Beautiful Red
by M. Darusha Wehm
Copyright 2007 M. Darusha Wehm
Smashwords edition
ISBN 978-0-9737467-2-3
http://darusha.ca/beautifulred
The Andersson Dexter novels:
Table of Contents
The figure stood beside Jack’s bed and looked down at her sleeping form. Maybe she sensed his presence because she turned ever so slightly.
He leaned toward her, his 5 o’clock shadow nearly scratching against her chin. “Good morning, Jack,” he said, his voice low and gravelly.
“What the fuck!” Jack woke up immediately, terrified and energized by the unexpected presence in her bedroom. She sprang toward the figure, jumping through his body and punching a button on the console sitting on the table at the side of her bed. The image of the intruder flickered once, twice, then disappeared.
Jack sat on the side of her bed, panting with exertion and adrenaline. “This alarm clock sucks,” she said aloud, even though she was alone in the room. “That was no ‘seductive stranger’,” she said, reading the currently selected setting on the holographic Personal Wake-Me-Up unit by her bed. She punched a few buttons and selected ‘chirping birds’ from the scrolling menu of options charmingly titled “Who do you want to wake you up?”.
“With my luck it’s a fucking swarm of vultures.” Jack hit save, blinked a few times and around her room.
The sun, such as it was, peeked through the window as the ’glass automatically turned from opaque to translucent. There hadn’t been a decently bright day in years; it had been so long that Jack wondered if it were one of those nostalgic false memories that old people were notorious for sharing with anyone who would listen. “Back in my day,” they would say, “the sky was blue and so was the ocean and everyone was happy and healthy and beautiful.”
Bullshit, Jack thought. The air was always full of crap, even when she was a kid. Sure, it might have been bright, but it still stank and made people sick. At least no one got sick anymore. The vaccines took care of that.
Jack stood up and walked the ten paces to her tiny bathroom. She did what she needed to do then stripped off her underpants and turned on the shower. After washing the night’s grime off both her body and the bathroom, she dried off under the blower and wandered over the eating area.
Calling it a kitchen would be an insult to the concept. She grabbed a breakfast bar out of the economy sized box near the fridge and slopped coffee into her cup. She pulled her uniform out of her autoclave and got dressed. Fucking blue daisy, she thought, distastefully, looking at the logo of her employer embossed on the back pocket of her regulation trousers. She wondered, not for the first time, if anyone at Bellis International had ever even seen a real daisy — blue, green or any other colour.
She stuffed half of the breakfast bar into her mouth and the other half into one of the utility pockets in her pants. On her way to the door, she went online by thinking the right combination of phrases to make it happen. The chips in her brain whirred and clicked; at least, Jack liked to imagine that they did something like that, but she couldn’t actually feel or hear anything. She absentmindedly rubbed the area behind her left ear where the chips were implanted. She shuddered slightly as the image of her home workstation superimposed itself over her vision and her personal startup chime sounded in her ear.
She had a handful of messages from the night before, but she figured on reviewing them at her desk. Work had been dull at Bellis lately, so catching up on mail was a good way to ease into the day. Work at Bellis has always been dull, Jack thought, it just had been even more slow recently than it had been in the past. I guess there isn’t a whole lot to secure these days, she thought, grabbing her jacket which was covered with the words Bellis International Security in large font, encircling an image of a sad looking blue daisy locked up in chains. Jack hated the blue daisy logo that Bellis slapped on everything, so she took a perverse pleasure in the Security department’s version of the design.
Jack clomped down the stairs of her building, passing a couple of neighbours along the way. They did not acknowledge each other at all; Jack had never spoken to any of the other people who lived in her building. Most of the time everyone had that thousand yard stare that comes from paying 98 percent attention to their desktops and 2 percent attention to the physical world. Given proximity sensors and integrated global positioning and mapping systems, no one really had to pay attention to where they were going.
Jack pushed open the front door of the building, an old-school heavy door made of real glass and wood. There was no doubt that it was the nicest part of the building —— the interior was broken into tiny cubicle apartments, just like almost every other building in this city and every other city. Hardly anyone lived in more than 200 square feet of space per person and many people lived in less. But of all the shitty apartments she could have chosen, Jack liked this one. The building door was cool; you hardly ever saw real wood anymore and the amenities inside her tiny apartment were thoroughly up to date.
As she exited the building, Jack reflexively looked up and down her street. Her neighbourhood wasn’t known to be particularly dangerous, but there were always people on the streets looking for handouts either by begging or by grabbing. Even though she rarely carried valuables, Jack wasn’t about to be accosted. Partly it was common urban defensiveness and partly it was years of security training, as Jack scanned her lines of sight, checking for streeters while she moved purposefully down the street toward the train line.
Jack owned a second-hand electric scooter that she’d had an old friend of a friend modify to run hybridly on biodiesel for extra distance and speed, but parking was exorbitant everywhere and Bellis didn’t spring for it for a lowly Security Officer Class 5. Only people high up in management, the kind who could afford parking on their own, got to have spots paid for by the firm. So Jack was waiting at the train stop, along with the rest of the downtown workers from her neighbourhood.
At least the trains were regular and fast. But their users paid the price of the trains’ efficiency, which is that everyone used them, so they were usually crowded. As the next train whizzed to the stop, a small throng of people surged into its few small doorways and crammed into the already full cars. Jack found herself wedged between a young looking woman dressed in fashionable but inexpensive business wear and an older looking young man who was obviously a courier. He had skate shoes on and they looked well used but of excellent quality. Jack could hardly see the propulsion jets at the heels and couldn’t see wheels at all. She recognized the man as one of the couriers that Bellis Corporate used.
