The engineer stood aside while Brandon scanned the room. The skunks were lined up up against the far wall: three waist-high OAF cabinets, two without covers, all looking dusty and untouched for months.
“Who can open this door?”
Horst shrugged and jiggled the keys in his hand. “Facilities, period. This is their ring. I don’t even have the key anymore. Whatever’s in here is going to salvage as soon as somebody finds time to push the paper. Those machines were parts units until we went to Rev 3. Now they’re just junk.”
Brandon strode across the lab, edged around a bench, and stood in front of the silent OAFs. One machine had been so stripped of parts that he could see the rear wall through its frame. It didn’t even have a platen. Brandon hit the top cover latches on the other two and pulled out his tapper. There were loose wires under the covers of both machines. “Pyxis, scan the barcodes and tell me which serial matches the one Marty’s people identified.”
He held the tapper up so that its camera lens could see the barcodes. The tapper’s flash fired. Pyxis answered immediately. “It’s the unit on the right.”
Brandon knelt beside the machine and plugged its power cord into the wall. He slammed the top cover closed and poked the power button. The display panel flashed white. Instead of the default OAF AI, the panel displayed a zombie in bloody rags, leaning crookedly against an opened coffin.
“I’m a parts unit. Don’t expect me to do much. Essential systems may be damaged or missing.” The zombie’s left arm came loose at the shoulder and thumped to the ground. Slime oozed from the protruding end. “Whoops.”
Brandon closed his eyes and rubbed his right temple. “Horst, did you pay people to write this crap?”
The gray-haired engineer shrugged. “Hey, young people like zombies. If they meet their schedules, should I care?”
“Never mind. Parts unit: What systems are missing?”
The zombie touched a blackened finger to its chin as though thinking. “Um…that would be most of them.” Its second arm fell off at the shoulder and joined the other in the dirt. “Whoops again. I guess now I can’t come for your brains.”
Brandon looked down at the database query on his tapper, with Pyxis fidgeting in the window above it. The serial matched. Beside it was the Plasmanet Internal Security System ID code, a 64-digit hexadecimal value that uniquely identified every Plasmanet device ever made—or that ever would be made, given that there were as many possible codes as atoms in the observable universe. Without a verifiable code, Plasma Object-Oriented Networking would not begin an object transfer.
“Display the Plasma ID.”
The zombie shook its head. “Nuh-uh. Got the POON driver here but somebody pulled my TANG last November.”
“TANG? You’re kidding, right?”
Horst edged past Brandon and pulled the OAF away from the wall. “Terabyte Autonomous Networking Gadget. Internal slang for a self-contained removable Plasma board. We use them in-house on concept lashups and prototypes. Production machines have the Plasma logic on the main controller.” He peered at the back panel. “Yup. The slot’s empty. No TANG, no Plasmanet port. This machine hasn’t been talking to anybody since last year.”
Another dead end, with a zombie to prove it. “Then where did it go?”
Horst shrugged. “The team probably plugged it into another one of the Rev 1 alpha prototypes.”
Brandon closed his eyes for long seconds. “Oh boy.” He leaned back against a dusty lab bench. November, yes. Sliding down a thorny slope toward divorce, he had tried to make up for a very grouchy season by offering his wife’s miser of a boss a very sweet deal on Zertek’s upcoming OAF 3100 product. He looked at the floor, shaking off a sudden urge to punch a hole in the drywall. “Crap.”
“Brandon?”
Brandon stood straight and took a deep breath. “Look, Horst, this is important. Find me a new-build OAF 3107 and some guys to put it on a truck. Do it today. I’ll pay for the box but I’ll still owe you big.” He pulled his tapper from his pocket. “Install at Marietta & Mazarkos.” He held his tapper forward. Horst pulled his tapper from a belt holster and tapped it against Brandon’s.
“Didn’t we loan them a Rev 1 prototype last year?”
“Yes. I did.”
“And it’s still there?”
“It sure is.”
“Whoa. TANG boards have admin auth codes in the firmware that don’t time out. Hook it up and it’s automatically in. I’ll bet you’re thinking what I’m thinking.”
Brandon nodded and looked at his watch, and started toward the door without another word.
