Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System

by T. K. F. Weisskopf

  "I think we should get off the highway before the cameras pick up our licence plate."

  She nodded and I pulled past a semi-trailer and then slid over to the exit lane. The beat cops we'd seen at the door had certainly been told to prevent anyone from leaving the building. Once Julie was outside she wasn't their responsibility anymore, and since I'd never gone in I wasn't their responsibility either—though if we'd given them more time to think about it they might have changed their minds. The computers watching the highway cameras wouldn't suffer the same lack of understanding. Their jurisdiction was everywhere, and if they'd been told to look for my license plate, SEC would come knocking wherever we were.

  Come to think of it, they could follow us through our phones, and the Porsche's anti-theft satellite tracking system would do an even better job of pinpointing our location. A tall sign by the off-ramp advertised a well-known national truck stop chain, and I pulled in there. In the parking a lot a hefty man was stepping out of five-year-old sedan, gray and nondescript. I slid into the space beside him and got out, leaving my phone in the Porsche.

  "Excuse me, I'd like to buy your car."

  "Buy my car?" He looked puzzled.

  "How much do you want for it."

  "It's not really for—"

  I held up a hand. "Name a price."

  "How will I get home?" He looked perplexed.

  "Take a cab. How much do you want?"

  The perplexed look vanished, replaced by one of calculation. He was trying to figure out the catch. "Twenty-five thousand." It was easily twice what the car was worth. He wanted to see how serious I was.

  "Twenty-five thousand. Done. Do you have a bankchip?"

  He looked at me, not quite believing it, then looked at the Porsche. Slowly he drew out his wallet, handed over his bankchip. I tapped it to deposit the twenty-five thousand, then thumbed it. There was a pause while it verified that my thumbprint matched my account number, then beeped. I handed it back to him and he looked at the display rather suspiciously, then handed over his keys.

  "Is the registration in it?"

  He nodded, still looking at the figures on his bankchip.

  "I'll mail you the paperwork."

  He looked up. "You don't know my address."

  Julie handed him her phone. "We'll call you."

  We got in and drove away, leaving him standing there still looking bemused. Back on the highway she turned to look at me. "Now I really feel like a fugitive."

  "Relax, you made the right decision." Now that my initial surprise and outrage had worn off I was already plotting countermoves. "We just need a base of operations to fight back from unhampered by the need to answer a bunch of annoying questions. This is just a shock tactic to get us to play ball with Dynacore."

  "We can't use a hotel, they'll pinpoint us immediately."

  We discussed it as we drove, vanishing from the government's vision is harder than you might think in an age of electronic cash. Buying the car by bankchip was fine—they would trace the transaction and find the man from the parking lot, but he'd be unable to tell them were we went. So long as we left the car before they knew what license plate to get the cameras looking for we'd be fine, but that left open the question of where we'd stay—that transaction would be inextricably linked with where we were. Finally we decided to barter for a room. We drove to a big-box store and while Julie picked up a paper and started looking for accommodation I loaded up the trunk with all the consumer junk I could lay my hands on—holocams, finger phones, personal vidgoggles, beltcomps—expensive baubles that came in small packages. When we left an hour later we had fifty thousand dollars' worth of electronics in the car. Then it was a matter of finding someone who'd take goods instead of cash for rent. We struck out with the first four places, the landlords obviously being concerned that all the goods we were offering were stolen. The fifth one was the charm. Mrs. Marel was a middle-aged matron of uncertain ethnicity who knew an opportunity when she saw it. The rooms certainly weren't up to the standard I'd become accustomed to, but it was reasonably clean, in a reasonably quiet neighbourhood. In exchange for sundry trendy toys she agreed to keep us fed, do the laundry and housekeeping and generally keep the house running while Julie and I did whatever it was we did during the day.

