by MacGuffin, WJ; Hanrahan, Gareth; Varney, Allen; Ingber, Greg
Immediately the screen flashed blue: SECURITY OVERRIDE.
A BLUE IntSec officer appeared on a third monitor. He had a long face, hollow cheeks, high forehead, and black hair slicked back. His ice-blue eyes were striking, and a scar split one thin eyebrow. “I’m Amparo-B, IntSecInfoSecO First Class. Are you—” He checked a printout. “—Granville-B-GCH-3, head of Threat Obstruction?”
“Threat Obfuscation.”
“Ah, yes. As part of Internal Security’s ongoing Information Security Initiative, ‘Eve is a Commie Mutant Traitor and other cyberwar scenarios,’ we’re conducting random sweeps of high-level consoles.”
“This isn’t really a good time. I’m in a meeting.”
Amparo-B learned forward. His knife-like nose seemed to split the screen. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sure the Commie Mutant Traitors will be equally respectful if you tell them that you’re busy. ‘Oh, we’ll come back tomorrow to steal your data and conquer Alpha Complex,’ they’ll say. ‘When’s convenient for you?’ For shame, Granville-B! A citizen in your position should be ultra-vigilant when it comes to information security! I’ll just make a note here.” He picked up an ink stamp marked ESCALATE.
“Wait!” A second unwanted IntSec investigation would bury him. “What do you need from me?”
“I’ve got a few issues to discuss first. Let’s review standard security protocols.”
Delevan returned. His quavering voice echoed out of one set of speakers, while Amparo spoke out of another set. Granville muted the speakers and kept smiling as he groped around his desk for two sets of earbuds. He plugged one set into each audio channel, then listened to one bud from each set.
He tried to parse the stereo conversations. Delevan complained about the lack of information about Beatrice’s contacts and co-conspirators. He used phrases like “expanding corruption,” “circles of malign influence,” and “arrest everyone!” Meanwhile, Amparo droned on about information security and trust issues. Fortunately, neither caller actually wanted to interact with him. His main role in the conversations was occasionally saying “yes, I understand,” “of course,” or “that’s good” when it seemed plausible in both contexts at once.
TraceRoute beeped, and Delevan reacted with horror. “She knew about—! Granville-B, I don’t know what sort of spy operation you were running in there, but it ends now. I’m recommending Threat Obfuscation be suspended and all staff be referred to Internal Security for loyalty assessment and re-cognitive therapy.” His fury triggered a coughing fit. Delevan coughed through his nose.
It’s pushed him too far. Time to dial back. Granville muted the feed from Amparo-B and quickly shut down the TraceRoute stream. “Delevan-I, I, I—I think that’s an overreaction. Consider this from a Threat Obfuscation perspective. If we haul off everyone on the suspicion Beatrice-Y knew more than we know she knew, then any spies would realize she knew, or was close to knowing, something important. However, if we conduct a small-scale covert investigation—I could run my own investigation—then we can determine if there’s any real threat—to Circulex.”
Delevan caught his breath. “I—all right. I expect a full report within 24 hours, understand?” The connection cut out.
Granville exhaled with relief. He’d learned of the whole Delevan issue, come up with a plan, and handled it all within 30 minutes, and all without leaving his apartment. He flipped back to Amparo-B and unmuted the call. The officer was in mid-sentence. “—on CX-GLSI433—that’s Delevan-I’s console.”
“Indeed,” Granville said automatically. He paged his jackobot butler, intending to order a celebratory can of chilled Bouncy Bubble Beverage, suitably sterilized. Belatedly he realized the cop had said Delevan-I.
“I’m sorry,” Granville said smoothly, “I was momentarily consumed with ecstatic joy at how wonderful life is here in Alpha Complex, and missed what you just said. Please repeat.”
“Certainly. I was just observing we routinely monitor all high-level consoles, and we’re detecting a data tap on CX-GLSI433—that’s Delevan-I’s console.”
“A—data tap.” Celeste had said the TraceRoute system wasn’t secure.
“Yes. An illegal hacking attempt. I’m following it now.” Amparo-B stroked his chin. “Hmm—it’s bouncing from relay to relay. Give me a moment.”
