by John Scalzi
“That still leaves lip reading,” Creek said.
“Well, then,” Javna said. “Try not to move your lips too much.”
“Cloak and dagger shit bores me, Ben,” Creek said. “What’s going on?”
Javna reached into his coat pocket again and produced a small curved tube. “Ever seen one of these before?” He handed it to Creek.
“I don’t think so,” Creek said, taking it. “What is it?”
Javna told him the whole story, from the murder by fart to the need to find the Android’s Dream sheep.
“Wild,” Creek said. “Disgusting, but wild.”
“Let’s say I wanted to find out who made this,” Javna said. “How would I do it?”
Creek turned the apparatus around in his hands. “I’m assuming this isn’t a mass-produced object,” he said.
“Probably not,” Javna said.
“Then someone either designed this from scratch or altered an existing design. You could probably check the UNE Patent and Trademark Office database to see if something like this exists, and then if it does, you could try to see who’s accessed the information in the last year or so. Presuming your guy searched off the government database and not off a private archive, you might get something.”
“So you think we could get the guy that way?” Javna said.
“Sure, if the guy was an idiot and didn’t bother to cover his tracks,” Creek said. “Does that sound like the sort of person you’re looking for?”
“Probably not,” Javna said again.
“There’s another place to look, though,” Creek said. “This isn’t mass-produced but it’s also not something you could make in your garage shop. This thing was probably made in a small-scale fabricator.” Creek looked up at Javna, who shrugged. “A small-scale fabricator is like a printer that works in three dimensions,” Creek explained. “You provide it a design and some raw material and it ‘prints’ the object you want to make. It’s inefficient—you wouldn’t use it to make a lot of things—but it’d be perfect for a job like this.”
“How many of these things are out there?” Javna asked.
Creek shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. I’d guess a couple hundred in the DC area,” he said. “They’re used by people who need to make replacement parts of old things whose manufacturers have gone out of business or stopped supporting the product. Like that old car of yours. If you ever got a replacement part for it, it was probably fabricated. But you could narrow it down in a couple of ways. This is mostly a metal object, so you could ignore the fabricators that output plastics, ceramics, and carbon composites. That’s still going to leave you with a few dozen, but at least that’s a smaller number.”
“But that still doesn’t tell us which of these fabricators made the thing,” Javna said.
“No, but you could find out pretty quickly from there. Fabricators are like any mechanical object—there are small, unique differences in their output. Put this under the microscope to find the pattern unique to its fabricator. Basic forensics.” Creek handed the apparatus back to Javna, but Javna held up his hand. “You want me to keep this?” Creek asked.
“I want you to find who made it,” Javna said. “That, and one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I need you to find that sheep I told you about.”
“You can’t be serious,” Creek said.
“I’m totally serious,” Javna said.
“Ben, even one of these things is a full-time job for actual analysts and investigators. And if you recall, I already have a full-time job. You got it for me, remember.”
“I do,” Javna said. “Don’t worry about the job. I’ve already given you cover for that. Your boss has received notice that for the next two weeks you’ll be participating in a State Department Xenosapient training program. And as it happens, there actually is a State Department Xenosapient training program going on over the next couple of weeks.”
“That’s swell,” Creek said. “Then there’s just the minor detail that I’m deeply out of practice in what you’re asking me to do.”
“You figured out how to track down this fabricator pretty quickly,” Javna said.
“Jesus, Ben,” Creek said. “Anyone who watches detective shows could have told you that.”
“Harry,” Javna said. “Just because you’re currently slacking through life with a dead-end job doesn’t mean that I have to pretend I don’t know what you can do.”
“That’s not very fair, Ben,” Creek said.
Javna held his hand up. “Sorry,” he said. “But, you know, Harry. If I had half your brains and talent, I’d be running the country by now. I mean, hell. I know you find your current job interesting. But it’s like using an n-space drive to go down to the store to get a bottle of milk.”
“Not everyone wants to run the world,” Creek said.
“Funny, I said something like that about you to Heffer,” Javna said. “Anyway, you don’t have to run the world. I just want you to save it a little. We need to find these things, but we can’t be obvious that we’re looking for them. I need someone I can trust to do this thing for me, and do it quietly. You fit the bill, Harry. I need your help.”
“I don’t have what I would need to do all this,” Creek said. “I don’t even own a proper computer anymore, you know. I’ve got my communicator and the processors in my household appliances. That’s it.”
“What happened to your computer?” Javna said.
“I had a crisis of faith about its use,” Creek said. “I stored what I was working on and gave it to the neighbor kids.”
“Then we’ll get you a new one. Tell me what you need,” Javna said.
“How big is your budget?” Creek asked.
Javna smiled, reached into his pocket yet again, and gave Creek a credit card. “Anonymous credit,” Javna said.
“How much?” Creek asked.
“I don’t rightly know,” Javna said, and nodded towards the card. “I don’t think one of these cards actually runs out of credit. So don’t lose it, or I’m in deep trouble.”