  What we did of course was orchestrate our counterattack on William McCool, Dynacore and the SEC. It was harder than you might think, due to the need to keep our location secret with the government looking for us with the basically unrestricted power given them under the anti-terrorist provisions in the Personal Privacy Act. Just calling Megan and Boyd was difficult. There was a phone in the house, but we couldn't use it because any call to our law firm would be monitored, voice-print matched and traced back to us. We couldn't just buy cell phones and use them from the house because those calls would be monitored too, and once they knew the number our location could be triangulated from the phone signal down to the meter. For the first couple of days we drove the car down convoluted routes to pay phones on the street, carefully avoiding intersections with stoplights where the traffic cameras could pick up our licence plate number. After that we decided the purchase had almost certainly been traced and we abandoned the car and went to buy another the same way, only to find our bank accounts had been frozen. All of them. That was a bad sign.

  The SEC had our offices completely shut down, a clever move which rendered our organization unable to help us. Megan and Boyd were fantastically busy on our behalf, but were severely hampered by the anti-terrorism measures, which allowed McCool's group to keep everything secret from our legal team. Still, there were a number of other angles we could work and we worked them all. I spent hours at pay phones, calling in political favors and started a congressional investigation into the SEC's investigation, which was sure to throw a few monkey wrenches into their plans, as well as prevent them from getting too loose with their interpretation of the law. Through Megan and Boyd I followed Mark Stuller's progress digging out dirt on McCool. I called the President's private number too, but he was in Australia discussing the Pacific Rim situation. I got on his callback schedule for two weeks later, which probably wouldn't help at all.

  At least we didn't have to worry about food. Mrs. Marel took care of that quite cheerfully, as well she might have. She was making about five times the going rate in consumer goods for everything she did for us. She didn't ask any questions either. I'm sure she didn't want to know the answers.

  Once we gave up the car our biggest problem was lack of transportation. We couldn't take taxis, we'd be nailed as soon as we thumbed the fare pad. Even getting on a city bus exposed us to security cameras that would recognize us and report us to the hunters. There was no doubt in my mind that our faces were in the databases now, the stakes had gotten too high. McCool was backing Dynacore because he expected Dynacore to back him when the time came to announce his presidential run. It didn't have to become a struggle, but he'd overplayed his hand. That might have paid off if we'd been caught and rendered incommunicado in the raid, but we'd gotten away. In threatening us too badly and forcing us to hit back hard he'd turned us into enemies, and thereby exposed himself to all the pressures we were bringing to bear, which were considerable. It was no longer a matter of doing a favor for his friends in Dynacore, bigger forces were now at play. If he didn't break Baker Technologies we'd break him. He needed to get Julie and me out of circulation to give him the time he needed to finish cobbling his case together and finish the job to vindicate what he'd started. If we managed to beat the rap he would have burned too much political capital to recover and his presidential dreams would be over.

  Oh yes, I was certain our faces were in all the watch lists. And our fingerprints, retina prints, gait profiles and favorite brand of breakfast cereal. Megan and Boyd informed us that a million-dollar reward was being offered for information leading to our arrest. That got our faces in the papers, and we were due to be featured on Crime TV in a week's time. It was a problem rapidly growing more
complex.

  The fourth day I got fed up. "Listen, we have to get to New York. Megan and Boyd can look after us once we're there."

  "They'd be required to hand us over, that's what the law says."

  "The law says a lot of things, and they aren't paid to make things easy for the other side. McCool's legal grounds are shaky at best. They can only make this snatch operation work if they can do it in secret."

  "You're the lawyer, but getting to New York is the problem."

  "We can't stay here long. If we do we won't even be able to communicate. They've got to know we're in this area by now."

  "You're right about that." Julie did some searching on the 'net to learn about the issues involved. They were considerable. We could only walk so far, and there were a very limited number of pay phones within reasonable walking distance. Reusing them was risky—even using them for any great length of time at once was risky, and we were at a minimum narrowing our whereabouts down to a specific geographic area.

  Or maybe they weren't even watching for us. I mused on it on the morning of the fourth day. Julie was scanning the news on Mrs. Marel's vidwall.

  "We need some options."

