As she spoke, we continued down the corridor, looking from side to side at the many doors as we went.
Suddenly Buddy muttered, "Aha," and we stopped in front of one doorway that was, as far as I could see, identical to all the others. I considered asking Buddy how she knew this was it, but decided against it.
"Okay," Buddy murmured, more to herself than to me, "this is where things get interesting." The alabaster-skinned arm of Buddy's icon reached into my field of vision. The slender hand held a scalpel whose blade glittered like diamond. With great delicacy, Buddy ran the scalpel down the shimmering barrier that blocked the door, from the top of the frame all the way down to the floor. The barrier sizzled and parted like a curtain as the scalpel blade passed. When the scalpel reached the ground, the barrier vanished totally.
What came next happened so fast that I could barely grasp it at the time. At the instant the barrier blinked out of existence, a shadowy figure leaped out into the hallway right past us. As it sprinted away, I thought my sanity had cracked: the figure was a vintage, Wild West-era U.S. sheriff, spurs and hat and badge and all.
Buddy responded instantly. My field of vision snapped around, and Buddy's arm again came into view.
But this time it was clutching a huge, fragging hogleg of a six-shooter revolver. She steadied the brutal piece of ordnance with her other hand, and squeezed off a single shot, taking the "sheriff" in the back of the neck. The slug knocked him clean off his feet, and when he hit the ground, the figure flickered and vanished. His dusty-brimmed hat, which the impact had knocked off his head, lasted an instant longer, then it too flickered into non-existence. Buddy opened her hand, and the six-shooter was gone.
"What the frag was that?" I demanded breathlessly.
"Life and death in the Matrix, cobber," she said jauntily. "There was white ice on the doorway. When I broke through, it tried to trigger a trace program, but I unofficially canceled it. No strain."
If I could have shaken my head, I would have. "Are you sure it wasn't another decker?" I asked.
"No way," she shot back. "Any decker worthy of the name would have stayed to duke it out." I remembered the hogleg roaring in Buddy's icon's hand, and was silently grateful that we hadn't gotten involved in any decker dogfights.
When we stepped through the open door and into the space beyond, I think I gasped out loud in amazement. From the scale of the corridor, I'd expected the typical three-meter-square wage-slave office.
The Matrix had done it to me again. We were in a space that could only just be called a room. The walls were slightly farther apart than the width of the doorway, but they extended away ahead of us and upward until they merged at infinity. And those walls were like something out of tequila-fueled nightmare. They seemed to be made of different-sized rectangular blocks, each filled with a swirling cloud of glowing characters, some just zeroes and ones, some alphanumeric, and some Greek symbols and happy-faces and other drek (encrypted files maybe?).
Buddy, predictably, didn't waste a moment rubbernecking, which meant I couldn't see as much of this strange space as I wanted to. She just walked along slowly, running the palms of her perfect hands along the surfaces of those infinite walls. "Lolita Yzerman, right?" she asked.
I tried to nod, vainly, of course. "You got it," I told her.
We stopped, and turned our merged perceptions to face one wall. Buddy laid both palms against it, and the two blocks she touched glowed brightly. "Getting warm," she murmured. With no warning, as though it were the most natural thing in the world-and in this world, it might well be-we lifted from the ground and floated straight upward. As we climbed, Buddy touched one block after the other, coaxing each to a brilliant glow under her fingers.
Finally we stopped. "Lolita Yzerman," Buddy announced. She reached out to touch one particular block in front of us, and it flared ruby red. Then she extended her hands though the wall of the block, and the characters within swirled like a data dust-storm around her fingers. "Can you download the files?" I asked. "No chance. That would trigger drek like you've never seen. We can browse, though."
"Do it," I told her.
It was as if somebody had placed a transparent computer display in front of my eyes. I could still see the wall and Buddy's hands, but superimposed over it was brilliant amber text scrolling by so fast I could make no sense of it. "Can you slow it down?" I asked.