His face and body fit her profile for attractiveness and if Jack had an entirely different temperament, she might have smiled at him. But while she was perfectly happy propositioning someone on the nets, she wasn’t about to make an ass of herself on the train. Besides, he was clearly online, his gaze unfocussed but his face cloudy with a look of concentration.
The train ride downtown was mercifully short and Jack was expelled from the car along with a group of several other Bellis employees. She walked up to the main entrance to the office and heard the ubiquitous ping of her identity chip being recognized. This sound was immediately followed by another sound, this time of recognition that she was wearing a company approved uniform. Why they needed to have a chip on her ass when there was a perfectly good chip in her hand, she never would figure out.
She picked up a lift and got off on her floor. She walked down the corridor and opened the door to the Security Room. It sounded more interesting than most of the names on the firm’s lobby directory, but it was really just another cube farm. She walked past a pair of identical cubicles until she reached the cube she shared with the night guy, Gilles. Bellis Security was a round the clock operation and each cubicle was shared by two staffers. They liked to keep a third of the cubes empty at any given time for cleaning staff and corporate monitors to visit them.
Jack suspected that the person who made up the cube assignments had a special sense of humour, putting her with Gilles. The falling down and breaking her crown jokes had just about finished and they had been sharing the desk for almost three years. She walked up to the desk and said, “Morning, G.”
Gilles looked toward her, then adjusted his focus to look at her. “Morning, Jack,” he replied, packing up his bag and gesturing for his coat. “It’s been another dull one.”
“Same old, same old,” Jack replied, exchanging his jacket for hers on the coat hook. “It almost makes you long for the good old days, doesn’t it?”
“You’re too young to be nostalgic,” he said, heading for the door. “The past only looks good when you can’t see for shit. Later, dude.” He shrugged on his jacket and loped down the hallway and out the door. Jack sat down in the chair and felt it automatically adjust to her preset configuration — a little lower, a little straighter and a whole lot softer. She settled in, taking out the second half of her breakfast bar and having a bite. The clock on the lower right corner of her display read 15:58 UTC.
• • •
Jack took a sip of her now cold coffee, made a face and put her cup down on the small ledge they called a desk. She unfocussed her eyes and logged into the Bellis system. Her vision was filled with an image which had essentially not changed since the technological bronze age — a rectangle with little pictures representing files and programs, a horizontal menu system and a yes and no interface. The desktop. Jack’s nemesis.
Jack hated the desktop interface like some people hate liver. She had gotten into security the old-fashioned way — by subverting it for fun and profit. As a kid she liked to crack into other kids’ systems, playing pranks and leaving messages. It was mostly harmless stuff, but she quickly realized that there were better ways to do almost everything. Once the Direct Connection became more common and monitors, mice and physical keyboards became obsolete, Jack expected a radical change in the way people interacted with their systems. But, no. They just emulated a WindowIconMousePointer system, drawing the desktop on the cornea rather than the screen. The lack of vision pissed her off.
She had configured her personal system to run with a home brew three dimensional interactive interface, but she was required to use the Bellis system at work. It caused her almost physical pain, but she turned on her “keyboard” by throwing a small switch on the side of her desk. A physical switch. She really hated that. A tiny laser light show started on her desk, showing the image of her custom keyboard layout. At least they let her use her own keyboard layout. She tapped away, sensors on her desk picking up her movements and converting those motions to wireless input into her system.
She called up the mail system and paged through a bunch of garbage from the social committee and some messages from management about new business lines and appropriate branding imagery. Deleted. Jack opened up the systems viewer and watched the logs scroll by for a few minutes. She found the image calming and had been known to spot problems in their early stages just by having a feeling that the logs looked funny. They were looking fine today, so she opened up another window and started reading the news.
According to what she saw, there didn’t appear to be a whole lot going on in the security world. Jack subscribed to all the usual trade feeds, the internal Bellis Security feed and she regularly visited a few outlaw cracker boards using an identity she first developed before she chose the right side of the law. Truth be told, she liked to keep her hand in on the lighter fun stuff and also figured that it didn’t hurt to see what the other side was up to. Not that there really was an other side anymore.
Sure, code jockeys were still writing clever tools to break into systems and do a whole host of interesting things when they were in there. But ever since Everlock came on board, hardly any foreign bodies lived long enough to do any damage. It was like DDT for computer viruses. The end of an era.
And it was both the best and worst thing that happened to the network security world. When Jack was a kid, security commanded respect and a decent salary to boot. Every firm was petrified that some cracker would break into their system and do stuff and they were willing to pay for the expertise to keep them out or get rid of them once they got in. But once Everlock was developed, network security became a lot less urgent.
Sure, every firm needed a security department and the staff still needed all those skills, but the willingness to pay for it vaporized like so much hot air. And markets being what they were, that meant that a security job went from being a high end career to a uniformed job. Really, security departments went from being filled almost exclusively with jobs for coders to being primarily concerned with law and order.
Since no one had yet come up with an Everlock for physical world crime, the bulk of security personnel were the equivalents of the anachronistic beat cops and squad detectives. Jack’s group at Bellis was tiny in comparison to the field officers and they were treated according to their relative size. But Jack wasn’t terribly bitter. The bottom had fallen out of network security before she was even out of school, so she went into the field with her eyes open. She just wanted to be able to stick her hands in the guts of the system and get paid for the privilege.