20: Carolyn
“You could have called.” Carolyn stood in her kitchen doorway, a wooden spoon in her hand and the smell of stir-fry everywhere around her. She was eye-to-eye with a man she had not seen since August and had wished aloud many times never to see again.
But there he was, standing on their stoop (my stoop!) in that same old suit and that awful Army haircut. What the hell…
“Sorry. I need to talk to you. Our last call didn’t go very well.”
“And whose fault was that?”
He took a deep breath. “Look, I’ll apologize if it’ll help.”
She wanted to scream. “Is that some battle tactic they taught you at OCS? Ignore me, cut me off, ridicule me, humiliate me, and then launch a canned apology to get off the hook? We’ve been there before.”
He held up one hand. “Guilty. Let it go. I have to talk to you. It’s important. My job’s on the line.”
Carolyn felt a pang of…guilt? Vindication? It’s the OAF. I got him in trouble. Serves him right. “You should have called. You really should have called.”
“I need…a favor.”
“Well. That’s a switch.”
He broke eye contact first, wow. “It’s true. You could help me with something that I haven’t been able to fix. If I can’t fix it, I’m unemployed.”
They stood in silence for long seconds, he on the stoop and she on the linoleum. At last she stepped back, and pointed inside with the wooden spoon.
She pulled his old chair back from the kitchen table. He looked at it oddly, and hesitated before sitting down. Carolyn guessed what had surprised him: The place in front of it was not piled high with…stuff. She turned the gas off on the stove, spun the spoon through the stir-fry a time or two, then pulled her own chair out and sat.
He glanced toward the stove. “You’re cooking again.”
She shrugged. “TV dinners still suck.” She’d muttered a complaint all the way back in June, at the lawyer’s office—and he recalled it. Scary. “Besides, I’ve got a boarder from Belarus now.”
“Whose intern did he turn out to be?”
“Don’t know. I guess we’ll find out when Cosmo drops him off.” She sat back in her chair, arms crossed. “Your move.”
“Ok. First of all, you’ve got another OAF coming out, probably tomorrow. It’s right off the line, brand-new production unit, not a prototype. The tech will migrate your data over and then stand in the corner and watch until you’re sure that it’s all there and it all works. My group will pick up the lease for two years.”
He paused. Carolyn tightened inside. What did he want, a thank-you kiss?
“I’ll throw in six toner cartridges.”
“Gee, thanks.” She owed him big before. Now she would owe him even bigger. Figures. “I’ll still have to call you when it breaks.”
“No. It’s not a lab machine. You just call the 800 number on the lid sticker for service, or tell the AI to. You’ll never have to talk to me again.”
“Promise?”
He was trying to smile, and not doing well. “Promise. Unless you want to.”
“Don’t wait up.” She pulled a paper crane from the pile of oddments at the center of the table and twiddled it between her fingers. “What’s the favor?”
He leaned back, looked up at the ceiling, and sighed. “Someone broke into Plasmanet last Friday, while we were in t
he middle of a line start. Whoever it was dropped a core bomb in the factory controller farm. The factory AI ran out of cores and panicked. We were picking up the wreckage until this morning.”
“Okayyyy…”
“My security team traced the intrusion to the OAF at Marietta & Mazarakos.”
Carolyn felt herself tighten inside. “So it’s still my fault.”
“No! No, really. It was my fault. The prototype machine I sent out last fall had a special comm board in it. It’s a sort of engineering test jig, and short-circuits just about all of Plasmanet security. It was never supposed to go off company property. Hell, it was never supposed to go outside a locked lab. We might as well have hung a Plasmanet cable out the window.”
“Well, that was certainly a mistake.”
Brandon nodded. “It was. Biggest damned mistake of my life.”
“Bigger than marrying me?” Carolyn remembered all their talk about mistakes and blunders and misunderstandings during their failed counseling sessions.
“Marrying you was not a mistake.”
“Ever since you got out of the Army you’ve been acting like it was.”
He looked down. “I was learning a new career. Corporate management is like war without bullets. No matter what you do, you can’t win. I was grouchy.”
“I’ll say. So what favor do you need?”
He took a long time answering. “I need to know who used the OAF at M&M.”
Huh? Carolyn couldn’t figure it. “Ummm…maybe all of us?”