Buddy snorted, but the text did slow its frenetic scrolling. Not enough for me to read it, though. I debated asking again, but decided against it. Buddy knew what we were looking for as well as I did, and she'd be more likely than me to spot paydata anyway. I kept my silence. "Your chummer wasn't high up in the hierarchy, was she?" Buddy asked.
I tried to shrug. "I don't know. Why do you ask that?"
"This is all petty drek she was assigned to," Buddy said. "Acquaintances of suspected tax evaders.
Nothing worth getting flatlined over. It's all small, sordid stuff."
I remembered the efforts that my mysterious X had gone to. Nothing small, sordid, or petty there.
"There's something else," I said firmly. "If you dig deeper, it'll be there."
Buddy didn't answer, but her silence was a rebuke in itself. The scrolling text picked up speed again, and I knew better than to complain. The text blurred by for several more seconds, then stopped abruptly. I heard breath hiss through Buddy's teeth in surprise and frustration.
"What's up?" I asked.
"Shut up," was all she would say, in true Buddy style. She pulled one hand out from the wall and inserted it into another block. More text flashed in front of my eyes, this time jade green and laid out in the format of a directory listing, but still scrolling too fast for me to read. She pulled her other hand out, drove it into another block. Another blurred directory listing, another hiss of anger from Buddy. Then she drew both hands out of the wall and all the blocks went dull again. "Frag!" she spat out.
A big red push-button appeared in the air in front of us. Buddy stabbed it with a slender finger.
And we were back in the real world. I was sitting on the chair in Buddy's apartment, my hands locked in a death-grip on the seat. Buddy-the real, walking-dead Buddy-squatted on the floor in front of me, her cadaverous face in a frown. She pulled the jack out of her temple and set her cyberdeck aside.
"What the frag happened?" I demanded. Buddy didn't answer, just went about neatly coiling the jack's optical fiber. I undid the chin strap and pulled the crown-of-thorns contraption off my head, dumped it unceremoniously on the floor. "What happened?" I insisted.
Buddy shot to her feet and began to pace jerkily about the apartment. Out of the Matrix and in her meat body, the old familiar paranoid Buddy was back. "Dead-ended," she said at last. "What do you mean?"
She dropped to the floor again, sinking back into lotus, clutching her knees with both hands and rocking back and forth with barely restrained anger. "Records are gone," she said. "Not deleted. Gone."
That didn't make any sense, of course. I bit back on my own frustration, struggled to keep my voice calming. "Buddy," I murmured, "I need you, chummer. You've got to tell me what you mean. What did you find? Use simple words, omae, like you're talking to a baby. Okay?"
Buddy continued her rocking for a few moments, and I was afraid I hadn't got through. But then I saw the tension go out of her body. She looked up and flashed me another strobe-light smile. "You know what your chummer did at Avatar, right?" she asked, and her voice was almost as relaxed as it had been in the Matrix. "She washed dataline taps."
"Signal enhancement," Buddy confirmed. "They keep two copies of everything. The original tap record and the enhanced version. Okay?" I nodded. "They also keep records of who worked on what tap and what the case was."
"And...?" I prompted. "And most of those records are gone," Buddy said.
"The original tap data she was working on and her enhanced version."
"Deleted?"
"Not deleted," she said firmly. "When a file's deleted normally,
there's a Delete flag set to show that a file was there and to record who authorized the deletion. No flags, no flags anywhere. The records are just gone. As far as the system's concerned, they were never present at all."
"But they were?" I said, confused.
"Of course they fragging were. On the file level, there's no record. Down at the level of the storage media, there's a number of clusters that used to be allocated to those files, and now those clusters are free. Understand?"
Clusters didn't mean a thing to me unless maybe you're talking about grapes-but I nodded encouragingly. "And what does that mean?"
The set of Buddy's jaw told me that she was done talking baby-talk. "You figure it," she snapped.
"Okay," I sighed. "So the files were there, but aren't any more. Two options. Option one: somebody decked into the system and blew away the files. But to do that he'd have to be pretty hot, right?"