There hadn’t been a lot of working with the guts lately, though, so Jack spent a lot of her time scanning the news and reading mail. She read about some firm trying a new system interface for its staff that used three dimensional motion for input. It sounded interesting and Jack was glad to see someone taking the risk, but the article made it sound like it wasn’t going to last. A firm in Europe had several servers disappear, a self-professed good guy cracker in Africa was building tools to determine the provenance of the programs being eaten by Everlock and someone had built a fully functioning physical keyboard out of lego. It was a typical news day, but between reading the news while glazing at the logs, it ate up enough of the morning that Jack felt it was late enough to get another hotter coffee from the break room.
She stood, refocussed, and walked toward the tiny enclave which housed the coffee pot and a small fridge. She poured a cup and tried to ignore Tony, one of the other day staff. He was just a class 3 and he liked to talk about old fashioned fashion and nothing else. It was ultra boring stuff at the best of times and Jack was convinced he knew she hated it but talked her ear off anyway. She tried to get her coffee without arousing him, but it was not to be.
“You’ll never guess what I just found on the boards,” Tony gushed as he practically teleported next to Jack. He didn’t wait for her to guess, but rather said, “A photo gallery of twentieth century Gucci shoes. All of them!” he practically squealed. Jack nearly threw he coffee at him, but said only “That’s nice, Tony. Back to work,” and walked back to her cube.
Tony was a character and Jack had to grudgingly admit that he added a little life to the office environment. His love of antiquated fashion went beyond websites and collectibles. He actually dressed as if he were from another era. His hairstyle and clothes looked like something out of an early first generation video show — short neat hair, white button up shirts, a flap of fabric hanging from his neck that he called a tie and eyeglasses. He even managed to find a way to make his regulation trousers seem old. Jack suspected he spent a lot of time at home with a fabric gun flattening pockets and tapering legs.
He wasn’t completely antiquated, though. Like most people, he had several implanted diodes in his face, fashionably placed at his eyebrow, nose, lips, ears and cheeks. Really, he was an entertaining enough fellow, it was just that his obsession was a little bit too over the top for Jack, especially before her second coffee of the day.
Back at her desk, Jack started paging through Gilles’ report from the night shift. Security officers were required to write up reports of their observations over the course of a shift and for the few times something did occur these reports were invaluable. Most of the time, though, the reports were either dull as the sky or read like the in-class messages of highschool students. Thankfully, the reports Gilles left fell soundly in the latter camp.
0800 UTC
No anomalies to report. Still no water.
0830 UTC
No anomalies to report. Henson in Pod 7 got a new haircut. Looks like a porcupine. Think I’m in love.
0900 UTC
No anomalies to report. Looking forward to lunch.
0930 UTC
No anomalies to report. Henson’s hair ruined in the rain. It’s over between us.
1000 UTC
Eastern systems reporting fluctuations. They have a new sysadmin. Lucky to have access at all.
1030 UTC
No anomalies to report.
And so on. Jack enjoyed Gilles’ reports, particularly since they made up the majority of the conversation they ever had. Her own reports were generally less amusing but more well developed and Jack felt that between their daily reports, she and Gilles had developed a friendship of a sort.
Later, she would check on the Eastern systems, mostly just to have something to do. The Eastern branch had their own Security department who was responsible for their systems, but since they interacted with the Western systems, a problem in one area could quickly become a problem in another area. But first she checked the video imaging logs for the night shift. She wanted to see Henson’s new hair.
• • •
The Eastern system problems were exactly as Gilles had suspected — pebkac. Problem exists between keyboard and chair. The new admin misconfigured one of the databases to create multiple connections on each new action. It was a rookie mistake that looked a lot like a denial of service attack on the logs. Typical. Most of the actual problems Security dealt with were really just internal incompetence.
Jack spent the rest of the day reading Gilles’ report and writing her responses, with a smattering of commentary on the logs and news of the day. There were no fires to fight today, just like it had been for a few weeks. There hadn’t been any new hiring at the western branch of Bellis lately, so there hadn’t been any noob errors to correct. It was comfortable, if boring.
Quitting time rolled around without any further interruptions from the other inmates; Tony had cornered Ravinder from Finance at one point, but Jack stayed out of their path. She packed her few personal items back into her pockets and after finishing off her report to Gilles, logged out of the Bellis system. The company’s required daily run of Everlock quickly scanned her onboard system, a process which always slightly nauseated her. It was over soon enough, though and she marched out the door to the Security Room. Somewhere, on some log on someone else’s field of vision, the note “TIMESTAMP 0102 UTC -- EMP 456873 -- EXIT” scrolled up and away.
As Jack left the building, the rain was falling lightly and making the streets shine in the dim late afternoon sun. Without even thinking, she opened up a program called “shades” from her home brew launcher and a dark platinum tinted screen rolled over her field of vision. To any bystander she looked like she had silver eyes — utilitarian but not very fashionable. The trendy look was to have glowing or animalistic prints on the outside of your shades, but Jack couldn’t be bothered.
She started heading directly for the train stop, but was distracted by a sidewalk vendor selling spare electronics. The seller was obviously a scavenger, one of the many street people who eke out an existence on one or other side of the law, but always close to the line. The spare parts gleamed in the wet and Jack stopped to take a look. She wasn’t working on any particular project, but you never knew when you might need something.
