by M. J. Locke
Jane shrugged. “As to the technology, you can install whatever controls you like so I don’t hack it.” She refrained from mentioning that she was pretty sure she could get Tania to circumvent their controls, if she chose. But she would honor her deal as long as they did.
“With regard to my influence, have you looked at my sammy cache? Have you been watching the news? Our ice was destroyed on my watch. Ten people have died, dozens injured, and many more are at risk. I’m facing a subpoena from Parliament. I am persona non grata. I’m reviled.” Her voice rose, despite herself; her breath grew short. With effort, she regained control. “But even if not, even if I still have friends in high places—and I admit I have an ally or two left—surely you must know that I honor my agreements. With something as sensitive and politicized as resource allocation, there is no way I could have been successful over the past three decades if I did not.”
Obyx glanced at Harbaugh, but Jane didn’t know what it signified.
“With regard to the feral…” she sighed. “I can’t lie. The notion of a free digital sapient being terrifies me. Humanity has kept the worst at bay for the past two centuries. We have become so dependent on our technology. With the feral, we might face our undoing.” She paused, the Voice ringing like distant bells in her thoughts. “But it seems to me that since we must face the Singularity someday, perhaps BitManSinger is a gift. A path through the vortex to the other side.”
She saw a swift look pass between Obyx and Harbaugh, and knew instantly why. “So—you did hack me!”
Once again, she had caught them unawares. Harbaugh started, mouth open. Obyx tried with limited success to appear indignant. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Sarah said, “Jane, what the hell are you talking about? Hacked you? Who hacked you?”
Jane replied, “I’ve been hearing voices, Sarah. Or rather, a Voice. Since the night before last. Somehow you figured it out—didn’t you?” she asked Obyx. “You detected that we had a feral sapient in our system. And in case your own plans to extract it weren’t successful, you wanted to neutralize me. To force me to believe I was having some premonition. Make me care. So I wouldn’t act to destroy it before you got someone in place to remove it.”
“You are quite mad.” But Obyx’s tone was not convincing.
“Perhaps. But it is a useful madness. You know”—she lifted a hand in a shrug—“I should probably hate you for what you have done. But I don’t. I should even thank you for it. You’ve given me a new outlook. Whatever you have put me in touch with”—she shook her head—“never mind. Let’s just say I find all kinds of possibilities opening up in my life, which is something I would never have expected at my age.
“So don’t worry. I won’t press charges, and I’ll still honor our deal. As long as you come clean about what you have done.”
A tense silence stretched. Finally Obyx said, “I will never underestimate you again.”
“That is wise.”
Obyx waved a hand. “Fill her in, James.” Harbaugh stared at Obyx as though trying to bore a hole through hir the way Sarah had stared at Jane earlier, but Obyx told him, “If we are going to make this deal, we have to make it with all our markers on deck.”
Harbaugh turned to Jane. “It was a mild hack. It wasn’t supposed to hurt you, or give you hallucinations, or anything. Just, as you said, make you care. Give you a sense of being connected to a greater whole. Open you up to new possibilities, to a different way of looking at things.”
Jane barked a laugh. “Oh, it did that, all right. And that little exchange at the memorial: that was just you jerking my chain, eh?”
Harbaugh merely looked at her, discomfited.
“That was my idea,” Obyx said. “To reinforce the programming.”
“Just being a good soldier, eh?” she told Harbaugh. To Obyx, she said, “So. Here’s a rider on our agreement. You ever mess with my neurochemistry again, and I will not rest till I bring you down. Mind-hacking is a serious crime, and I will pursue it. I will use every last shred of my power, every last connection I have left, to take your organization apart, piece by piece, and leave you with nothing. Even if it kills me. Understand?”
Obyx and Jane studied each other for a long, tense moment. Then Obyx gave a single nod. “Fair enough.”
Sarah was eyeing them both. She did not look happy. “Where does all this leave us?”
“Let’s review terms,” Obyx said. “You want all my resources at your disposal to produce your anti-‘Stroiders’ hack. When do you need it?”