  She looked up. "Buy a boat, or rent one. Sail to the Caribbean. Maybe the Turks and Caicos Islands, even Cuba—somewhere where there's no extradition. Put a satellite phone on it and we can run the battle from there."

  "It'll be hard to get a boat with barter."

  "If we stay here we're going to be caught."

  "If we go to Cuba we'll seal our fates as Communist sympathizers."

  She laughed. "The Cold War is ancient history, we can go where we want."

  "Let's try an experiment first." I suggested. "Maybe we can beat the surveillance."

  "What?"

  "Let's see if we're overreacting here."

  She raised an eyebrow. "How so?"

  "There must be a way to beat the cameras."

  "Sure, put a bag over your head."

  "No, something more subtle than that."

  "Dark glasses and a fake beard won't work. I know that much. The computers compensate."

  "Why don't we look it up and see how they compensate, figure out what will work?"

  "By 'we' you mean 'me,' don't you?"

  "You're the one with the science degree, I'm just a lawyer." I smiled my best smile at her. "I love you, honey."

  She rolled her eyes, but dumped the BBC financial section and the Hong Kong Times off the vidwall and started searching. An hour later she had an answer.

  "It works like this. A facial fingerprint takes all the features in your face and relates them to each other by distance and angle."

  "What features?"

  "Edges of your eyebrows, bridge and corners of your nose, corners of your mouth, your chin, distance from pupil to pupil, all that stuff."

  "Okay."

  "So to beat it you have to change those dimensions. You can't change just one, because it uses statistical matching, you have to change a bunch at once."

  "So it can't be beaten without plastic surgery is what you're saying."

  "No, I think it can. Faces are broadly similar, so a few small changes would make a big difference."

  "What changes?"

  "As many as possible. Shave the edges of your eyebrows, put on dark glasses, use actor's putty on the bridge and corner of your nose, and lipstick at the corners of your mouth to make your mouth look bigger. That should mess up the facial-structure metrics pretty badly. For facial shape you'll have to let your jaw go slack. That's not a big change but with the others it should work."

  "What about gait recognition?'

  "Slouch, mooch along, exaggerate your walk."

  I thought it over. "Okay, let's do the experiment."

  "You haven't told me what it is yet."

  "We find a shopping mall, go in, let the cameras pick us up. Go into the bathroom, make all those changes, come out, go back to the entrance and see if McCool's troops come flying in like the Light Brigade to bust us."

  She thought it over. "To what end?"

  "They'll be watching Megan and Boyd like hawks, waiting to snap us up. They know we're going to have to go there sooner or later—it's the only real support we've got with everyone at Baker under the SEC's thumb for now. We can't risk going there until we know we can beat the cameras. Their response time at the mall will be a little slower, and it'll be easier to blend with the crowds and vanish if we mess it up."

  "Hmmm . . ." She thought more, looked around our cramped quarters distastefully. "All right. Let's make something happen."

  We gathered the few supplies necessary and walked down to the nearest shopping mall. It was a hot day, sticky with humidity and I found myself wishing for the climate-controlled interior of my Porsche. The cool air that gushed from the mall doors was like a drink of ice water, but I was acutely aware of the security cameras trained on the entrance. If we were on the watch lists we were busted now, and McCool surely had enough data to know we were in the area. If we were right about the value of the stakes to him he would have rapid-response units standing by. We were about to find out just how rapid.

  There were more cameras inside, in mirrored camera balls so we couldn't tell if we were being tracked. We went straight to the first public washroom, split up and went in. The clock was ticking and my hand trembled as I applied the razor to take half an inch off my eyebrows. That took a minute, then another minute to put the putty on my nose. I was sweating and it looked ridiculous, but didn't have time to fix it. I smeared lipstick unevenly on the corners of my mouth, giving myself a lopsided clown smile, put on the sunglasses I'd borrowed from Mrs. Marel and went out again. Time to fix the details later, if McCool's agents found me in the washroom alone my disguise wouldn't matter. Humans aren't so easy to fool as the cameras. Julie was waiting for me outside, looking ridiculous and still recognizably herself. Any human watching the washrooms would have known at once that the slackjawed, oddly made-up pair in dark glasses who shuffled out of the washroom four minutes later were the same ones who went in—known that and further known that something strange was going on. The computers, I hoped, would not be so smart. We had moved outside their "problem space," to steal a phrase I heard Holmes use once.