The seller had spread an old rug on the sidewalk and had arranged her wares carefully on top. Jack recognized this as a sign of someone who actually knew what she was dealing with, not just someone who will grab anything that looks like it may fetch a euro or two. Jack looked over the merchandise, waiting for something to catch her eye.
There was the usual array of those thin flexible screens that used to be used for portable monitors but now was really only used for clothes or wallpaper and a handful of nearly invisible add-ons that attached to implanted diodes. There were personal recorders, translators for several languages, taxonomic determinators and a whole host of devices Jack couldn’t or chose not to identify by their overly large packaging. None of these interested her, although her hunch was right on the money — every item was good quality and up to date. She eventually picked up a small bag of what appeared to be small marbles.
“Are these what I think they are?” she asked the stall’s minder quietly.
“That depends on what you think they are, doesn’t it?” the streeter replied coyly. Jack grinned and asked if they were encrypted. “Of course,” the vendor smiled, showing her crooked and rotten teeth. “What would be the point if they weren’t?”
“Indeed,” Jack said, “what would be the point? I’ll take them.” She pulled up her account, walking through a virtual gallery that appeared before her eyes. She stood before what looked like a statue of damned souls descending into hell. She saw her hands manipulating the statue, moving various parts of the figure in a complex pattern. The statue cracked open and its hollow space inside was filled with what appeared to be gold coins.
“How much,” she asked, looking through the statue and coins to the scene on the other side, in the physical world. The vendor named a figure and Jack counted out coins. She saw herself handing them to a representation of the woman in her immediate focus, while the actual vendor shivered slightly as the upload took place, Jack’s system wirelessly transferring the funds to the seller’s account.
Jack still smiled to herself every time she paid for something. The statue and coins trick was a piece of user interface she had written herself along with the walking-through-the-museum representation. The whole gallery probably seemed more impressive than the funds transfer, but getting her home brew interface to hook up with the program that controlled personal accounts was more than a little difficult. The funds program was covered in layers and layers of security and average users weren’t supposed to be able to play with it. They obviously didn’t want people crediting themselves with extra funds, but they also weren’t very keen on people modifying their user interfaces either.
Well, fuck ‘em, Jack thought, as she slipped her bag of new micro video recorders into her pocket and headed back toward the train stop. She had no plan for the recorders, but had always wanted to try them out. They were tiny spheres that recorded and narrowcast audio and three dimensional video directly to their owner. Like almost everything else with a chip in it, they were connected to the everywherenet, the wireless network that connected everyone and everything everywhere. Using the nets, the recorders sent real-time images and sound to their owner using an encrypted signal. They had originally been developed for military espionage and police surveillance, but like everything else soon became available on the open market. Jack couldn’t wait to try them out.
As she was waiting for the train, she noticed a couple of Security goons from another firm. It must be Lentech - only their cops wore that horrible crimson uniform. Jack thought they looked like packages of tomato flavoured soup as they grabbed some guy and patted him down. It was probably a private crime, since Lentech’s offices were nowhere near the Bellis office and the guy looked more like a mugger or something rather than someone who made an enemy of a firm. He must have targeted a Lentech employee, so the firm’s security cops went after him as a violator of The Law.
Jack thought she had read once that there was a book full of a bunch of different laws in a dusty cabinet somewhere, but the only law that was really enforced was the protection of employees from harassment. Like any other asset, employees needed to be protected from harm and part of any compensation package was the protection by the firms Security. This effectively allowed the Security departments of the various firms to arrest, detain and punish criminals. Some of the large cities still employed police departments, but they were really just Security for the city. Any offence against person or property was dealt with by the Security department of the victim’s employer. They were tough on crime, so most people were perfectly happy with this arrangement.
The train arrived as the Lentech cops let the now beaten and bedraggled suspect go. Either he wasn’t the guy or the offence was pretty minor. The train ride back to her neighbourhood was uneventful, though, and Jack spent most of the time online catching up on the underground cracker boards she followed. A couple of her online buddies were getting into a small conflagration over the Everlock tools being developed by the African cracker known as N$0now4. They were fighting about anything that could be argued — whether the tools worked, whether the job they purported to perform was useful, whether the Pope was Catholic. It was a typical day on the boards.
Jack scanned their arguments and moved on. She checked her mail and found a message from Adrian, a friend she had met on a board that specialized in talk about the role of intelligent agents in security, on both sides of the fence. They messaged each other most days and had real-time conversations a few times a week. Today’s message read:
“Hey J. Read about the missing crap in Brugges? Nets are full of it here, like some thieved h-ware is some great fucking scandal. Makes you wonder if there’s more to it, right? Catch you tonight if you’re free. A”
Jack always found Adrian’s messages funny. She had no idea where “here” was, though a couple of years of context had narrowed it down to somewhere in Europe. Every time she asked, “Where are you,” Adrian evaded the question. Jack wondered if the mystery was part of the charm; she suspected that it was. She knew that she would be disappointed if one day she found out that Adrian was the anonymous handle of, say, Tony the class 3. She shivered at the thought, then immediately dismissed it. Tony couldn’t go two minutes without mentioning Chanel or Hilfiger, let alone two years.
Jack’s onboard geophysical locator notified her that her train stop was coming up, so she logged out of her mail client by walking out of the Postal History section of the museum in which she saw herself. She refocussed on her surroundings and stepped to the door of the train. As it slowed into the stop, the door dissolved and Jack stepped onto the sidewalk. It was almost completely dark by now and she felt herself tense slightly with awareness of her surroundings. Things seemed pretty quiet on the street, but you could never be sure. She made it to the beautiful wooden door without incident, however, and it unlocked in response to the ping from her implants and a recognition of her biometrics.
