The Way Things Seem

by Mackey Chandler

  “You almost talk me into selling my cute little Audi. Jack keeps encouraging me to get something exotic and flashy. I’d be scared to take it out of the garage. One good ding in a parking lot would cost more to fix than my whole car is worth now.”

  “Most car doors hit my running boards instead of the body. They’re welcome to bang away on them all they want.”

  “Well, given our ride tonight, are we headed for a BBQ joint?” David asked.

  “No, I have a taste tonight for Hungarian.”

  David had to explain why he laughed, and telling the story of his recent introduction to Hungarian food filled the time until their arrival.

  Linda was just as pleased not to have to coach him on what to order, and it was very good. Linda hadn’t traveled as much as David and they talked about other places he knew in Paris and London. He compared them to the more exotic experience of Djibouti and related how he got out of there just in time before they shut down the phones and internet.

  “What do you think about all the judges and politicians keeling over dead last week?” Linda asked.

  David choked on his dessert, tried to cover it and took a sip of his coffee.

  “Damn, this is going to be bad isn’t it? You may have that fancy face reading, but it’s plain for me to see that touched a nerve.” Linda said.

  “Actually, it was a very good thing to have happened,” David said. “It was needed and I suspect it should be repeated a lot of other places. It was limited to the east coast and parts of Europe.”

  “Europe too? You have a connection to really know what was going on there?” Linda asked.

  David hesitated too long before he said yes.

  “Oh my God, you are hip deep in it,” she quickly concluded.

  “Do you have a cell phone on you?” David asked.

  “Of course, don’t you?” Linda asked.

  “Yes, but mine runs a very thin custom operating system. It shows whatever number I want when I call someone, all my data resides on a different computer in a secure location that actually relays the call. The very smallest needed set of data is securely loaded only when I activate the phone a certain way, and when I end my call that is hard deleted. Most importantly, when I end my call I know it is off and not recording or radiating.”

  Linda didn’t say anything and thought about that.

  “So I don’t really want to say more about this anywhere near your phone.” David added.

  “If we go back to your place and I leave it in the truck is that far enough away?” Linda asked.

  “Absolutely, I’m almost as secure at home as in my office.”

  The ride back was in silence, because Linda was thinking of all the questions she couldn’t ask and she had no desire to make idle chit-chat. At David’s apartment she made a point to show him her phone and let him see that she placed it in the glove compartment.

  David made more coffee and checked the status of the apartment on his computer. Nobody had been in or triggered his systems. They took opposite corners of his couch and David related how an agent brought them an artifact he couldn’t destroy, but he didn’t actually name Johnson.

  “So you used one of these things just like I have in my purse?” Linda asked.

  “Yes, but I had to keep adding a great deal of power to it before it overcame the tile. Jack pointed out we lucked out it wasn’t much worse. For all we knew it could have blown up Atlanta like a nuke instead of blowing a hole in his sod. We had no idea what it was doing elsewhere when it blew. The agencies involved managed to hush up a lot of it. The thing is, I was working with a rogue agent. He has at least some other agents looking the other way if not actively helping. I don’t know any of them or even the name of his agency.”

  That was bizarre enough to raise Linda’s eyebrows.

  “That may be safer for all of us,” David conceded. “I don’t think his superiors even know it was one of their own who did this, and we’re all just as happy as can be to keep it that way.”

  “But you will do it again if you get a chance, won’t you?”

  “Oh yes. I haven’t described what we’re dealing with to you yet. It might make you back up and dismiss all the progress I’ve made with you and convince you I am crazy.

  “Give me the short version,” Linda demanded.

  “Not humans. Monsters.

  “Aliens?” Linda asked.

  “Aliens could be cute and furry and want to be our friends. These are monsters,” David insisted. “Worse they are messing with our society unknown to almost everyone.”

  “I don’t suppose I can know for sure how to feel about all of this until you have extra of your plant and it either works for me or doesn’t. I’m leaning towards taking it,” Linda said.

  “There is a complication on that you should know. When I was first taking it Uncle guided me and made sure I didn’t overdo my dosing and kept me safe. If you commit to taking it you should plan on setting some days aside and spending them with me while you find out if you are sensitive.”

  “I’m leaning towards that not being such a problem either,” Linda said. “I’ll have a winter break without classes about the time you have plant to spare.”

  “Won’t your family expect you to spend that time with them?”

  “Are you kidding? My mom has been lobbying like crazy, playing matchmaker for you ever since you visited their home.”

  “She hasn’t said a thing to me,” David said, shocked.

  “You wouldn’t be aware if she hired skywriters to announce it outside your office window,” Linda said, sweeping her hand like drawing a banner across the sky.

  David looked stricken.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” Linda allowed. “It’s kind of cute.”