  We shuffled our way up to a food court that overlooked the washroom and waited. We didn't have to wait long. First a security guard arrived, trying too hard to look casual, and checked the washrooms. Before he was done a trio of cops arrived, doing no more than walking quickly so as not to alarm the shoppers, but clearly ready for action. There was a hurried conference outside the washroom, the security guard consulting his datapad and shrugging. The group was joined a minute later by a man and a woman in suits. There was more talking, more shrugging by the security guard, then he spoke into his radio microphone. More talking after the answer, and the group broke up. We stayed where we were for half an hour, time for them to convince themselves that we were gone. One of the cops walked through the food court and my heart pounded, but he went on without noticing us. Too many people there to check them all.

  The computers would have saved the video of our motions from the mall entrance to the washroom, they're programmed to do that when they get a facial recognition hit. But since they didn't get a hit when we came out of the washrooms they neglected to track us after that, or record any of the video in the area after we'd left it. Smart, but stupid. I prefer dealing with people.

  Julie smiled across the table at me, took my hand. "We got away with it."

  "And we know they're serious."

  "That's okay. We know how to beat the system, at least for a little while. We can get on a bus to New York, get in to Megan and Boyd. After that we're in control. McCool will wish he'd never heard of Baker Technologies."

  "You're right about that."

  I took advantage of the mall pay phones to call Brian's private number. It was a risk—they'd surely be monitoring his line too, but I needed to know work was progressing on the buckytubes and
the drive.

  "Sure, everything is good." He was his normal cheery self, but then his voice dropped with concern. "Where are you guys? Mark Stuller was here setting up security and everyone is looking for you."

  I was glad to hear Mark was taking care of business in my absence, making sure the crown jewels were secure. McCool was so far out on a limb going after us that he wouldn't dare go after Brian—but I'm sure someone at Dynacore would be urging him to do it anyway. "I can't tell you where we are, but once we have this legal snarl worked out I'll be up and you can show me live fusion, deal?"

  "Sure. We're already laying up the drive tubes and I've got another superconductor storage ring on line."

  "Excellent. Tell Dale on the patent team to start looking for a build site for a spaceport." Julie gave me a look, tapped her watch pointedly. "I've got to go, talk to you soon."

  We trudged back to the house, plotting strategy on the way. The aim was not only to stop McCool and Dynacore but punish them so badly they never considered trying anything like this again. We went up to our little room, tired and hungry and I reflected on the irony of having twenty billion in net worth and being unable to order takeout Chinese food for lunch. Mrs. Marel had left some peach cobbler out for us and we attacked it.

  I was pouring a glass of milk when the door broke in with a crash and a pair of men in black jumpsuits with flak jackets burst in, assault rifles leveled.

  "FBI! Search warrant! Get on the floor!" Before I could do it the first agent was already slamming in to me with his weapon, throwing me down, another right behind him got a knee in my back and forced my wrists into handcuffs. I heard Julie curse as boots pounded through the house. More agents poured through the door and spread out, weapons leveled. The four who had taken down Julie and me picked us up and bustled us out the front door. A helicopter thwopped down into the tennis court across the road. We were bustled out to it and unceremoniously piled on board. Out in the driveway a convoy of sedans and vans was pulling up and serious, dark-suited men and women were getting out, dragging equipment.

  All that for us? What did they expect to find? But then I saw the news van rolling down the street and understanding dawned. The drama was for the news crews, to convince them of the serious danger we represented to life, liberty and the American way. This was going to be a high-profile case, and the SEC had to ram it through hard or they'd lose. This was round one in the public relations fight, and they were already winning. Mrs. Marel was on the lawn, talking excitedly to one of the agents. I caught her eye and read her expression in an instant. She'd turned us in for the money.