He waved his hands in the air. “No. Who used it who wasn’t on staff? Interns? Friends? Could anyone have shared their OAF logins with outsiders?”
“Like I would know?” Carolyn felt real anger this time. No matter what she did, it all came back to her. Had she been supposed to post an armed guard in front of it? “Ethel and I watched it like hawks. I knew it was a gift. Strings, y’know? You asked The Norm. He didn’t ask me. I didn’t want the gift. Certainly not a gift from you!”
Carolyn heard the kitchen door open. She looked over her shoulder. Stypek stood in front of the door, mouth open and wide-eyed. The whine of Cosmo’s maladjusted old Volt faded into the distance.
“Baroness! Baron? Wait, Cosmo explained. You’re not a baron. You’re a colonel. The mapping was bad. ‘Brandon’ mapped to ‘baron’ and I was insufficiently sensitive. Colonel Romero, I am honored to meet you.” He bowed from the waist.
Carolyn watched Brandon push back from the table, and give her a sidelong glance that almost screamed What did you do now? His smile to Stypek was lukewarm. “I wish I were still a colonel.” He stood. “Sorry, I forgot your name. Did Marcella find out who you’re working for?”
The odd man shook his head. “Stypek. Bartholomew Stypek, as the correct mapping would have it.” He bowed again. “Marcella searched while I was trained to be sensitive, to no avail. Cosmo decided that I would work for him.” He pointed at the badge hanging on a lanyard, from which his own goofy photo stared. “I was granted the Badge of Power. The doors obey it.”
Brandon rubbed his chin. “The doors do. Some doors are too smart by half.” Carolyn sensed his trademark suspicion. Uh-oh… “Now, Mr. Stypek, what exactly did your education cover?”
He almost beamed. “I was trained in spellbending by…umm…adept, um, no, Dr…Phil Izeptlek, far away in my own land.”
Brandon nodded. “Spellbending?”
Stypek looked up and bit his lip. “I alter structures…” He looked at Carolyn. “…of soft wear; um, software, to turn their operation in a different direction from what the adepts, um, scientists?” Carolyn shook her head vigorously. “To what their creators intended.”
“In other words, you’re a hacker.”
“Brandon, it’s not what you think!”
Stypek smiled. “Hacker. A cutter and hammerer…a smith. Yes! Of soft wear. Of the analog to magic that controls the prime mover, electricity.”
“Like all the tools and robots in Building 800.”
Stypek seemed puzzled. “Robots? Zombies of…metal?”
“He had nothing to do with it!” Carolyn shoved her chair back and stood.
“And you’re an expert on hackers?”
“I’m not the one who let the magic circuit board out the door!”
“Magic?” Stypek asked in a startled voice. “Not here. It could not have been magic. I do hope.”
“No. It’s not magic. It’s just the perfect way to break into the most secure network the country’s ever built.” Brandon pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket.
“No fracking way!” Carolyn took the three steps toward Brandon and grabbed the phone out of his hand. He reached to grab it back. She tucked it between the buttons on her blouse so that it slipped into her bra. “Get out!”
“What is he, your lover?”
“He’s my boarder. He’s my…friend.” Carolyn winced. That had not been the absolute best thing to say. “Get out.”
“And he used your affection to get himself a badge into my factory!”
“Affection! I was doing you a favor, you idiot! Cosmo said he was working for you!”
He held out his hand for the phone. “I’m going to find out who he’s working for.”
Carolyn grabbed a cast-iron #7 frying pan out of the drainer and held it with both hands. She stared at him with cold hatred. “How about this: A Zertek vice president sneaks a machine with a back door off the campus, and tells his Eastern European masters that the connection’s open for business.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“He even sets up a fall guy to take the rap!” Carolyn looked briefly at Stypek, who was backing up against the refrigerator.
“Nobody will believe that!”
“The FBI has a cybercrime hotline. We can find out.”
“And they’ll believe a copywriter at a two-bit ad agency owned by a miser and a corpse?”
“Maybe they’ll believe the woman who was his wife for twenty-three years!”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Call the cops on him and I will!”
Carolyn sensed odd motion and looked toward the refrigerator. Stypek had drawn his LED-infested magic wand out of his shirt, and raised it as he had done the night the OAF died. She started to yell, “Put that down!”