“Oh, wow,” Creek said. “A boy could have a lot of fun with a toy like this.”
“Don’t get too excited,” Javna said. “If you buy yourself a tropical atoll, it’s going to get noticed. Buy everything you need. Just don’t buy anything else.”
“No worries,” Creek said, pocketing the card. “I’m also going to need access. I don’t know what my access level is on the UNE database, but whatever it is I guarantee it’s not high enough.”
“Already done,” Javna said. “But it’s like that credit card. Use your powers wisely.”
“You’re sure this is square with Heffer,” Creek said. “I don’t want you taking a fall for anything I do.”
“Heffer trusts me,” Javna said. “I trust you. Therefore you have Heffer’s trust. For exactly six days. That’s when all this has to be done and dealt with.”
“That’s not a lot of time,” Creek said.
“Tell me about it,” Javna said. “But that’s the time we have.”
“All right,” Creek said. “I’ll do it. But you have to promise me my job’s still going to be there in two weeks.”
“It’s a promise,” Javna said. “And if your boss gives me any trouble, I’ll have her fired and you can have her job.”
“I’d rather not. I may be a slacker, but the job suits me,” Creek said.
“I’m sorry about the slacker comment,” Javna said. “You’ve done some important things, Harry. And you’ve always done the right thing by my family. You’ve always been there to help us. I haven’t forgotten. We haven’t forgotten.”
Both of their eyes went back to the headstone.
“I was more helpful to some of you than others,” Creek said.
“Don’t blame yourself for Brian, Harry,” Javna said. “That wasn’t about you. It was about him.”
“I promised you I’d look out for him,” Creek said.
“Still stickin
g up for Brian,” Javna said. “You said it yourself. You know Brian. You couldn’t tell him anything. You couldn’t look out for him because he wouldn’t look out for himself. We know that. We’ve never blamed you for it. You did what you could. And then you made sure he came back to us. Most kids up who die up there never make it back. You brought him back to us, Harry. It meant more to us than you know.”
“This is Arlington National Cemetery?” Defense Secretary Pope said over the photos, to Phipps.
“That’s right, sir,” Phipps said.
“I thought you said they were heading for a bar,” Pope said.
“They said they’d be meeting for a drink,” Phipps noted. “It didn’t really occur to us that Javna might be heading to his brother’s grave until they were already there.”
“Sloppy,” Pope said.
Oh, and you would have figured it out instantly, asshole, thought Phipps.
“Yes, sir,” Phipps said. “We’re not using our in-house people on this one. I’m using a specialist suggested by Jean Schroeder. Rod Acuna. Schroeder says he uses him and his team often.”
“Fine,” Pope said. “But tell him to keep better tabs from here on out.” Pope waved the photo in his hand. “Do we know what they’re talking about?” he asked.
“No,” Phipps said. “Javna carried a portable acoustic scrambler.” Phipps braced himself for another sloppy comment, but Pope held his fire. After a couple of seconds Phipps went on. “But we think this is the guy Javna’s going to use for his little project.”
“Who is he?” Pope said.
“Harris Creek,” Phipps said. “‘Harris’ is actually his middle name; his first name is ‘Horatio.’”
“Which explains why he goes by his middle name,” Pope said.
“He’s an old friend of the Javna family,” Phipps said, digging through his notes. “Specifically of Brian Javna, who was the younger brother of Ben Javna. There’s a twelve-year difference between the two. Or was. Anyway, Creek and Brian Javna joined the service at the same time, when they turned eighteen. They were both at the Battle of Pajmhi. Brian Javna died there.”
Pope snorted. “Join the club,” he said. No one in the UNE Defense community liked to talk much about the Battle of Pajmhi. There may have been worse clusterfucks in the history of human armed conflict, but Pajmhi had the misfortune of being the most recent.
“Creek got a Distinguished Service Cross,” Phipps continued. Pope raised an eyebrow at that. “A note from Creek’s C.O. was put into his file, saying that the C.O. had originally wanted to recommend Creek for the Congressional Medal of Honor, but that Creek had become so agitated at the suggestion that he had to back down. As it is, it doesn’t appear Creek ever took receipt of his Cross. Most of his battalion was wiped out at Pajmhi; Creek was transferred to a military police brigade where he served the rest of his tour. Re-upped once and was honorably discharged as a staff sergeant.”
Phipps flipped to another page. “After the service, Creek joined the Washington DC police department, working on electronic crimes. You know, fraud, hackers, child molesters in chat rooms. That sort of thing. Quit the department three years ago and spent a couple of years unemployed.”
“What, like homeless?” Pope asked.
“No, not like that,” Phipps said. “Definitely not homeless. His parents left him a home in Reston after they retired to Arizona. He just didn’t work for anyone.”
“What was he doing?”
“Doesn’t say,” Phipps said. “But about fifteen months ago he started working for State Department as a Xenosapient facilitator, whatever that means. His schedules are public record so I checked them out. He spends most of his time visiting embassies for other planetary governments of the CC. He’s got no diplomatic training; he doesn’t even have a college degree. So it’s a pretty good bet Ben Javna helped him land the job.”