“Right away.”
Obyx lifted hir eyebrows at Harbaugh, who said, “It so happens that we occasionally have need of such a technology. We have it on hand.”
“And in return you agree to keep silent about your suspicions regarding the feral sapient,” Obyx said, “and to give us a berth on Sisyphus, to use as we see fit, no questions asked. Without alerting anyone that something out of the ordinary might be happening.”
“Yes.”
Obyx looked at her askance, as though doubtful she could bring herself to do such a thing. Ze extended both upper sets of hands, and Jane brushed hands with hir, both right and left, thinking, and now I’ve made my own deal with the devil. Sarah was shaking her head in dismay.
“Draw up the papers for us, won’t you?” Obyx said to Sarah. “For your usual fee.”
“I think I deserve hazardous duty pay for this one,” Sarah muttered.
While Sarah and Obyx stayed behind to discuss other matters, Harbaugh took Jane down the way to outfit her waveware. Jane felt as if she were walking through an amusement park ride that had gone overboard with the biologicals. Inside one room they passed she got a glimpse of someone in a nutrient cocoon, reaching out to adjust a monitor, and realized that that must be how they hacked themselves.
Harbaugh took her to a chamber with several different nooks and technology stations. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing at a chair. “This will only take a few minutes. What waveware do you use?”
She removed her ear unit and handed it to him.
“It’s Intel’s latest quantum processor, I forget the model. Plenty of free memory—I keep it clean. I have a cortical interface with standard gold and an RS-1482 bus.” She tipped her head to show him the tiny gold connector that rested in her ear canal.
“Good. This will just take a minute.” He pulled down a screen and plugged her computer into it, and started the download. Then he leaned against the counter, arms folded, eyeing her. She sensed he did not truly trust her.
“Was Ivan Kovak really a Viridian?” she asked.
“Depends on your definition. He wasn’t modded. But he and his family attended services occasionally. We never turn people away.”
“I can’t help wondering about him,” Jane said. “He surely knew he would not be able to get out alive. The mob doesn’t inspire the obsessive, delusional sort of mind-set that leads people to throw their lives away in a grand gesture. What could have led him to end his life in such a way?”
Harbaugh frowned. “From everything I saw, up till near the end, he seemed … content. He loved his spouses; he loved his kids. They had money struggles—they were trying to survive as artists by doing skilled and unskilled labor. But of the three partners, he seemed least disturbed by it. He said to me one time that wealth begins when your belly is full, which always struck me as a healthy attitude.” He shrugged. “All I can surmise is that the financial strain ultimately split the partnership, and their leaving broke him. They were everything to him. The kids especially.”
Jane shook her head, lips pursed. “Learned, we don’t have firm proof yet, but the police are convinced that the Ogilvies used their connection with him from his days on Vesta. They promised him that his family would be provided for if he would do this thing.”
She could tell she had shocked him. “What makes you think so?”
She recapped what she knew, including how Marty’s death seemed connected to the attempt to cover up a
meeting in Kovak’s old neighborhood. “From everything you’ve told me,” she said, “he seemed a decent sort, and not easily bribed. The most likely alternative, then, is extortion. Blackmail.”
Harbaugh looked troubled. “If that is true, and you are able to find evidence, then we will want to know.”
“If you will allow me access to the city web to check my e-mail, I may be able to confirm it now,” she said. Harbaugh eyed her speculatively.
“All right. Let’s finish the installation first.” He looked back at the monitor. “And … it’s done.”
Harbaugh removed her ear unit from its slot in the station and handed it back to her; she plugged it in, hooked it back over her ear, and got a bad case of reboot nerves—sparks in her vision, tinnitus, a tingling in her fingers and toes. Then her waveware settled down. She wiggled her hands and feet, twitched muscles here and there; her menus and her heads-up overlay responded as usual. Some shiny new icons appeared in her waveface, beneath her usual suite. A sapient appeared: a luminescent spider with a human face. Harbaugh said, “The program is named Arachnid. It is pretty straightforward. Just follow the instructions that pop up. It records directly from your visual and auditory nerves. You can test the antisurveillance disabler first, if you like, and check your e-mail at the same time.”
