by Mark New
Frisque, bless her, had already changed the bar roster so that I was free that evening. I still had no idea why she was so good to me but I certainly appreciated it. I had left the bar to prepare for the ordeal ahead. If Latimer was really on the level, I could see an argument for becoming involved even though my inner voice still suggested that I was too frail, too ill, too depressed and a million other things which would render me incapable. This evening would help me decide, no matter how painful I was going to find it.
‘Were you worried about me?’ Becky replied as I waved her into the main room. ‘I’ve only been gone eleven years and seventeen days.’ I winced. She sat down in the armchair and put the briefcase on the floor to her right and took the slimpad from her arm.
‘Do you still drink that hideous soda?’ I asked.
‘Yes, if nothing more expensive is available.’ That was good as I’d picked up a six-pack of it from Frisque. Becky used to say that if she was going to pollute her liver with alcohol it would only be for the best kind and consequently she only drank champagne or vintage cognac. Or used to drink it: I was going to have to remember how much time had passed and that things might not be the same any more. I knew I wasn’t the same person I was then. I grabbed a bottle from the fridge and took the top off (I’d remembered to liberate a bottle-opener from the bar) then unscrewed the lid of my usual beer. I left both in the kitchen while I took the hard-backed chair from the bedroom into the living room. It wasn’t greatly comfortable but it would do. I returned for the bottles.
Becky turned off her slimpad totally and patted it back onto her jacket before accepting the proffered bottle. She nodded at my drink as I sat down opposite her. ‘Local brew?’
‘Yes. Turns out it’s better than most of the mass-produced stuff. Assuming nothing more expensive is on offer, of course.’ She almost grinned. I saw the flicker around her mouth.
‘If it’s all the same to you,’ she began, ‘I’ll skip the whole “how have you been” rubbish.’ It wasn’t as harsh as it sounded. Our entire relationship had been conducted on the basis of an agreement that there should be no bullshit between us. It was a horrible irony that, in fact, we had both been lying to the other about pretty much everything in our lives outside the confines of our house. I was happy not to rake it over. I was finding it extremely difficult just being in the same room and I wondered if she felt the same.
‘Suits me. Just remember who it was who tracked down whom.’ This time she really did grin. See? Miracles happen! I also noted internally that my editorial comments were snarkier which probably wasn’t a good sign.
‘Yes, unfortunately it was for your expertise not your company.’
‘I suppose an all-expenses paid trip to paradise doesn’t hurt much, either.’
‘Right. I can’t tell you how considerate of you it was not to hide in Antarctica.’
‘Who’s hiding? It’s not my fault if a major corporation can’t find one insignificant individual when it wants to, now is it?’
‘You should be flattered that we sent our Head of Security in person to talk to you.’
‘My mate George? Nah, he just fancied the chance to get away to the tropics with his vir-actress.’
She half-grinned this time. Now that I was closer to her, I could see that some of this was an act. She had dark lines under her eyes and looked as though she hadn’t slept in days. At least we weren’t shouting at each other. ‘She’s his PA and it’s strictly business.’
‘You know he’s screwing her, don’t you?’ I asked innocently. She frowned.
‘He’s happily married and very litigious,’ she warned.
‘Would you like to see the footage?’
She knew me well enough to know that there was no footage but nor was it a baseless accusation. ‘Christ, he kept that quiet.’ She reflected for a moment. ‘And you found out inside two days.’
I assumed an air of insouciance. ‘One never loses the old magic.’
‘You didn’t recognise him, though, did you?’ Busted. Fair point.
‘Form is temporary but class is permanent,’ I improvised. She laughed, though it felt a little forced.
‘You haven’t changed much. Apart from significant aging, obviously. You even wear the same old shirt.’ It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d put on my favourite t-shirt when I got out of the shower. She used to tease me about being an old rocker when I wore it, as it was the ‘It’s Legal’ 2036 World Tour commemorative shirt. It’s Legal were the first rock band to undertake vir-tours and they made a mint out of it. I was lucky enough to attend one concert in person and picked up what I liked to think of as a design classic shirt. I was a little surprised she’d remembered it.