She walked up the stairs to her floor, not bothering with the automatic firefighter’s pole. She felt better getting some exercise, rather than letting the pole spiral her up to her floor. She approached her apartment door and heard the locks disengage in response to her proximity. Her apartment door wasn’t wooden — that was just for the street door. The door to her unit was some kind of polycarbonite and it split down the middle disappearing into the walls on either side to let her in, then closed almost silently behind her.
Jack pulled the contents of her pockets out and dumped them on the side table by her bed. She took off the Bellis pants, shoved them in the autoclave and grabbed some more comfortable clothes out of her drawer. After she got changed, she opened up her fridge and grabbed a bottle of beer, opening it with a flick of her thumb. She drank a long swallow and threw a meal packet into the zapper. While the machine blinked and whirred, Jack picked up a fork with her physical hands and paged over to a site devoted to micro three-d video recorders with her virtual fingers. The zapper made its “done” noise and Jack pulled the hot food to her small table.
As she ate, she learned about how the recorders worked, not just how to deploy them and receive their output, but how to program them as well. By the time her food was gone, she was ready to start playing with her new toys. A chime sounded and she saw on her display that one of the paintings in her museum was blinking. She felt herself walk toward it and stand facing it. It took on the appearance of an old-school screen and text began to appear.
Incoming realtime secure message from ADRIAN:
>Hey J. You there?
>>I’m here, how’s it going.
>Good, I guess. Things here are the usual. Everyone’s all crazy about some such thing while roam burns. But that’s the cost of life in the fast lane.
Jack smiled to herself. Subvocal recognition was so close to perfect that it was always amusing when it got things wrong.
>>Wish I were in the fast lane. Work is so boring I’m thinking of writing a bot to automate my breathing and then just put myself in some kind of hibernation.
>(laughter) Yeah, things haven’t been the same since the bad guys actually got away with stuff. So what are you doing to occupy your mind?
>>Reading logs and reports, watching the boards, you know, the usual. You might be interested in this, though.
>Well? Spill it.
>>I picked up some micro recorders today from a streeter.
>Ooh, those are fun! Have you played with them yet?
>>No, I just got home when the usher started flashing.
The silent speech recognition software had problems with proper names. Jack had previously told Adrian about her home brew interface and explained that the message program was represented by an image of M. C. Escher’s Sky and Water I, the famous line drawing of the fish and the birds. Ever since then, whenever they talked about getting messages, they referred to the Escher image.
>Well, then, I’ll let you go so you can play with your new toy.
>>Sounds good. Maybe I’ll flash the fish later.
>Once you get into the guts of those wee balls, you won’t be doing anything else tonight. I’ll flash you tomorrow.
>>OK. Later.
>Later.
The words scrolled up to the top of the frame, then the famous birds and fish slowly faded into view. Jack felt herself turn and walk toward the museum’s door. As she passed through the door, the image of the museum faded and she became more aware of her real surroundings. She was sitting in her chair with a third of a beer and a dirty plate in front of her. She blinked, had a swallow of beer and reached for the sack of marbles.
Jack picked up one of the units and rolled it between two of her fingers. It was pale blue, lighter than the colour of the Bellis logo and it shimmered with an iridescence when the light glanced off it. It was small and round, about the size of a marble, but covered in hundreds of tiny spheres. Each one of the little nubs was a self-contained camera, capable of recording three dimensional video and audio. Taken together, the unit could wirelessly narrowcast up to a thousand still images at once or create an immersive three dimensional recording in real time.
Jack looked closer and adjusted the magnification of her vision to 10 times normal. She inspected the tiny ball, looking for markings, imperfections and seams — anything, really that made it look different from a pale blue raspberry. She found the tiny depression you could use to open the unit and also caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a logo. She adjusted her vision to a greater magnification and saw that the logo looked like a stylized B created in lace.
She didn’t recognize the brand, but she had been out of the hardware market for a while so she was not surprised. She slipped a thin tool into the opening crevice and gently pried open the sphere. The recorder split in half, revealing tiny circuits and what were almost certainly clusters of nanotubes. Jack noticed a slight gleam on one side and increased her magnification even more.
“There you are,” she said aloud, having found the uplink code. She copied and pasted it to her scratch pad and closed up the sphere. She sat back and was momentarily disoriented as she refocussed her eyes back to normal magnification. The brief sense of vertigo passed and she took another swig of her beer. She called up an underground board devoted to micro recorders and ran a search for the latest version of a well known controller program. She quickly scanned the file with her own copy of Everlock as well as her homemade scanner that searched for less malicious but equally annoying bits of unexpected code, then when it was pronounced clean, she downloaded the software to her own system.
As it started up, she was immediately impressed by the interface. No kludgy windows and menus here. Rather, it was a graphical representation of a recorder — a nice, shiny sphere with an obvious entrance slot. She navigated to the slot and felt herself drop into the sphere. Once inside, she was in a maze that clearly mimicked the circuits in the real recorders. The maze was well marked, however and at the first door she encountered a reassuring voice pleasantly offering a tutorial.
Jack usually eschewed wizards and walkthroughs, but this program was unlike anything she had used before. And more importantly, the programmer in her was dying to find out what the tutorial would look like. She audibly said the word “yes” and immediately the door opened revealing what appeared to be a nice looking young man.
