by J D Huffman
There was that sincerity again. It infuriated her. She couldn’t read his mind and know if he really meant it. Maybe he’s just a great liar. Fred said he was able to convince a lot of Totality to join him. That’s probably how he did it. And there’s whatever he’s doing to control Angel. It must be connected.
“For what it’s worth,” he continued, “I appreciate the strength of your convictions. We may never see eye-to-eye but I respect you.”
She bristled. The last thing in the entire universe I want is the respect of a Totality.
Chapter 27
Electronic Mazes
Devon had already wasted two days. Well, not “wasted,” exactly, but he’d spent a good portion of his work day at SINAI Systems combing through documents on the company intranet while trying not to look too suspicious about it. It didn’t help that he didn’t know what he was searching for, only that it would have to be something out of the ordinary—something he didn’t know SINAI was into, or something that they shouldn’t be into.
His scans turned up plenty of documentation: project specifications, estimates, work orders, invoices, programming references, and other miscellany. None of it gave him what he needed, or what he assumed the man with all the stories about werewolves and fantasy dimensions was looking for. It frustrated him. He was normally very good at his job. He could code his away around damn near anything, no matter how short the deadline. He got a rush from it, too, that sense of accomplishment, especially when he did something his bosses or coworkers assumed was impossible or at least very unlikely. He’d knock it out in no time flat, and it’d be good stuff. He didn’t consider himself a rock star, as the best of the best might, but he knew he was pretty good.
This? This, he wasn’t good at.
His lucky break came on Wednesday morning, when a new project was assigned to him. Management wanted to shave off a few nanoseconds in the corporate messaging system so they could use it as a selling point to other companies. In order to work on this, Devon needed data—lots of data. SINAI, of course, had plenty to play with: most traffic on the ‘net passed through a piece of SINAI hardware somewhere along the way. He didn’t need all that, though. He just needed what was passed around internally. In particular, he hoped he could get his hands on corporate-level communications. Those were normally off-limits for a plebe like him, but he had a feeling he could sweet talk his way into some of it.
What the man said before was right: getting hold of a C-level executive for SINAI was like looking for a good meal at Denny’s. Secretaries, on the other hand, were easier to reach. He remembered Irene Wexler, who sat next to him a few times in that Mythologies of the Ancient World course during their college days. He also remembered they never spoke much. There was brief, awkward flirting, and he was reasonably certain they’d shared notes a time or two. But it was a hook, and that was all he needed. Irene Wexler was the CTO’s personal assistant.
He picked up his headset and tapped the spot on his screen that initiated the call.
“Brown’s office,” she stated, almost with a sigh.
“Hey, Irene. This is Devon Engels. Remember me?”
Her tone of voice immediately improved. “Devon! Hi. How’ve you been? Aren’t you over in R&D? Do they ever let you guys out into the sun?”
“Oh, very funny. Look, I’ve got this new project I need to do, and I gotta have some test data for it. I have access to most things around here, like communications records. But I need to eke out a few more nanoseconds in the messaging protocol, especially high-priority messages. I didn’t want to bother Mr. Brown about it personally, you know? So, I’m asking you. Would you be able to give me permissions on his internal messaging archive? I just need to be able to make a copy so I can test it using his credentials. Internal data is fine—I don’t need anything from his personal account.”
She paused for a moment, probably absorbing his request. “Sure, I think I can do that. Do you have a project number for this, in case he asks? I mean, he never does, but I just know the one time I don’t ask for it, he’s going to come over and be like, ‘Irene! Why was someone else in my messages?’ and I’ll have to fumble for an explanation because, you know me, I can’t remember anything if I haven’t put it down somewhere.”
I didn’t know that, but that’s good to know. “It’s project number 885917.”
“Okay, give me a few minutes. You should get a message when it’s unlocked and available to you. Let me know when you’re done so I can lock it up again. Don’t want to leave this open any longer than we have to, right?”
“Good idea,” he agreed. All I need is a copy, anyway. If I need to get in there again, hopefully Irene will oblige me. “Hey, one more question, if you have a minute.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” He imagined her smiling on the other end. Why didn’t I talk to her more back then? Oh well.
“You ever see Mr. Brown in person? Has he ever come talked to you, or taken you to lunch, or anything?”
“Of course. I see him a couple times a week.”
That was too fast. I wonder… “Think about it a little more. Do you have conversations, face-to-face? Have you sat down and talked to him about anything, ever? What does he look like? And I don’t mean the picture of him they put on the break room walls.”
It took her longer to answer this time. “You know, now that I think about it, I don’t think we’ve ever had a face-to-face conversation. I’ve seen him walk past me into his office, I’m pretty sure, but I can’t remember what he looks like other than his black suit and thinning white hair. I’m not even sure about that.”
“But he calls you?”
“Sure, when he wants his messages or to send me out to do something.”
“Is there anything unusual about his voice?”
“Devon, what is this about? You’re being weird.”