‘Well you haven’t changed a bit, courtesy of Big Pharma no doubt.’
‘Rejuv is great, free for senior employees and you could do with it in large doses.’
I grinned and swigged from the bottle as she took a long drink of the soda. Truce. It wasn’t turning into a shooting war which had been my major worry but beneath the light but stilted banter there was a frisson of something darker. As I watched her, Becky abruptly turned into business mode. That was also characteristic, that instant change of demeanour. Clearly, the pleasantries were over. She waved casually around the room.
‘I’m expecting that you can make the room go dark?’ She meant turn it into what used to be known as a cold room where electronics and pretty much anything else couldn’t penetrate. I was sure that she didn’t know about my implants and I wanted to keep them to myself so I did it the old fashioned way.
‘Computer.’
‘Yes, Mr Harvard?’ Becky looked at me when she heard the non-personalised voice of the AI. She was probably noting that it was characteristic of me. This sizing up exercise ran both ways. She must have seen when she came in that the walls were blank, another of my foibles from time immemorial.
‘Protocol Seven-Six-Fifty. Initiate.’ The walls briefly flashed a pale blue before reverting to my favoured muted white.
‘Protocol Seven-Six-Fifty confirmed. No breach detected. Faux traffic running as programmed.’ That was the bit some people forgot to add. It’s all very well going dark but people can see that it’s a dark spot Online and might, if they’re the suspicious type, conclude that you’re up to something. Faux traffic is just a surface fake that convinces any passing spybot that you’re Online normally. If you push at it enough you can see the trickery but pushing that much would set off alarms in any ordinary system too.
‘Standard feature for this model?’ Becky asked archly.
‘I believe the previous occupant may have added some options.’ I said, deadpan.
She reached for her briefcase and set it on her lap. I took another drink from the bottle as she put her right thumb against the TAG reader on the case. It took a second or so and then released the lock. She opened it up. All I could see from opposite was the open lid but it seemed to have a lot in it judging by the amount of sifting she was doing. Time to get down to business.
‘I got your message,’ I said. ‘Not alarming at all. No, sirree.’ She looked at me over the top of the case. Uh-oh, her serious face; I know that one.
‘It’s true that I knew it would get your attention. However, it wasn’t an exaggeration. Neither Latimer brother understands much apart from; it’s in the system, it’s very dangerous, it’s proved fatal to some employees, and I raised hell until they agreed to find you.’ Oh, so both the brothers Latimer knew?
‘My deal with ol’ George is that I’ll hear you out but without prejudice to whether I do anything else to help. He wasn’t entirely clear on what he thought I might do, though,’ I informed her, though she must have heard it from Latimer himself. ‘But bloody hell, Bex: Naimittika??’
She continued to give me the serious look.
‘I may be mistaken about it’ she admitted ‘but I didn’t use it lightly to get you into the game. I think it’s a probability.’ She half-smiled ‘And do you know how long it’s b
een since anyone called me Bex?’
So far, this was a passably tolerable experience. I wished she didn’t look so good though. I didn’t expect her to pine for a decade but she might have at least developed the odd grey hair. I sighed inwardly. The sooner this was over the better. She could tell me what was wrong, I’d tell her she was mistaken, job done, all go home.
‘I look forward to hearing your reasoning.’ I said in as neutral a tone as I could manage.
She emerged from behind the case again and gave me an irritated look.
‘No you don’t. You wish you’d never heard about any of this and you especially wish that I wasn’t here.’ Well, she wasn’t wrong. ‘Believe me,’ she said with some feeling ‘I would have been much happier to have stayed out of your life for an epoch or two. If there was anyone else on the planet who could both understand this and do something about it I would be at their house drinking their soda. Unfortunately for both of us, there isn’t. You might be under the impression that you can just hear me out and then bale out but it isn’t going to happen like that. Once you’re aware of the situation you’ll understand that, however unhappy it may make us, we don’t have any choice but to work together.’