If Delevan-I finds out I hacked his console, I’m finished. “Are you sure it’s not a data feed beyond your security clearance? Maybe you’re mistaking it for something else.”
“No, it’s definitely a hacking attempt. The sniffer says the tap originates from—let’s see—‘Threat Obfuscation.’ Wait, that’s your department, isn’t it?”
Granville swallowed hard. “Yes.” How sloppy were you, Celeste? “But are you sure it’s ours?”
“Hmm. It’s certainly going through Threat Obfuscation. It’s bouncing through a subnode. I can’t tell if the tap starts at the subnode and bounces into Threat Obfuscation, or vice versa. Oh well, I’ll forward this to Adjustment & Enforcement. It’ll give them a chance to field-test their new Suggestion Truncheons. Thank you for your cooperation, have a nice daycycle.”
“Wait! This could all be a glitch. Let me check the Threat Obfuscation systems—” and erase all the evidence “—before we jump to any conclusions.”
Amparo considered. “Someone would also have to investigate that subnode. It’s at Room 25, Corridor 54, Level 4C in this sector. Here, look.”
A BLUE-Clearance map window showed a routine corridor. Granville zoomed out. The subnode was close to his suite, and to Threat Obfuscation as well. “We can handle that.”
“And I’ll have to file a report within the hour.”
“I’ll handle it right away.”
Amparo nodded. “I’m hugging a reactor for you on this. I’m not supposed to ignore protocol. Make sure you find that data tap. One hour.”
The connection closed, leaving Granville alone.
He took a moment to breathe. Blissful, sterile solitude.
Call Celeste, send her down to the subnode, ensure the data tap can’t be traced back to Threat Obfuscation. Better yet, plant evidence framing someone else, maybe those bastards over at Memetic Cognition—
He froze. Celeste wants my job. If she knows I used TraceRoute on Delevan, she’ll report me. I’ll have to hide the evidence—
He pulled his knees to his chin. He hugged them tight.
—myself.
—————
The doorbell was supportive. He’d programmed it that way.
“You can do it, boss! One step at a time!”
The door yawned open. Outside was Alpha Complex. Endless corridors, cafeterias, fetid barracks crammed with disease-ridden clones. Drug-addled, brainless clones.
Granville checked his pockets: disinfectant spray, HappiKleen Wipes, hand sanitizer.
He took a step.
He’d clawed his way up the ranks to escape his fellow citizens. Endless years as an INFRARED in the food vats, pranks and bullying and incessant meaningless jabber. It spurred him to fight for advancement. By reporting a co-worker’s repeated breaches of hygiene regulations, he’d made RED. He wondered whether his complaint forms still existed somewhere—whether anyone could tell, now, he’d doctored them.
“You’re moving! Stay with it!”
A few more steps. Spray, wipes, sanitizer, still there.
He’d reached ORANGE after a short tour of duty in the Troubleshooters. Most tours of duty in the Troubleshooters were short, but Granville managed to get the rest of his team terminated before they left the briefing room. They’d forgotten to fill out Page 2 of the Experimental Equipment Combined Requisition Form and Rights Waiver—forgotten, because they never saw it. When they picked up their assigned experimental equipment, The Computer incinerated them.
Was there video, somewhere, that showed him pocketing that form?
“No, don’t back up, you were doing great!”
Steps, steps. YELLOW Clearance—ah, his “YELLOW fever,” when he real
ized every other citizen was a squelching, festering sac of flesh-eating microbes. He shared a small apartment with another YELLOW. He remembered long, sleepless nights, listening to the wheeze of the man’s breathing, to the slime shifting in his lungs, to the nigh-imperceptible pop of flaking skin cells. He’d paid an IntSec GREEN goon to plant evidence framing the guy as a traitor. Was that goon still alive? Had he ever told anyone, perhaps in an email?
“Go, go, go!”
When they promoted him to GREEN Clearance and assigned him his own apartment, he spent the first two days disinfecting every surface nonstop, until, in his bright haze of Wakey-Wakey pills, everything looked luminous. He’d felt so proud. Six years after that, he’d made BLUE and received this suite.
He hadn’t left it in eighteen months.