  * * *

  The European Space Agency testing lab wanted to know why the chips David’s company supplied were so far out of spec. Not that they failed. Far from it, they seemed impossible to degrade with radiation at a level that suggested there was some significant new tech involved. His chief engineer pushed the call up the line to Paul being unwilling to discuss the matter with the man. David ended up taking the call because the man had dealt with him before as head of the company and insisted on speaking to him. That would happen less and less he hoped. It wasn’t good and he hated to do it because it might undermine Paul’s confidence.

  The truth was, the engineer knew every detail of the manufacturing process and the only change that had been introduced recently was to change the company logo etched on the case. If Paul or David wanted to tell the man that they were welcome to do so. Since it was impossible for that to make any difference, the engineer rationalized it as an unlikely statistical fluctuation.

  David wouldn’t tell the man something he couldn’t believe either and simply told the man it was a proprietary process he intended to keep as a trade secret. The fellow objected that some aggressive firm would reverse engineer his product even if it required difficult disassembly at the molecular level and systematic mapping each layer under an electron microscope.

  Since the proprietary part of the product was the first thing a competitor would discard in testing, absolutely certain it was superficial and protected not by patent but by trademark, David confidently said they were welcome to try.

  “I’m reluctant to approve a device based on technology I don’t know or understand,” the fellow said, “even if it appears to be a superior product. If it is significantly different it might have other weaknesses and limitations for which I’m not testing and should be.”

  “And yet, you use a hundred other devices every day you could not create yourself and the inner workings of which you only vaguely understand,” David pointed out. “I’d wager heavily you could not make or explain the manner in which your cell phone works to the last detail. You probably drive home in an automobile, in which the only critical components you understand are those it has in common with a Model T.

  “The specs call out how the device must t
ake an input and what it will put out. It doesn’t call out a specific internal architecture or process. You assume everybody in the industry is working at a common and known generation of tech and will announce any advance with a big promotion. But that is an assumption. It could be a literal black box completely unknown to you internally and meet spec.

  “We won’t be pressured into revealing trade secrets. I’ll leave it to you to explain to your superiors why you would reject components that tested out as too good to use so you switched to inferior. The question might come up and become quite heated if one of your satellites suffers failure or degraded performance and the investigation shows there was a change of vendor to an inferior product.”

  The fellow could easily see such a thing happening. He wasn’t being asked to switch to Aerosense as a supplier, just retain them. It was far easier to justify leaving things as they were than explaining a change. Such things could appear suspect even if no kickback or other impropriety could ever be documented. In the end it was safer for him to leave things as they were.

  Paul, who sat silent but listening attentively appeared a little stunned at David’s aggressiveness with a customer. Just to make his thinking clear on the matter David addressed him after he hung up.

  “If they are too stupid to buy a superior product the problem will self correct in a few years. The insurance companies will notice your platforms degrade and fail at a higher rate than the competition. They will start charging higher rates and drive them right out of business. They don’t care about internal architecture and trade secrets, they care about hard numbers on the losses they have to pay.

  “When the failure history confirms the lab testing, any loss we suffered in sales can be made up by increasing our prices for a better product.”

  Paul nodded, looking thoughtful. Hopefully he got the message that if David would play hardball he wasn’t going to second guess Paul for doing the same.

  * * *

  David had a program doing data mining for anything involving lower level politicians and judges. They mined all the usual public sources and piggy-backed some of the paid surveillance his company contracted. It wasn’t the first time he’d done that but never before was it for things off such personal interest. He was prepared to explain that away as a check on their systems against known sources if anyone discovered it. So far nobody had gotten so much as a sniff of it.

  There was a statistical anomaly of deaths of judges and state and city officials. David waited until it increased again the next week and then sent the message 77777 to Johnson’s phone. It wasn’t until the next day he got a call back.

  “I bought a burner and made a detour to Topeka,” Johnson said. “I hope it wasn’t just to wish me a happy birthday.

  “I don’t know your birthday, and I haven’t gathered that complete a dossier on you. I figure just assembling it might be hazardous to one or both of us because you are an agent. They might have a few fake files out there as trip wires. But I’ll take that as a compliment, thank you.”

  “Data collection is your game. I figured you probably had everything about me right down to my my shoe size,” Johnson joked.

  “Ten and a half,” David said, with no hesitation.

  “How the hell could you possibly know that?” Johnson demanded.

  “That’s the commonest size for men, it was just a good guess. The same way a gypsy fortune teller can scare your boots off with a cold reading. You just have to know a lot of facts about the average person,” David said, “or what drives most people go to see a gypsy fortune teller if that is your game. What I really wanted to ask you is if there is any reason you’d be aware of that I’m seeing an uptick in morbidity among lower court judges and slimeball politicians? It wasn’t all at once, like you destroyed another artifact, but it is both up and accelerating.”

  “Oh crap, I better cool it a little if you could see it,” Johnson said.