“Where is the data stored?” she asked.
“The default is to beam the video to multiple social and news sites throughout the Solar Wave, where it gets scooped up by the Upside-Down folks and folded into ‘Stroiders’ as they do with other tourist and supplemental material. However, under Preferences you can choose whether to livestream it to the wave, or to simply archive it.”
“Is it archived locally, or beamed out onto the Solar wave?”
“It’s stored locally with two remote mirrors. I understand your concern. Since we only have the one trunk line up to the surface, and it is currently under repair, there is a small risk that your recordings could be hacked and deleted before escaping into the Solar wave. But our firewalls are the best there are, and it won’t be long till the transmission cable is repaired. Phocaea owns twenty percent of Upside-Down’s transmission capacity, and we find that sufficient for avoiding destruction of information. You saw for yourself how hard it was to stop the feral from escaping, and that would have been a much, much bigger packet dispersal than we are talking about with snippets of video and audio.”
“It will have to do. Good enough.”
She downloaded her e-mail. She had a message from Masahiro Takei. She opened it, and read: “Here are the files you requested, from three different Uraniaville loci that fit your parameters. Hope they are of use.”
“This may be it, but it will take me a few minutes to review,” she told Harbaugh. “I’ll call you if I find the proof you ask.”
“Take your time.” He stepped out.
She played Takei’s recordings at 4x speed. They were all of a fourteen-minute stretch of time. All three showed different angles on a location at or near a grocery kiosk. The neighborhood in question must not get much mote or mite activity, because there was no sound. All three showed Ivan Kovak shopping at the kiosk, and walking away from the kiosk with his groceries, holding the hand of a little girl, maybe seven or eight, who resembled him. She must have been his daughter.
It was certainly interesting that Kovak showed up in the video. But why go to the trouble of killing Marty over a shot as trivial as this? She put in a call to Masahiro again. To her delight, a bar crawled across her screen, scanning the transmission and confirming it as surveillance-free. She began to understand Sarah’s appreciation of the Viridians.
“Masahiro-san,” she said, “am I remembering correctly that some ‘Stroiders’ subscribers Downside record their experiences while plugged in, and later share them with their buddies?”
“Yes, there are several such sites, as with other commercially successful waveworlds. They are quite popular. Some even insert themselves into the action, and play with the outcomes. A whole secondary economy has grown up around the phenomenon.”
Jane suppressed a shudder. As always, the notion of being used as a doll in other peoples’ inwave fantasies gave her a case of the grues. “Could you poke around some of those sites and see if you can find any downloaded video/audio recordings made before the disaster—as close as possible to when the event took place?”
He seemed perplexed. “But they will be much lower quality, and there is a possibility of their having been hacked in some way.”
“For my purposes, that won’t matter. Do what you can.”
Harbaugh was in a chamber down the way, with Thondu. Jane paused at the door. They stood at a computer and had not yet noticed Jane’s presence. Thondu was looking down at the clusters of biocrystals that made up the computer bank, and hir hand rested on hir belly.
“Will it be OK? If anything were to happen to me—”
“Don’t worry.” Harbaugh rested a hand on Thondu’s shoulder. “We’ll keep the backup safe. If your experimental version fails to thrive, you’ll still have the genetic map, too, which can be decoded and reconstituted in digital form on one of our servers, once you are back on Earth.”
“But it’s untested tech.”
Jane cleared her throat. Both started. Thondu looked aghast at the sight of her, but Harbaugh shook his head. “It’s all right. We have an arrangement.”
Jane looked at the glittering crystals and tubes. “So this is it, eh?” Harbaugh nodded.
Jane thought of her dream, and the fetus trapped in the crystal. She realized that this was the moment the Voice had warned her of. Are you done with me so soon? she thought, and felt relieved, and a bit sad.