Too late. Faster than Carolyn thought possible, Brandon tackled Stypek. The odd man dropped the wand and fell backwards against the kitchen desk, knocking books and paper cranes and empty doughnut boxes to the floor before collapsing in a heap. The wand rolled away in a broad arc toward the kitchen table. Carolyn dropped the frying pan, fell to one knee and reached for the wand. Brandon scrambled toward her and tried to grab her ankle. She kicked wildly, her shoe pivoting off her foot and striking Brandon on the side of his head.
Carolyn’s kick had knocked her off balance, and she fell forward onto her elbows, her breath chuffing out, the wand below her. Brandon grasped her left forearm and pulled hard. Carolyn flipped onto her back, both hands clasped tight over the hilt of the wand.
Brandon covered both her hands with his and squeezed. “Let go of that. You have no idea what it is.”
“Neither do you!”
“Set it off and it could kill us both!”
Stypek crawled toward them. He stopped barely a foot away, rubbing one hip. “The wereglass is not a weapon,” he said. “And this is unseemly.”
Carolyn refused to release the wand. She felt her knuckles crack under Brandon’s grip. “You don’t want to hurt me. Let go!”
The pressure of his hands over hers was heavy but controlled. “I’ve never wanted to hurt you. Let go.”
Stypek reached toward the tapered end of the glass wand. “This could be an opportunity. Or two. It won’t hurt. Don’t let go.” Carolyn watched his hand close around two of the pulsing blue LEDs.
Prrrrrrrang!
Two deafening notes filled the room, one high and pure, one deeper and rougher, locked together in a thrumming vibrato that shook Carolyn’
s guts. Brandon let go of her hands and shoved himself away from Carolyn, who dropped the wand and fell on one hip. The sound lingered for some seconds, and vanished. Carolyn felt a prickle like electricity race and dance over her skin, surging from every part of her body to the crown of her head. For a moment it seemed like her hair was standing on end.
Stypek picked the wand up from the floor, and wasted no time tucking it back in his shirt.
“What was that?” Brandon looked at his hands, then ran one hand over the thin ends of his buzz cut. He looked sourly at Stypek, who again edged back toward the refrigerator.
Carolyn picked up the frying pan and got to her feet. “Don’t you recognize it? After all that crap you used to read about ‘nonlethal deterrents’? Get out.”
“Some deterrent.”
“You let go, didn’t you? He was afraid you were going to hurt me. Get out!”
Brandon grunted. “So he is your lover.”
Carolyn pointed at Stypek with the frying pan. “You. Go to your room.” She turned to Brandon. “You. Get out!” Brandon held out his hand again. Carolyn dug two fingers between her buttons and fished out his phone. “Remember what I said about calling the cops.”
He nodded as he took the phone and left the kitchen, closing the door behind him. Carolyn watched him rub the top of his head while he walked toward his car, and then tap the RX9’s door handle lightly, as though trying to ground a static charge picked up by scuffing over wool carpeting.
21: Stypek
Trust the Continuum, Tuggurr had said. Sure. And how had that gone? Stypek pulled the wereglass out of his shirt and laid it on the bed, among the piles of fine clothing that Queen Neuitha had gathered for him. Four lights now danced in its depths. With both Carolyn’s and Lord Romero’s hands on its hilt to draw the Continuum’s attention, Stypek had taken a huge chance: He had released two Opportunities, one for each, with the wish and in the hope that they might reconcile.
As best he could tell, the Continuum had done nothing at all.
At least they didn’t bash one another’s brains out, which was some consolation. But Lord Romero now thought he was a spy, and—worse—Carolyn’s paramour. Lord Romero was a strong man, fast, and certain. He could have snapped Stypek’s neck as easily as a goose’s. That he did not suggested that other uses for Stypek had occurred to him. Stypek had not seen any genuine zombies in this universe, though one of Cosmo’s fellow adepts (Dr. Arenberg?) bore a striking resemblance. Mapping still had its occasional gaps, especially for things with no clear analog in his own universe. The word “intern” suggested “enthusiastic slave” as much as anything else. Remaining a live slave was certainly preferable to becoming a dead one.
Ten Gentle Opportunities Page 14