I decided to ride out the storm. I shrugged. ‘Well, you and George have built it up to be apocalyptic,’ I waved my beer bottle at the sheaf of paper files now in her hand ‘let’s see what you’ve got.’
Her irritation had subsided as quickly as it had arrived. I thought it quite a good thing that she wasn’t actually immune to the circumstances. At the same time I hoped that the volatility was a symptom of the stress this alleged problem had put her under and not a new part of her character. The Becky I had lived with had decried drama and was cool and rational under pressure. This was best demonstrated by the cool and rational way that she had walked out on our relationship.
She put the briefcase down and replaced it on her lap with a number of files she had taken out. Paper files in the 2050s! I could see the top one had a buff cover with some numbers and letters and nothing else except a large, red, unfriendly stamp that read something like ‘Argonaut Industries: Top Secret’. I couldn’t imagine that they would have many paper files: maybe they had the stamp made especially. The numbers and letters looked like TAG references but it was difficult to read them upside-down so I couldn’t be sure. Hey, you want someone dead, give me a call. You want someone who can read upside-down, find a different secret agent.
The soft whirr of the air-conditioning unit momentarily blipped. Immediately, the walls went pale blue and stayed that colour. The AI broke in:
‘Caution. Bot scan occurred on faux traffic. No breach detected. Bot has been tagged. Trace in progress.’
Becky looked amused, ‘Don’t tell me the previous occupant opted for counter-measure capability?’
‘He was the suspicious type. Want to bet that the trace will lead back to a large yacht off the north coast?’
‘It had better not! I gave them strict instructions not to get involved. And I suppose you want extra credit for finding the yacht?’ She didn’t seem surprised that I knew about it but, then, having apparently gone out on a limb to hire me, she was hardly likely to run down my professional abilities. I mentally thanked Frisque for maintaining my reputation.
‘How much do they know?’ It was best to know if I was going to be falling over the good guys if I went looking for the bad ones. I had to remind myself that not only had I not agreed to take the job yet, I still didn’t really know what it could be. I decided I was only asking so that I knew what I might be letting myself in for if I helped out.
‘They’ve been told by George that we’re investigating certain seemingly professional attempts at breaching the systems. They don’t know we’re already compromised.’ That made sense. The team wouldn’t be taking any risks and they would probably infer that the antagonist was another corporation or possibly a hostile government so they wouldn’t be tempted to try to flush anyone out without higher sanction. She had also admitted that the breach had occurred.
I nodded approval. ‘And yes, I require extra credit for finding the yacht.’ She smiled. I realised that she was here to recruit me so bringing up my previous failings wasn’t likely to be on the agenda. Even so, I could nearly convince myself that there was a degree of warmth here amongst the drama and the stress. Or perhaps I should stop trying to kid myself and concentrate on the alleged end of the world.
I took another long drink from the bottle which emptied it. I waved it in the air.
‘I’m having another. How about you?’ She balanced the files on her lap with one hand while she finished the soda and handed the empty bottle to me.
‘Yes, please.’
When I returned with the bottles she had sorted herself out with the bulk of the files on the floor to her left - leaving one on her lap - and with the briefcase now placed behind her chair so that she could sit at an angle. I have no idea why people do that. Chairs are clearly designed to be most comfortable when you face forward and yet some people can’t help but drape themselves over them. I had to concede that Becky could drape with the best of them especially given the relatively short length of her skirt. She accepted the bottle from me and opened the file on her lap. I sat down on my chair and failed to read upside down again. I had to remember to find some software that would do it for me: it should be relatively simple to rotate the words and feed them through my ocular implant.
‘Very well, Miss Kingston. You may now attempt to convince me that the end is nigher than anyone thought possible.’