"Nova hot," Buddy confirmed.
"Option two, then," I continued. "Lone Star blew the files away themselves.
They can do that?" A curt nod from Buddy. "Which means they're covering up ... something. Either way, it means this isn't small stuff. Which I already knew."
I got wearily to my feet. "Thanks, Buddy. I'll transfer the credit when I get home." I headed for the door.
"William Sutcliffe."
I turned back. Buddy was still sitting on the floor, watching me. "What?" I asked.
"William Sutcliffe," she repeated. "It was his data-line. A chummer of his was under investigation, so they tapped Sutcliffe's dataline."
"And who's William Sutcliffe?" I asked.
"Fragged if I know," Buddy snapped back. "You're the fragging investigator."
I got out of there fast, and damn near flew back to my doss in the Barrens. All the way home I wracked my brain for some kind of line on this William Sutcliffe. Null program, cobber. I'd never heard of him in my life. But Buddy was right, I am an investigator, and I could put out various feelers to track down our Mr. Sutcliffe. The supposed dead end wasn't quite as dead as it seemed.
The message light was flashing on my telecom, so I let myself down in front of the screen and hit the appropriate combination of keys. The screen lit up, and when I saw who it was, the whole room seemed to light up as well.
The young woman smiling out of the screen was attractive rather than beautiful, the lines of her face were utilitarian at best. But her brown eyes sparkled with life, and her smile was as bright as the sun.
"Hoi, bro," my sister Theresa said. "Sorry I missed you. Just checking in to let you know I'm still breathing. Hope things are rolling well for you, and"-she shrugged lightly-"and I guess that's about it. Catch you later, Derek."
After the image vanished, I sat staring at the screen for a few moments, a lump in my throat. Theresa has that effect on me, always has. Part of it is that she's my baby sister-at twenty-five, six years younger than me- the other part is that she's the only living family I've got left. But there's more to it than that.
I remembered her back in the old days, when we were growing up. Theresa was tall and gangly as a kid, all freckles and skinned knees, sudden enthusiasms and innocent laughter. She was the one with the imagination, but it was strong enough for both of us. Even when I was in my rebellious mid-teens, Theresa was one of the few calming influences in my life. I think she kept me sane. But then we started to grow apart. It's during the teens that you've got to learn one of the most important lessons in life: the world's a dark and dangerous place, and you've got to deal with that if you want to get by. Theresa learned the first part, but not the second. Instead, she'd tried to isolate herself from the world around her. She immersed herself in books, the trideo, and whatever the frag else she could to keep the big bad world from infringing on her reality.
Infringe it did, of course-big time-the year I turned twenty-two and Theresa was sweet sixteen. I'd just had one of the all-time great fights with my old man. It was the night I told him I'd dropped out of computer science-dropped out of the whole University of Washington system, in fact. He blew his top, like I knew he would, but didn't quite take a swing at me-which I hoped he would, because then I'd have been justified in pushing his teeth down his throat. Instead, he kept the violence on the verbal and emotional level. That only made it worse, of course. I stormed out of the house, wishing him dead in my heart.
It was the next morning that I got the news. The stupid fragger had obliged me. After I'd left he'd taken my mother out for a drive, probably to calm her down after the ugly scene with her son. Whatever the reason, he drove into a patch of turf claimed by a particularly militant go-gang calling themselves the Junk Yard Dogs. And then- goddamn him to hell!-my old man stopped the car, and the two of them got out for some fresh fragging air. The Dogs were out to play that night, and my parents were just raw meat. The police report said they had died quickly, and I want to believe that.
I took it hard enough, but it damn near blew Theresa apart. She stayed with me while I tried to put her back together as much as I could. It was obvious from the start she wasn't coping, but I lied to myself that she'd pull it out and get back in control.
Then one night she just vanished, no message, no nothing. I fragging near went mad, but I couldn't track her down. She showed up a week or so later, acting as if she'd only stepped out for an hour or so. I went up one side of her and down the other, but she just stood there and took it, giving me this inane smile.