He let off an awkward chuckle. “You’re right, I am being weird. I’m just messing with you, to be honest. But let me know about that file, okay?”
“I will. Thanks for calling! You should call more often,” she suggested.
Yeah, assuming I’m even alive next week. “I’ll do that.” He ended the communication and waited nervously, thinking of all the things that could go wrong. What if Mr. Brown really is some kind of weird creature and he already knows what I’m up to? I could be dead before I hit the floor. I’d never know what hit me. Who knows what he’s capable of? Ugh, I’m going to die, aren’t I? Killed by some freak from another world, or whatever.
The worrying was for nothing, though, as he got a message from Irene a few minutes later. Inside was a reference to Mr. Brown’s message archive. He opened it up, pulled down a copy to his workstation, and made certain to push another to his portable drive—one of those fingernail-sized chips that could hold massive amounts of data. He figured he could pore over it with more privacy at home, and if something happened and he wasn’t allowed to return to the office (a good possibility if Mr. Brown figured out what he’d done), at least he’d be able to continue digging for that strange man. Devon felt more than a little weird—guilty?—about stealing an executive’s data, even if he had a modestly plausible justification for it. If he presses me on it, I’m going to have a hard time lying, he knew. He wished Irene worked for one of the other executives rather than the CTO. He imagined Mr. Brown was a fairly technical individual, and at a minimum Devon might get chewed out for taking such a brute force approach to his project. He envisioned Brown calling him and berating him. “What are we paying you for, grunt work? We’re paying you to optimize our algorithms so we’re the best—the fastest—in the business! You shouldn’t need huge volumes of my company communications for that! Pathetic. What makes you think you deserve to work at SINAI if this is all you’re capable of?” It was the kind of talk he’d read about people getting at other companies when they drew too much attention to themselves, CEOs who became famous for firing people af
ter a chance encounter in the elevator, or the parking lot, because he or she didn’t like how you dressed, or smelled, or looked at them, or what tone of voice you used—maybe too deferential, or not deferential enough, and you never knew which one it was supposed until it was too late.
Devon was hyperventilating by now, driving himself to hypertensive paranoia over the stolen-but-not-really message archives. He sent a message back to Irene that he was done copying, then set about scanning his bounty. He decided to look for anything talking about “special projects,” as he’d done fruitlessly against the more public records. He surmised that anything “special” wouldn’t be available to everyone else, but surely the C-level folks would speak freely to one another about such things.
He watched the minutes tick by on his computer display as the scan sifted through years and years of Mr. Brown’s messages—the man had been at SINAI since something like the mid 2050s—and suddenly, a bunch of listings popped up. The scan was ongoing but it had found enough to report back to Devon. He peeked at the records, one by one. The first ones were quite old and not particularly relevant, projects that had been kept secret while being debated in the boardroom before being laid out more formally and assigned. Those projects had long since been developed and released. He poked at dozens of results like this, and soon it was hundreds, but the closer he got to the present, the more he saw vague messages about a “new project, top priority” and offhand references to something called “Mu.” Impatiently, he jumped to the top of the list—the most recent findings—and saw Mr. Brown asking Ms. Clarke, the head of their Seattle office, for “an update on Mu.” He tapped his fingers on the desk, hoping Ms. Clarke’s response would pop up in short order.
He could hear his heartbeat in his ears as he opened the latest message from her, a response to Mr. Brown.
Felix,
I don’t need you hounding me about Mu every other
week. I have a million things going on. You seem
to think this is progressing much faster than it
is. It’s delicate work. Very slow, very
meticulous, very expensive. You want it sooner?
Give me more money or more people. Preferably
both.
Here’s your status: ETA 60 more days for a live
test. Software is nearly developed and hardware is
functioning, if sometimes erratically. The company
should have sprung for better equipment if they
wanted this to work well right away. This is what
happens when you try to do world-class work with
bargain-basement tools.
I have my doubts about the live test. But, we’ll
have to see what happens with what we’ve got.
Don’t bother asking for an accelerated timeline. I
know you and the Chicago boys want this thing
yesterday, but it’s not happening. The estimate
stands, and I will point out it’s still two months
less than what I gave you at the start.
By the way, please fire whoever you assigned to
procure the live test vessel. I’m not convinced
this thing is seaworthy but I’m being told it can
be made ready in time. You can look forward to
budget overruns for that. There’s no point arguing
with those unless you want Mu at the bottom of the
ocean, in which case I’d be happy to see you
follow it, along with my career.
This little escapade had better work, or we’ll
have wasted several years’ worth of R&D budget on
a fantasy.
But you already know that.
Best,
Julia Clarke, Director of Special Projects
(Seattle)
Devon wasn’t sure what he’d just read, but clearly Ms. Clarke was not in a good mood about it. That only intrigued him more. It also gave him something to search for, going forward. He decided he’d mark that correspondence for later review and get back to work, as much as he wanted to keep digging around in Mr. Brown’s files. He still had real work to do.