“You know,” the doorbell observed, “you never turned my safeties off. I’m still armed for lethal force. If that doesn’t motivate you—”
He jumped into the corridor and fumbled for the pills on his belt. Mixing happy pills and stress-relief helped, and also gave him a pleasant buzz. It relaxed his tongue so much he could barely speak, but he didn’t intend to speak to anyone. In an ideal Alpha Complex, he’d make it to the subnode without contact with any pestilent walking disease-bags.
He shuddered as a jet of hot air sprayed out of a nearby air vent. It stank of sweat from a million human petri dishes. His skin crawled. Billions of germs were moving into their new quarters.
Before leaving his suite, he’d memorized the route and watched a virtual walkthrough. Two corridors, a BLUE-Clearance elevator ride, and another corridor. His path took him past Threat Obfuscation, not that he intended to stop even to say hello.
It was the middle of a work-shift, so the corridors were relatively empty. He skirted past a knot of YELLOW technicians and a RED floor-polisher, sticking to the quieter high-clearance corridors. He held his breath as much as he could. Get to the subnode. Destroy the evidence. Go home and shower with bleach.
“Good afternoon, Granville-B.” Celeste-G stepped out into the corridor right in front of him. For her, that was the equivalent of waving; she had next to no body language of her own. “How did the meeting go with Delevan-I?”
“Exthellent.” His tongue really was relaxed. “Noth a thoblem athall.” He could feel her breath on his face. It disgusted him.
“Are you heading to the office? We can discuss work-related matters as we walk.”
“No! I’m gointh to—thomthing elth.” Lying with a dead tongue was tricky. “I’ll thalk to you thomorrowthycle. You’re dithmithed! Dithmithed, I thay!”
He hurried past her. Glancing back, he saw she wasn’t following him, but was instead making a call on her PDC. That could become a record of his presence.
Data exhaust (he thought, to distract himself from his rotting flesh) was basically poor hygiene. Just as a citizen exhales a trail of germ-ridden warm air—just as oily, bacteria-rich fingers leave a mark—just as skin cells flake off the decaying husk of the human form—any electronic transaction leaves forensic clues. Accessing a digital file smeared it with bits, just like handling a paper form without gloves covered it with invisible slime. Really, what TraceRoute did to Delevan was his own fault for not wiping down his digital presence.
The BLUE elevator was unusually crowded. Three other blue-jumpsuited citizens crammed into the capsule, looking worried and nervous. A chemical odor hung around them, a pungent toxic smell that made Granville’s eyes water. He did his best to ignore them as they discussed something technical about biological compounds. This was even worse than he’d expected. Low-clearance citizens could be plague-ridden clones, but these BLUEs made plagues. Who knew what genetically engineered monstrosity might be wafting invisibly into Granville’s pores? Another handful of pills made the situation bearable.
The elevator disgorged all four of them into Corridor 54. As Granville left the elevator, he noticed his fingerprint on the control panel. He was leaving a physical trail, a biological exhaust some enemy could use to track him. He wiped it off with his sleeve, but that just transferred the grease to his uniform—and anyway, how many similar clues had he left? A plague tailored from the DNA in his exfoliated skin cells could target and destroy him from within. TraceRoute proved there was no digital secrecy—how long before someone created a biological equivalent? Every second he remained outside his sterile quarters brought his termination closer!
It took an eternity for the other three BLUEs to vanish around the corner. He swallowed the rest of his pills and licked the wrapper, then realized he’d impregnated the wrapper with salivary exhaust. He reluctantly shoved it in a pocket and, careful to hold his breath as much as possible, padded down the corridor in search of Room 25.
The blue door was propped open. Beyond, a chamber of horrors. Chemicals bubbled in vats; misshapen human corpses leered out of steel canisters; lumps of flesh sizzled on electric scanner-grids. Things with spikes and saws and syringes loomed over the entombed cadavers. Towering banks of computers lined the walls, blinkenlights blinking. Granville guessed the place was an R&D research facility, or maybe an IntSec torture chamber. Neither possibility cheered him.
In the distance, beyond the cloning tanks, he could hear muffled voices. He wasn’t alone. He drew his laser pistol and peered into the darkness of the laboratory. Sinister shapes lurked out there, illuminated by the sickly glow of the computer banks and the occasional flash of arc lighting from Tesla coils.