‘If you’re sitting to attention,’ she said, with only a tinge of irritation, ‘I’ll begin.
‘The first death was referred to the Security Team by HR according to our standard employment protocol not because of any suspicions surrounding the death but because when the local law investigated an apparent accidental death it was discovered that he had been up to no good on the side. The deceased was Jan Peters and he was one of our Team Leaders dealing with various government contracts. Turned out he was also making some money from unsavoury types by generating false TAGs.’ I raised my eyebrows. That was hugely serious naughtiness and not the easiest thing to do. TAGs were the codes used by individuals to access nearly everything Online and some things offline too. They were quantum encrypted and based on a person’s DNA. Nearly all jurisdictions assigned them to a baby when the birth was registered and the person had that TAG for life. It was generally regarded as unbreakable simply because the amount of computer power required to break the encryption would have been beyond the combined resources of all of the world’s processors. Given that you couldn’t steal one or break one, generating new ones for less desirable types was both very difficult and very lucrative. A very few people were authorised to generate them such as the head of the registration agency in the UK and similar people in other countries. They were equally responsible for generating ‘government use’ TAGs for undercover agents and the like and had dealt originally with assigning them to the existing population when the system was first introduced. There were very few places where a country’s intelligence or police agencies were allowed to make their own without oversight simply because of the potential for mayhem. The policing of it was high priority because the world economy depended on people - especially big bankers - being who they said they were. There was even an agency at the UN, backed by the Security Council, which served to enforce proper TAG usage and known by the acronym UNTEA. If a nation state transgressed then the economic price it paid was high. Only once, about twenty years ago, had the UN had to de-recognise an entire nation’s TAGs. The country, a small one in western Asia which had broken away from its parent ‘Stan thought it could generate significant GDP by supplying authorised TAGs to anyone rich enough to pay. When the TAGs were de-recognised the country went bankrupt in two weeks and had rejoined the original country inside a month. Those responsible for the TAG sales, at least those of them that survived, were still in jail. Some of the TAGs re
leased at that time had been used in some unsavoury practices which ended up as a contributory factor in starting the South African War. To say that nobody wanted to see that again was something of an understatement. Consequently, selling TAGs now was a low-key affair involving the odd batch here and there and mostly sold to underworld contacts who either used them for organised crime or passed them on at a premium to terrorist groups. That’s pretty much the recipe for ghosting. It struck me that there was something I didn’t understand here.
‘How did he get access to TAG generators? Was he just bribing someone already authorised?’
‘No. That’s what it took a UNTEA investigation to uncover. He had somehow slipped a bot into the Namibian server and it diverted a batch of TAGs to him whilst flagging them as unused to the Namibia Registrar. He took maybe two or three in a hundred thousand generated so nobody noticed and the security AI in their registration unit considered it below threshold for reporting.’
I looked at her. ‘Um... isn’t that supposed to be impossible? Getting a bot around the security system, I mean.’
She looked at me steadily. ‘Now you’re starting to get the idea. It’ll be easier to just hold onto that thought for a bit and I’ll get back to it later.’
I waved a hand in apology ‘OK. Wouldn’t want to interrupt the narrative flow.’
‘The death of Peters was ruled to be misadventure but we’ll come to that in a second. The local law - I don’t think I told you that he was based in Morocco, but it isn’t significant - handed the peripheral TAG case file to UNTEA to whom we gave full cooperation. Peters wasn’t doing anything illegal on our servers nor utilising any Argonaut infrastructure so we got a clean bill of health. The agency concluded that the registration unit’s security AI was defective and the Namibian authorities replaced it. Job done; case closed; nothing more to see here.’ She picked a sheet of paper from the file on her lap and handed to me. ‘Though people with special skills might find this interesting.’ It was a translation of the rather detailed summary from the Moroccan inquest into the death. I took a few minutes to read it through and eventually looked up to see Becky watching me expressionlessly.