“How does a semi-literate war hero help out Ben Javna now?” Pope asked. “I’m not seeing the benefit here.”
“Well, that’s the thing,” Phipps said. “You’re assuming he’s semi-literate because he doesn’t have a college degree and he’s an ex-cop. But that’s not the whole story.” Phipps shuffled through his papers and set one on Pope’s desk. “Look at this. In his senior year in high school, Creek was a U.S. national gold medal winner for the Westinghouse Science and Technology competition. He designed an artificial intelligence interface to help people with degenerative motor diseases communicate with the outside world. He had a full ride to MIT and had been accepted to Cal-Tech and Columbia. This is one really smart guy, sir.”
“He was a tech geek and yet he joined the army,” Pope said. “That’s not the obvious play.”
“Just before his graduation, he got arrested,” Phipps said, and handed his boss another sheet. “He and Brian Javna broke into a George Washington University physics lab and gave each other brain scans with the lab’s quantum imager. Apparently Creek hacked the lab’s security system so they could get in, and then Javna talked them past the staff. Also almost talked them back out of the lab, too, but then the lab director showed up and had the both of them arrested. The lab got funding from the army, and some of its projects were classified. So technically, Creek and Javna could have been charged with treason. The judge handling the case gave them the choice of going to trial or joining the army and having their records expunged after they finished a tour of duty. They joined the army.”
“That was still twelve years ago, Dave,” Pope said. “A dozen years is like a century in tech. They’re like dog years. He could be hopelessly behind the times.”
“He’s been near computers since he’s been in the army, sir,” Phipps said. “Those years on Metro Police. And when a geek takes a couple years off and hides from the world, he’s probably not just playing video games. He’s up to date.”
“He still live in Reston?” Pope asked.
“Yes, sir,” Phipps said. “We’re already hard at work bugging his lines.”
“Let’s be a little more proactive than that,” Pope said. “It’d be useful to everyone involved if we found what Creek’s looking for before he does.”
“Schroeder’s given us the Android’s Dream genome,” Phipps said. “All we have to do now is start looking for it.”
“Let’s get going on it,” Pope said. “But I don’t want you using any of the usual staff, and I definitely don’t want you using any military personnel. They’ve got this thing about the chain of command.”
“This department is crawling with contractors,” Phipps said. “I could use one of them. I can encrypt the data so he wouldn’t know what he was looking at.”
“Do it,” Pope said. “And try to find a smart one. I don’t know how good this Creek character is anymore, but the sooner we’re in business, the longer it’ll take for him to catch up with us.”
Archie McClellan was born to be a geek. The child of geeks, who were themselves the children of geeks, who were in themselves brought into the world by members of the geek clan, Archie was fated for geekdom not only in the genes that recursively flirted with Asperger’s syndrome down multiple genetic lines, but in his very name.
“You were named after an ancient search protocol,” Archie’s dad, an electronics engineer with the DC Metro system, told him when he was in kindergarten. “And so was your sister,” he said, nodding toward Archie’s fraternal twin, Veronica. Veronica, who despite all genetic predilections to the contrary had already begun a reign of popularity that would propel her all the way to the editorship of the Harvard Law Review, vowed instantly never to tell anyone of her name’s origin. Archie, on the other hand, thought this bit of information was super cool. He was a geek before he could spell the word (which would have been at age two years, two months).
As also befitted his name, Archie McClellan made a specialty out of administering the various legacy systems that labored in the dusty corners of the many departments of the UNE government. One of Archie’s favorite stories was when he was dragged
down to the basement of the Department of Agriculture and presented with an IBM System 360, vintage nineteen fucking sixty-five. Archie McCellan turned to the administrative assistant who had hauled him down to the basement and told her that there was more computing power in the animated greeting card in her desk than in the whole massive bulk of this ancient mainframe. The administrative assistant snapped her gum and told him she didn’t care if it was powered by chickens pecking at buttons, it still needed to be reconnected to the network. Archie spent a day learning OS/360, reconnected the hulking birdbrain to the network, and charged triple his usual consulting fee.
So when Archie found himself being led down into a similar basement hall in the Pentagon, he assumed he was heading toward yet another ancient machine, still tethered to the network like a Neanderthal because of the government-wide directive not to throw out legacy systems due to decades of data that would be otherwise unreadable. No one building computers today makes their machines backwards-compatible with punch cards, DVD-ROMs, collapsible memory cubes or holo-encodes. He was mildly surprised when he arrived where he was going and saw the machine.
“This is this year’s model,” he said to the Phipps, who was waiting inside.
“I suppose it is,” said Phipps.
“I don’t understand,” Archie said. “I contract to maintain your legacy systems.”
“But you can work with today’s computers, right?” Phipps said. “The computer doesn’t have to be older than Christ for you to use it.”