“Hi there!” One of the spiky syringe things—a docbot—rolled towards Granville. Its spindly arms were tipped with bloodstained surgical tools. It waved cheerily, splattering red droplets across his suit. “I’m DocBot XC-543. You look like you need elective surgery!”
“Noth!” he whispered. “I mean, no!”
“Oh.” Its mechanical arms drooped with disappointment. “Then how can I help you?”
“What ith thith plath?”
“Are you sure you don’t want a new tongue? We’ve got loads to spare.” The docbot gestured towards one cadaver. “That one’s pretty fresh.”
The cadaver looked oddly familiar, but he couldn’t place it. He certainly didn’t know anyone with a melted face. “No thank you.”
“I’ll wipe it off before I graft it. Come on. A new tongue means exciting new flavors.”
Granville raised his laser pistol.
“Okay,” said the bot. “Welcome to Circulex Genetic Research.”
The muffled voices got louder. It sounded like an argument.
“Please ignore the mysterious meeting. There are absolutely no secret societies meeting here. That’s just, er—a plausible explanation. Look, I’m not programmed for this sort of thing, all right? I’m strictly experimental surgeries and dismemberment. They told me to watch the door and make sure they weren’t disturbed.”
“Thtay back,” Granville said. “Or I’ll thoot.”
The bot scooted back. “Technically, the Five Laws of Robotics (Revised) state that a fifth-law threat like yours shouldn’t take precedence over a fourth-law order—but as long as you don’t disturb anyone, I guess there’s no need for anyone to shoot me.” It waggled its arms in a conciliatory fashion, quite a trick for an abattoir on wheels.
Granville’s PDC rang, and he dropped his laser pistol in surprise. He fumbled for the phone. The pistol skittered away across the floor under a table covered with organs.
It was Amparo-B. He wondered how the IntSec agent got his phone number. “Hello?”
“That data tap is active again.” The cop sounded panicky. “You’ve got to shut it down now!”
“What’th it doing?”
“It’s grabbing the Threat Obfuscation database!”
But the data tap comes from Threat Obfuscation, thought Granville. Was Amparo-B misreading the computer readout? Or was—No! Oh no! Circulex was a terrorist cell! This room was a bioweapons research facility! They wanted the database to hide their terrorist schemes. If they had the database, they could turn the depart
ment—his department—into a weapon of terror. He wouldn’t know what was real and what was fake. Anything could become poisonous, tainted, diseased!
He wasn’t sure if it was the pills, the stress of being outside, or some misplaced devotion to duty, but he threw himself forward across that gore-laden table, scrabbling for his pistol. He twisted to aim the gun at the docbot again. “There’th a data tap in here! I need to thut it down!”
Wordlessly, the docbot pointed to one of the computers. A thick network cable snaked out of it and to the wall.
Granville noticed the chanting had stopped. They—whoever they were—were almost here.
His pistol spat six bolts of lethal blue light. The machine exploded. The lights flickered, and one by one, all the banks of computers whirred and slowed into silence.
“Why” asked the docbot, “did you just destroy all the boss’s medical data?”
An icy chill ran down Granville’s spine, then reversed course and raced up to his brain. At some point he’d bitten his tongue badly. “Medical data?”
“Yep. All our experiments in reversing genetic degradation and replicative fading—all gone. Personally, I’m happy about that, because I’m programmed to enjoy dissection and experimentation. Other people, though—I think they’re going to be annoyed.”
Delevan-I stepped out of the shadows. One eye blazed with fury. The other watered peevishly. Behind him, burly figures leveled big guns.
“I can explain thith,” Granville said, even as he realized he really, really couldn’t.
—————
At an illegal INFRARED market in a parking garage two sectors away, Amparo-B dumped his stolen blue IntSec uniform. From a locker he retrieved his yellow jumpsuit. A professionally uninquisitive evidence-disposal specialist used an atomic shredder to reduce his bootleg PDC to component atoms and spew the vapor into the air vents. With it went the only copy of his features, created by untraceable illicit facial-manipulation software. Just like that, Amparo vanished forever.