And that's when I saw the shiny-new datajack and the optical fiber trailing down to the simsense-chip player on her belt. Theresa had found a better way to escape from the world.
She stayed with me for another couple of months. During that time, I tried to monitor-and moderate-her chip usage. For the first few weeks, she spent most of her waking hours with simsense drek pouring directly into her brain. After that, though, she started to pull back. She was still a user, but at least she wasn't the full-blown addict chiphead I feared she'd become. I guess I was hard on her. Like a self-righteous teetotaler, I ground her for using chips at all, for using them to dilute and escape reality. (And, at the same time, I was almost single-handedly supporting the synthahol industry.) I ground her too much. A few weeks before I was to enter Lone Star basic training, I came home and found her gone. The note she left made it abundantly and painfully clear that she could do without my lectures and my posturing. She'd found somewhere else to crash, with people who weren't so fragging tight-assed. The note was scrawled longhand on a scrap of paper, and was wrapped around her credstick. My baby sister had dropped out for real.
I tried to track her down, both then and after I was into training. But even with the Star's resources, it's slotting near impossible to get a line on a member of the SINless understrata. Maybe six months later I was still looking, but growing ever more convinced she'd gone the same way as our parents.
Then, out of the blue, she called me. From a public phone, of course, so I couldn't put a trace on her that way. I screamed at her for a while, and she just listened until I calmed down. And then we talked and came to a kind of rapprochement. Neither one of us was going to change our world view to suit the other.
But what was wrong with that? We'd each found what we needed at the moment. I had the Star, she had her chummers-chipheads or BTLers, some of them, but still her chummers. We talked, and something strange happened.
We became friends. Not siblings, not big brother-little sister, but friends. We weren't the same, we had different views-I thought she'd funked out, she thought I was lying to myself-but that was okay, really. It was a strange revelation.
Since then we'd kept in touch every few weeks. She won't tell me where she is, so it's always Theresa who makes contact. Probably afraid I'd do something stupid like try to send her credit or such drek, and she's right. Twice she called for help after getting into some drek over her head, but it's never been anything too serious. I look forward to her calls, and wish we could get together face-to-face. But that's beyond the scope of what she'll allo
w, and since she's the one in control I've got to live with it.
I was glad of her call now. It was good to see the face of at least one blonde who wasn't on a slab.
Chapter 7.
How do you track down someone if all you know is his name-William Sutcliffe, for example? Various ways, chummer. Some legal, most not. Predictably, of course, the chances of success increase with the illegality of the means. (Call that Montgomery's-Law. Copyright is withheld, royalties are appropriate.)
Nevertheless, I decided to try the law-abiding ways first.
There are a couple of database-retrieval services tailor-made for just this kind of thing. It's like flipping through a "phone book" for the whole of North America-or beyond, if you let the search routine run on. One simply churns through the LTG and RTG subscriber records in case Mr. Sutcliffe consented to have his LTG number posted in the open listenings. In the more likely situation that he didn't, there are similar services that search corporate employment records-though the number of corps that consent to release the information is pretty fragging small-and even electronic publications, newsfaxes, and screamsheets.
From what Buddy told me, the good Mr. Sutcliffe would seem to be a pretty small fish who only came to the attention of Lone Star and Avatar because he was the chummer of a tax evader. The odds were pretty good, then, that this superficial kind of search would turn up something.
Like drek. Appearances to the contrary, Sutcliffe wasn't a small fish. People don't get killed for listening in on a small fish. So I expected mat the legal searches would be merely the first round, and that I'd have to get into some serious and hideously illegal digital tap-dancing. I had to go through the motions, though. Who knows? I might get lucky. I was sweating away, writing the most efficient search syntax, when the telecom beeped with an incoming call.
I considered letting the machine take it, but then reconsidered. I hit the key for voice-only, and growled, "Yeah?"
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