Meghan already had dinner ready by the time he got home that evening. To be fair, it was Thai food she’d ordered—neither of them were especially good cooks, but they enjoyed trying different cuisines together. Thai remained one of their favorites, even if Devon himself didn’t care for anything that spicy. He never understood how Meghan could ask for her chicken rama “as spicy as possible” and not have her eyes water and her nose run while eating it. She smiled the whole time and gave off quiet moans of enjoyment that he sometimes envied. “You really enjoy that, don’t you?” he teased.
“It’s so good, Devon. I wish you liked your food spicy. Even if it’s just pad Thai.”
It was true, he always liked his as mild as he could get it. A dash of black pepper would get him sneezing, and if he detected any cayenne, he’d likely not even try it. Still, they enjoyed their dinner together, sitting across from one another at their little dining table, eating out of brown, biodegradable containers. The packaging alone added several dollars to the price, Devon knew, because anything needlessly disposable had a federally-imposed levy on it. He’d read about what was once called the “disposable society,” in which people got new cars every couple years, relied on dishes and utensils made of plastic, paper, and something called Styrofoam. All that waste built up, and perhaps more importantly, the energy involved in manufacturing and recycling it was substantial, and saving energy had become a civic responsibility over the past several decades. The planet used to be cooler, he learned in primary school, until centuries of unlocking prehistoric carbon dioxide changed the balance of the atmosphere and ran the planet a bit hotter. It still snowed in Chicago, obviously—even global climate change couldn’t kill the Lake Effect—but he understood that deserts had grown and gotten hotter, water supplies in marginal environments dried up, and there was plenty of starvation and misery out there that the world slowly grappled with. Water was strictly rationed in the southwestern United States after many decades of waste, and while artificial rivers were dug out both to put legions of unemployed people to work as well as restore lost water supplies, it ultimately didn’t do a lot of good since a river is only as good as the runoff that falls into its drainage basin. There simply wasn’t much of that anymore, with precipitation numbers down in most areas, a long negative trend that no one knew the end of.
Sometimes Devon thought too much and too long about things like this and it depressed him. The world always had so many problems, and every one that was solved seemed to spawn three more. He was fortunate to work in a high-demand industry—so was Meghan, for that matter. If you were good with computing technology, you had bright prospects. Likewise if you could deal with the fast pace and high stakes of medicine. Education used to be one of those growth fields, too, but budget disparities had divided educators into two categories: the comfortable, content beneficiaries of wealthy regions, and the larger horde of teachers relegated to poorer areas, forced to contend with anemic budgets and unruly children. Getting one of those good jobs was as much luck as skill. On the other hand, legal fields continued to boom, as the seemingly endless parade of technological advancement opened up ever more opportunities for crime as well as litigation.
Devon rarely paid much attention to any of that, but he understood that prisons used to be places where criminals were housed in sprawling facilities filled with barred cages, with violence, drug abuse, and even administrative corruption running rampant. The system became more civilized during his childhood, with powerful psychoactive drugs used to suppress criminal and antisocial impulses, implantable under the skin to deliver continuous doses over periods of many years so there was no risk of some lunatic going off his meds and slaughtering a nursing home full of helpless g
randmothers. Once subdued and medicated, the criminals were housed in abandoned communities which they were charged with renovating and maintaining. Declining populations in many areas left vast numbers of homes—entire communities—empty and disused. State governments found they could save money and even raise property values by turning those abandoned communities into temporary prisons. Once a dilapidated town had been brought back up to spec, the state would begin selling the properties and hope to attract young, educated buyers. Many of them came in from places like China, India, the Middle East, and along the Mediterranean. The government didn’t care where they came from, as long as their money was good, and most money was better than American dollars anymore. That was part of why international travel never appealed much to Devon, though he figured even if he had the time and money, there wasn’t a lot out there that truly intrigued him. He preferred to spend his time buried in the guts of a network than poking around old buildings in Europe or Russia or something.
Meghan had been talking about something for several minutes, and he only realized this when she asked him what he thought. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention,” he admitted. “What were you asking me about?”
She sighed and used her fork to stir her chicken around in its spicy peanut sauce, looking down at it. “It doesn’t matter. I have to get to work in about an hour, so I guess I should take a shower soon.”
“When will you be home?”
“Late. Well, early? I’ll probably be off at five or six, so you’ll see me before you go to work.”
He nodded and smiled. “We could have breakfast together.”
She didn’t smile so much, and he couldn’t blame her. I’m being a complete heel. “I’m really sorry, Meghan,” he said with his shoulders drooping. “I’ve been busy and I have a lot on my mind. It has nothing to do with you. Things just haven’t been right since the accident.”
“I thought that’s what you had the counselor and pills for?”
“I stopped taking the pills. And I’m too busy to see my counselor this week.” He didn’t feel comfortable telling her why, of course.