So be it; she was glad to shed the role of prophet. She said to Harbaugh, “I have more research to do before I can provide you with that information we spoke of,” she said. “I’ll get it to you as soon as I have it.”
* * *
On their return to Heavitown, Sarah was excruciatingly monosyllabic. Jane realized she was still angry over Jane’s scene with Obyx. They reached the Promenade, and she said a curt good-bye. Jane touched her arm. “I’m sorry for surprising you like that.”
Sarah frowned. “OK, here’s the deal. Next time you want my help, I need to know what you are up to ahead of time. With an opportunity for me to advise you on the legal ramifications—and even decide whether I want to be involved!”
Jane winced. “You’re right. I screwed up. I should have told you. But it’s not that simple.” She sought for a way to explain. “I’m operating on instinct, Sarah. I didn’t know quite what I wanted to say to Obyx till I had hir in front of me. I just knew I needed to talk to hir, and there you were with a way to reach hir. Perhaps I shouldn’t have involved you. But I didn’t see any other way. Nor any way to explain it that would have made sense.”
Sarah sighed. After a pause, she said, “It was good that I was there. Ze’ll trust you better, because ze knows ze can trust me.” She slugged Jane lightly. “Just keep me in the loop.”
Jane made an X over her heart. “I will. I promise.”
25
The ship’s engines kicked in: deceleration had begun. Xuan had maybe another twenty minutes before they touched down. While he waited, Xuan studied the stroid’s stats from the original claim.
The original prospector had extensively surveyed it. The stroid was primarily metal ore. It was a big one: about three by three by ten kilometers in size, roughly barbell-shaped. Its albedo was high—typical for nickel-iron rocks. Its mean density had been 5.8 grams per cubic centimeter—nearly three times Phocaea’s. One end of the barbell consisted of a big lump of crumbly silicates; the result of a collision with a silica rock sometime in the distant past. But the bulk of the stroid was high-grade ore.
When the claim was first filed, a hundred fifty years ago, the stroid’s mass was 16,300 gigatons. Its gravitational pull had been a little less than a thousandth of a gee back then, comparable to that of larger but less dense, silica
te-based Phocaea. Now, of course, as a mined claim, its mass would be reduced, and thus so would its gravitational pull. How much less was the billion-troy question. The extent of gravitational decrease gave astrogeologists their first estimate at how much ice a tapped-out claim might have. The lower-gee the rock, in comparison to its pre-mined gee, the more porous it was now—and thus, the more ice its tunnels could hold. In short: lower gee, more sugar.
Just because the rock had lots of tunnels did not mean that all those tunnels would be filled with ice. But you had to start somewhere. So you always started with a gravitational survey, and subtracted that measurement from the original-claim gee.
The general rule was: over two-thirds, holdin’ a turd. Sugar-rock prospectors didn’t bother going any further with a claim, unless its tapped-out gravity was below about sixty-five or seventy percent of the original. It took a lot more disassembler to process rock than it did ice, and when the number of pores was too few, the amount of energy needed to mine the ice was greater than the energy locked up in it.
If the tapped-out stroid’s gravity was substantially lighter than the original survey gee, on the other hand, this was a big flag that the rock had sugar-rock potential. They would then expect him to do seismic testing to calculate how much of the rock’s void space was filled with ice. And those results would be exceedingly difficult to falsify. No, the simplest way to shut this expedition down would be to falsify the stroid’s gravitation. And Xuan knew of a way. As long as he could make the sleight-of-hand work.
Xuan felt the deceleration and vibrations that meant they were approaching their target; a lurch and a thud meant they had touched down. Mr. Mills radioed Xuan, instructing him to suit up and meet the others in the cargo bay. When he got there, Mills was nowhere to be seen. The pilot and the four—well, cargo workers, Xuan supposed he should call them, though he was unable to think of them now as anything other than thugs—were there, however. And it did not escape his notice that they all carried sidearms. As they gathered Xuan’s field equipment and stacked it at the hatch, Xuan sensed the pilot looking at him, as if daring him to say something about the weapons. Xuan played dumb.
