and intelligence were far more rewarding qualities. It was only years later, after settling under Helen’s wing, that she realized ugliness was not beauty’s opposite. Both extremes caught the eye, drew people in. The opposite of being beautiful was being common, for it attracted nothing but indifference. And that indifference was invaluable armor to a spy. Of course, the flip side was that people mistook you for the archetypal “someone.”

 

‹ Prev