“Hello,” he said, “I am the tutorial.” He offered his hand and Jack shook it. The warmth and firmness of his grip surprised and delighted Jack. This is great work, she thought. “Are you a new user, or would you like to go straight to the advanced features?” he asked.
Let’s see what he can do, Jack thought to herself. “I’ve never used a micro recorder before,” Jack said, “ but I’m a Security Officer Class 5 and I’ve done some complex UI programming. I don’t think I need the dumbed down tour.”
The tutorial was frozen for a microsecond, then said, “I am sorry. I did not understand your last sentence. However, as a new user, you may find the complete tour most beneficial. Please, follow me.” He started walking down the corridor and Jack thought to herself that the designer was clearly better at mimicking tactile sensation than verbal interface. Oh well, she thought, I can waste a few minutes on the full meal deal.
The new user’s tour took only about twenty minutes and Jack had to admit that she probably would have an easier time working with the recorders after having gone through the process. In fact, by the time she felt herself leave the sphere, the micro recorder in front of her on the table was fully configured to use.
She went to get a water and a snack and quickly checked the recorder. For a disconcerting moment, she was watching herself perform the very actions she was currently doing — getting a slice of toast from the food machine and pouring water into a tumbler. There was absolutely no noticeable lag. It was amazing technology, that she could not deny.
It made her wonder, as she turned off the program, what kind of surveillance devices were in use in the wild. Surely, if marble-sized recorders could be bought on the street corner, organizations with money and clout could afford to buy or create even smaller ones, maybe even the size of a speck of dust. A person could be constantly watched and recorded and never know.
She dismissed the thought as soon as it was fully formed, though, because the point was moot. Round-the-clock ever-present surveillance had become the norm years ago. As soon as everywherenet became truly ubiquitous, any illusion of privacy that people harboured was finally dissolved for good. Your body’s actions may not be photographed as such, but your location, any programs you are running, any conversations you are having are logged and trackable. Even, to a certain extent, your thoughts.
Sure, no one had the time or energy to truly monitor most people, but you could never really be alone. And for law enforcement or in case of emergency, the logs could be reviewed. They were destroyed after a week as a matter of course, but would be retained longer for important people or known criminals. It was the cost (or benefit, depending on your perspective) of having an always accessible and free to use network.
Jack pushed these thoughts out of her mind and thought instead about bed. It was Tuesday, which meant that tomorrow was her last workday for the week. She was looking forward to the three days off; there was no doubt that ten days of working in a row was unpleasant, even if the hours were reasonable. Some of her colleagues at smaller firms or lower classes worked ten or more hours a day. As much as she hated Bellis, she recognized that it could be a whole lot worse somewhere else.
She stripped off her clothes and stuffed them in the autoclave. It was on a timer and would flash clean everything inside while she was sleeping. She double checked the alarm and again doubted the wisdom of the holographic Personal Wake-Me-Up. Still, there’s nothing like an adrenaline rush first thing in the AM. Damn that subconscious, she thought and took a gulp of SleepingJuice. She knew she only had about five minutes until it kicked in, so got into bed and ordered the windows to darken and the lights to dim. The next thing she knew, she was asleep.
I’m starting to get scared. I’m getting worried for my sanity. Maybe I’m paranoid and there’s a hundred boards all devoted to this, this — what would you even call it, a syndrome? Can’t even run the search, though, too scared about what I might find. What if I’m the only one, or even worse what if this is the beginning of some incurable illness, brain cancer or some chemical thing. Christ, I think I’m losing it. You know, nuts, batty, loony, crazy, wacko. That’s what I think I am. Crazy.
It’s been happening for a few weeks now, on and off. Everything seems normal, everything is fine, then wham! It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. Literally.
It’s later. Everything is fine and then bam, it’s some random amount of time later. And I have absolutely no idea what I’ve been doing and no sense at all that any time has passed.
At first I just ignored it. Maybe I was really bored and the time just escaped on me. That can happen, right? But after it happened a few times I couldn’t ignore it anymore. If I’m at the office when it happens I’ll casually ask someone about the last hour or two; you know, make it sound like I was zoned out and wasn’t paying attention. They’ll say that everything was normal; I guess I didn’t run around like a monkey or start foaming at the mouth or anything. But I just don’t remember it. At all.
I’m thinking about looking at my logs, but you can’t just call them up like you’re paging over to some board. You have to ask for them, officially. I don’t know if I have the skills to get them undetected. Oh, I could get them, but I can’t be sure I wouldn’t leave a trail. And I can’t be found out. I need to not be crazy.
I’ve seen those people. The streeters. The ones who clearly were normal once then they lost it and now they’re nowhere. Living like rats. Well, I won’t be a rat. I’d die first. Die.
The birds weren’t that bad after all. They really did just chirp and about three of them flapped benignly over Jack’s bed until she hit the off button on the alarm. “I can live with that,” she said, getting out of bed and padding to the bathroom.
She went through the usual morning paces and was out the door within fifteen minutes. She washed down half her breakfast bar with coffee as she headed for the train stop. The morning was pretty much the same as every other day, maybe a few more streeters than before. It seemed like there were more streeters every day. It was hard to tell if it just seemed that way; if there were any official stats on the number of street people, they were classified and unreported. Most people were thankful for what they had and didn’t like to think about the alternative.
When Jack got into the office, Gilles was finishing up the night shift report. “Anything good for me?” Jack asked.
“Eastern systems are fubar again,” Gilles said, getting his jacket on. “Nothing for us though. We’ve got the Eastern noobs locked out for now.”