  “So it is you,” David said. “Did you find some way to sense their portals or energies to track them down? I’d really like to know since it would relate to the things I am trying to understand and study.”

  Johnson sighed. “Don’t I wish? No, this is plain old detective work. We’ve taken to studying which of them seem to have withdrawn from normal human activities. We look for people who suddenly don’t go to the country club and golf. Who stop coming to political dinners and cut off relatives.

  “We thought they were more susceptible if they were widowed, but it now appears to us that the spouse was as just as likely to have been disposed of as an inconvenience. If they have a handler who drives them and keeps them functioning by managing their bills and doing their shopping that’s a big giveaway too. The handlers are actually more dangerous to deal with than the targets.”

  “How are you taking them out?” David asked bluntly.

  “Well if they have a caretaker they tend to die within days if you remove their support. With the more robust ones it is hazardous to try to examine their home situation and see if they are being managed like a puppet. It’s best to snoop while they are away for the day and then arrange an accident or medical emergency. Just a couple of them have required plain old lead poisoning.”

  David didn’t take his meaning at first, but got it before he asked a stupid question.

  “If there is anything I can do let me know,” David offered. “Have you recovered any more artifacts?”

  “We have, but the next puppet we took down my agency became aware of his tile and demanded a thorough search thereafter for them. In fact we had to go back and make a show of searching at Judge Ramaris’ home and his keeper’s place. They have not brought you up again and I’m not about to do so myself. In fact I have discussed involving several other people of talent rather than you. I don’t think these others will be useful, but I want to divert their attention to keep my contact and activity with you safely separate. You seem to be off the radar and I’d like to keep it that way.

  “My blunt assessment is that my superiors would soon be in conflict with you because of their personality type and your personality type. You can make what you want of that and decide whether I am insulting them or you, but you are both useful to me. I feel that to bring you together will ruin the utility of one or both.

  “The agency has the tiles sequestered at what they feel is a safe location. I’m not sure there is such a thing. I’d never concentrate them together when we have no idea how their proximity will affect their function, but it’s out of my hands. I’m not going to give them unwelcome, unsolicited advice unless it gives evidence it will become a complete disaster. But thanks for the heads up that our activity was visible. I’ll fill you in further sometime in the future, if it seems safe and advisable. This phone won’t exist in a moment, so no need to note the number,” Johnson added before disconnecting.

  David appreciated that, and didn’t expect to contact Johnson using this method before he got back in touch on his own. A butt dial was believable, but two close together would be stretching credulity and raise suspicions. He did wonder what sort of people Johnson’s agency knew who they regarded as people of talent. He’d bet anything they didn’t have the acquaintance or cooperation of Mrs. Ayers.

  * * *

  Linda refused a dinner date out and instead insisted she cook for him. It felt like a significant step in their relationship. If he invited her to his place she’d probably be disappointed in how simply he lived. She didn’t try to wow him with fancy cooking. They had steaks off the grill, from out on her balcony, vegetables seared off the same grill, and a bottle of wine that didn’t shout of snobbery. A bought dessert and real Kona coffee rounded it out.

  She had some very interesting stories about how people make decisions from her studies. The key point David got was even after psychology students learn the ways in which they make poor decisions like everyone else they don’t actually apply the knowledge and change their decision making process. It was kind of scary actually. If they couldn’t change the
mselves how could they possibly help others?

  David had several stories of his own to share, including dealing with the testing lab. Paul finally found a candidate for his old job eligible for sainthood and smarter than him. He actually hired him. His succulent was propagating well and he had it divided into two locations with separate people tending each. A sudden disease or power failure wouldn’t wipe his operation out now.

  “I’ll have two weeks and a couple extra days winter break at the holidays,” Linda informed him. “If you have enough weed stocked by then you can introduce me to it.”

  “Do you want to stay in familiar surroundings?” David indicated with wave of his hand at her condo, “or would you like to be in a different environment?”

  “What little you related about your own experience seemed to center on being outside a lot. There’s a little resort in California, in wine country, my parents took up going to after I left home. I’ve never been there but they love it. I’d never want to live in California, but it’s lovely to visit. I had mom check, and they are holding a comfortable suite for a couple days until I confirm or let it go.”

  “Are your parents going there this year?” David guessed. “How would she feel about us coming?”

  “They have reservations in the spring, and she said it was a lovely idea for us young people to get away and get to know each other better. But she warned me not to let you drag all your business dealings along.”

  “If they can’t survive two weeks without me I’ve failed badly somewhere. I can restrain myself to just our business,” David vowed.

  “I’ll confirm then,” Linda said. The false colors her face flashed said she had a very broad interpretation of what constituted their business. David blushed at the display more than the caramel color of his face could hide. She could read that ordinary show of embarrassment so plainly with no special powers that she laughed in delight.