“Noobs,” Jack said, derisively. “You’d think that by now they’d give a half a day orientation at least. It would cost a fraction of what it costs to clean up the mess.”
“That’s corporate, for ya,” Gilles said, “don’t know their ass from Tuesday. Later, dude.” He left the Security Room and Jack settled into the chair. When she first started at Bellis, she was put off by the cubicle sharing system. Fresh out of training, she idealistically believed that companies would have realized that physical presence in the office was obsolete thinking. But now that she had been working in the system for a while, she realized that it wasn’t solely a lack of understanding that made corporate require physical presence.
It was a method of control. Sure, the network was able to ensure you actually were working when you were on the clock; no one had to physically see you to be sure of that. But making you wear the uniform, sit in the chair and just be there is a not so subtle way of letting you know who’s in control. You really gave up a lot of freedom in exchange for employment and all the historical trappings just helped to break your spirit a little more.
But really, what other option did you have? Become a streeter? No-one chose that life, never mind what those conservative vidcasters said. Jack daydreamed about other options all the time, which is to say that she daydreamed about nothing. She wished things were different, but wishes don’t make anything real, so she tried to find satisfaction where she could. Work wasn’t doing it for her these days, but between the boards and online friends she had an okay social life. Maybe playing with the micro recorders would keep her occupied for a while — learning a new tool usually interested her for a few weeks or months. She might have to visit that street vendor more often.
Jack spent the work day paging through the boards, reading Gilles’ report and avoiding Tony. The first two items were more successful than the latter, as he accosted her not once but twice on the way to the washroom with boring anecdotes about some guy in Cuba with a collection of what she had to assume were clothes, though she’d never heard the word he used before. At least he was benign. Unlike that guy in admin, Atomu, who was obsessed with practical jokes. Having an anti-grav chip stuck to the bottom of your chair was one thing, but he had graduated to doing things like screwing with the access codes and turning entire logs into haiku.
Jack hadn’t seen any of his shenanigans first hand and she was thankful. She wasn’t sure if he just hadn’t made his way up to her floor, or if he was scared of Security. Privately, she found his handiwork pretty funny; she just knew that it would make her life momentarily miserable if it happened on her watch.
Around mid-afternoon, as she was fighting off the end of the day drowsiness, Jack noticed something odd. The Eastern systems were still being flaky, which meant that the problem had been going on for over 36 hours. That was a long time, even for a really green noob. Jack punched up the logs for the Eastern system, entering her Class 5 admin token. She knew that action would be flagged for her counterpart in Eastern and she expected an angry message any minute now, complaining about her interference. She just couldn’t let it go by unchecked — it was the closest thing to something actually interesting that had happened in ages.
As she suspected, her messenger started chirping a few seconds after she accessed the logs. She ignored the insistent sound resonating insider her eardrums and started reading.
That’s strange, she thought, looking at the logs. There’s no record of anything wrong here. The logs look like any others. Hell, they look just like mine. The insistent sound of the messenger brought her back to reality and she finally answered.
“Hey, Jack,” the voice at the other end said, sounding surprisingly calm.
“Sorry, Mac,” Jack said, “I just couldn’t stay out of it. I know it’s none of my...”
Macintyre, the Eastern Class 5, cut her off. “I’m not calling to bust yer balls,” he said, “I’m hoping you’ve got a clue what the fuck this is all about.”
“Damn, I don’t know,” Jack answered. “This log looks fine. Are you sure the system’s borked?”
“Only completely,” Mac answered, the frustration clear in his voice. “Users can only log in half the time, then they get kicked off. But no one seems to be able to replicate the problem. It’s totally random. Yesterday’s crap didn’t help, but this doesn’t seem to be related to that. I don’t know what this is.”
“I haven’t seen anything like this in years,” Jack said. “I know it’s an old school idea, but have you thought about shutting it down and restarting the system?”
Jack heard a sharp intake of breath from the Eastern guy. “Christ, that’s drastic.” He paused. “But I’m running out of options. I’ll see if we can’t straighten it out some other way, but if it come to that, I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks, Mac,” Jack said. “I’ll keep an eye on things from my end, if you don’t mind.”
“I’ll take all the help I can get,” he said and ended the message. Jack sat back and watched the clean-looking Eastern logs scroll.
• • •
Mac never did figure it out, but by the time the middle shift was arriving, the Eastern systems had gone back to normal. Jack had spent the remainder of the afternoon scrutinizing the logs from her systems and for the Eastern systems and finally noticed something odd — a connection on the Eastern side from an external node. Of course, access to the system was restricted to authenticated users, but if you could authenticate to the system you could log in from anywhere. You wouldn’t get credit for being at work of course, but you could always work if you wanted to. Obviously, not many people took advantage of this feature, so it was unusual enough that Jack instinctively noticed, even though the system wouldn’t flag this kind of connection.
On a hunch, Jack ran the address through a secure reverse lookup feature she had installed in a fairly well-hidden directory. Bingo. The address resolved to Buyside Solutions Inc., a huge financial services corporation with branches in every major centre. As far as Jack could figure, there was no good reason why someone would access the Bellis system from within the Buyside system, unless someone from Buyside was trying to get access to private Bellis documents.
Jack paged over to her office mail and rooted through her deleted messages looking for the most recent “What’s New at Bellis Corporate” propaganda piece. She scanned the last few weekly missives and read between the lines. It looked like it was possible that Bellis was planning on acquiring a new subsidiary. Jack wasn’t involved in big finances, no one who wore a uniform could afford to be, but she knew enough to realize that inside poop would be pure platinum to an outfit like Buyside.
Espionage. What a cute, antiquated concept. But, if she could foil an attempted acquisition of unauthorized information, she would get bumped up to Class 7 or 8 without breaking a sweat. But she had to tread carefully, since she could never survive a lawsuit from Buyside. And that was if they didn’t just sic their goons on her instead.
Jack left coded notes about the situation for Gilles in her report and made a note for herself to message him privately the next day. She logged off the network, got her jacket and headed out the door. She didn’t have a fully formed plan about how to investigate this, but she hadn’t felt this engaged in her work in years. Maybe ever.
On her way home she stopped off at a take away that made food the old fashioned way, with multiple ingredients grown from seed rather than flavoured nutrient blocks. She spent half a day’s pay on a small box of steaming vegetables, part of her weekly indulgence. She carefully carried the box back to her apartment, keeping a keen eye on the streeters aroused by the aroma. She made it into her apartment unmolested and shucked her uniform immediately.
Changed into her own clothes, she popped a beer from the fridge, set her display to rest and sat at the table with her stir-fry. She ate slowly, savouring the flavours. She knew that some people ate like this every day and that knowledge more than anything else made her angry about the inequities in the world. But many people could never afford to eat this food even once and Jack was aware of the realities of life enough to know this as well. Once she had finished every last morsel and had her last sip of beer, she stuffed the box and bottle into the recyclatron. She did nothing for a moment, enjoying the memory of her dinner, then restarted her display.
She started up the program that controlled the micro recorders and spent the next three hours breaking it. Part way through her fourth hour of trying, she finally successfully reconfigured it the way she wanted and involuntarily let out a small yelp of happiness over her success. She wanted to share her victory as well as talk about what she had uncovered at work, so she pinged Adrian.
“Not available”, came the response, “do you want to leave a message?” Jack said, “No” and went to one of the micro recorder boards instead. She paged through a few posts, but the board was publicly accessible, if hard to find and presumably logged, so she left without posting anything.
She silently cursed herself for being her usual antisocial self and never asking Gilles for his private contact information. Logically she knew that no one ever did that at work; off duty fraternization was frowned upon strongly enough that no one ever bothered. But now the social code of work had become inconvenient. She would have to contact Gilles tomorrow at the office.
She sat in her apartment, the night sky barely visible even though her window was still transparent and cracked another beer. After drinking half of it, she opened her fridge and its freezer compartment. She found a small box labeled “petite green peas” and opened it. Inside she fished out a cigarette from her small stash.
Tobacco was illegal, of course, although no one ever got in trouble for simple possession anymore because possession didn’t pose a problem to any of the firms. Even so, a record of criminal activity can be a real problem for someone in Security, so Jack was slightly paranoid about her stash.
She lit the contraband cigarette and spent the next ten minutes thoroughly enjoying her illicit habit. She didn’t even smoke once a week, but sometimes it played a part in her weekend indulgences as an extra treat. The drug was an acceptable substitute for companionship and it almost compensated for not being able to talk about her exploits; however, between the nicotine and the alcohol, she felt like she had taken half a hit of SleepingJuice. She fell into her bed, excited and intoxicated and oddly a little sad. She set the alarm for the middle of the night, then immediately fell asleep and dreamed of infinitely scrolling log files.
Jack woke again to the chirping birds, each peep sounding a bit like a tiny jackhammer to her aching head. The first morning of the weekend often started this way, though usually a few hours later. She silenced the birds, rubbed her eyes and banged her way through her tiny apartment to the water. She drank down a couple of glasses and tried to convince herself that she felt better. She grabbed a hot breakfast packet from the box and chucked it in the zapper. She turned on the coffee and while everything was heating up, she found some comfortable clothes. The zapper dinged and the coffee machine pinged and Jack took her food and drink to the table. She ate and drank offline, becoming less aware of her headache, more aware of her surroundings and thinking subconsciously about the previous day’s revelations.
She knew what was going to do, she just didn’t want to admit it to herself. Security was a good job, that was sure, and promotion would make it an even better job. Hell, she might even be able to move to an apartment with a bedroom. Or eat real food more than once a week. But none of that was worth committing a crime. Jack was fully aware of that, but she also knew that the real motivation for what she was going to do had nothing to do with Bellis, her job or any of the other possible gains. The real reason was that it was exciting. It was what she had trained for and it was what she had done for fun before she got into security. It made her brains throb and her skin itch, but in a good way.
She was going to break in to Buyside. It was either break in or forget the whole thing. Technically there was no crime in just connecting to the Bellis system since all users had to authenticate and the actual connection was out of her jurisdiction, anyway. But she knew something was up and she had to find out what it was. She had to get in there and she had to get out again without being caught. This was going to be fun.
She fired up her display and headed straight for the Escher. She set the basic encryption on and tunnelled into the Bellis system through the security back door. She messaged Gilles as soon as she was in. He answered immediately.
>Hey, dude. Read your report. Not surprised you called.
>>You saw it, too?
>Yup. Weird. Nothing wrong with it, though, officially.
>>Dunno...
>Me neither. You going in?
>>
>
>>How did you know?
>Don’t read someone’s reports every day and not figure out a thing or two.
>>Back me up?
>’Course.
Jack let out the breath she didn’t realized she’d been holding. She wasn’t so sure you could know a person from daily reports and shift change banter. He could have just as easily laughed her off as offered to help. She drank a little water and forced her heart to slow down.