He nods and pretends to be impressed. “I was wondering if you could help us understand some of the ways in which these safety checks could be subverted. During the recent spate of thefts.”
Now this is trouble. It’s coming from an angle I was not expecting. They don’t think I’m a thief. They don’t think I’m a donor.
They think maybe I’m part of Silhouette’s crew.
I stall for time. “Can I confirm your ID?”
“Sure.”
“I’m not talking security until I know who you are.”
“Very wise, Mr. Brewster.”
“Not wisdom. Habit. You get by on habit at my age Mr. ...”
Secret Squirrel here won’t give me his name, just a look at his dental work. So he leans forward and my TV checks out his retinas. We share a polite, stone-cold silence as it chews over this for a while. Then out comes his stuff.
Secret Squirrel is 36 years old, has a tattoo on right knee which sounds real romantic and is validated as Armament, Security Status Amber ... oh, it takes me back to the good old days. It still won’t give me his name. Psychological advantage.
I always hated Armament, for the same reason I hate Silhouette. They shoot people. Also, they never gave SecureIT a clear brief. “OK, Secret Squirrel, shoot. I don’t mean that literally by the way. Feel free to make a few more statements you already know the answers to.”
“Smart ass,” says the Armament.
“Look Squirrel, I’m rich, I’m happy, I don’t have to take anything from anybody and it was difficult getting to the point that I can say that with confidence. I didn’t ask you in here, and I don’t have to cooperate. In fact I signed a nondisclosure agreement with SecureIT when I left. What they would prefer and what I would prefer is that you go talk to them instead of me. So. You want me to be nice to you, you start thinking nice thoughts about what a sweet old guy I am and how much you respect me.”
“Age Rage,” he says sweetly, calmly. “You’re a suspect Mr. Brewster, not an information source.” He keeps smiling, and waits for me to fall over in shock.
I just do Mr. Rich Disgusted. I roll my eyes. And hold up my hands like, I live in this place, so why would I have Age Rage?
He keeps his poker smile. “So Mr. Brewster, it is in your own interests to cooperate fully. In the first place Mr. Brewster, it is true that you came up with alot of this stuff, and it is also true that it is all patented in the name of SecureIT and that you didn’t get a bean. Isn’t that so.”
“I got paid,” I say. “A lot. A lot more than you. And I’m smart with my money.”
“Eighty percent, Mr. Brewster. Eighty percent of online crime is by employees or former employees. You fit the profile like a glove. Your profile is in neon lights all around your head.”
I don’t like his attitude. “First thing, I got nothing to do with all this crap. My own granddaughter just got her face burned off so don’t come here with some fairy tale about how I’m a big Age Rage freak.”
He blinks. And I think gotcha. I have no problems pressing my advantages. I go for it. “You dumb fuck, you didn’t come here and not know that Elizabeth Angstrom Brewster is my granddaughter did you? I mean you have read the files, I take it? Victims? Try 13705 Grande Mesa Outlook, apartment 41, Loma Linda, CA.”
And for once Dr. Curtis does something smart. “It would be very difficult indeed for any of our guests to be involved in something unsavoury. You have to understand that for their own protection, our guests are monitored 24-7-365. We know every keystroke on their computers.”
I play along. “Damn right. I can’t even download any porn.”
The Armament’s face settles and his eyes narrow. He’s mad. Somebody he relies on didn’t add up Brewster and Brewster and come up with four. He coughs and blanks out his face. “How did they circumvent the recognition software?”
I answer him like I’m talking to a baby. “They ... turned ... it ... off.”
It was easy after that. I cooperated fully. I didn’t know how it was done. You guys have been on the scene what did you find there? He didn’t wanna say, so I speculated, and I speculated for real. Infrared input, transcoding images? Not EMP, the stuff is hardened against that. Maybe they just broke the box and put their own software in. Maybe, yeah, it was an inside job.
When the Armament left he looked like there was some poor guy back in research was going to get a full body electrolysis for free. We all shook hands.
I’d lucked out. That was all. I was one dumb fuck who’d lucked out. All this VAO uses my stuff. I should just have known they’d think maybe I was part of it. I just didn’t see it coming.
I’m getting old.
And something else.
It was very far from a dumb idea to check out SecureIT staff. I should have thought about it myself. Remember how I said I took one look at Silhouette and thought I knew him?
Well suddenly I realised that I did. I knew who he was, I could think how he used to talk, I knew he still had all his own hair.
I just couldn’t for the life of me remember who he was or where I knew him from. So I’m gaga too. I sat there and ran through every single face in my address book. Nothing. Who?
I am clearly going to spend much of my declining years with people’s names on the tip of my tongue, and no idea whether or not I’ve turned off the gas.
What I’m thinking is: I need something to get the Armament looking somewhere else. The best way to do that would be to ID Silhouette.
That night we’re back in the bar, licking our wounds.
None of the Neurobics Crew got stung. But. The Armament got one old dear for illegal arms trading. Really. She and her son on the outside were dealing in illicit ordnance. That lady had the biggest, highest, roundest widow’s hump I’d ever seen, and I swear she was even more out of it than Jazza. It’s kind of sad and sick and funny at the same time.
Mandy has no time for sympathy. “We’re next.”
Gus is reading the paper and suddenly he drops it and says. “Holy shit. Have you seen this?”
He lays the paper out on the table. “It’s another job,” Gus says.
AGE RAGE ATTACK. VAOs use VAO again.
The CCTV rerun shows the whole thing. The little label says:
Chase Manhattan Bank NYC, 1:00 am this morning.
You’re looking at the inside of a vault and suddenly this iron door starts to rip. You see this claw widen the gap and then nip off some of the raggedy bits, and then they duck inside. This time my jaw drops.
This time they’re wearing firemen’s suits.
Walking exoskeletons that respond to movement pressure from the guys inside them. With training you can wear those things and walk through fire. You can lift up automobiles or concrete girders. You wear those things, you’re Superman for a day.
The old codgers don’t lurch anymore. Those suits weigh tons, but they dance. They duck and dive and ripple and flow. They shimmy, they hop, they look like giant trained fleas.
I’m saying over and over. “It’s brilliant. It’s fucking brilliant.”
I worked on those things. You see, you can’t send in rescue workers carrying hydrocarbon fuel or nuclear power on their backs and even those suits can’t carry enough ordinary batteries. So you beam the power at them. You beam microwaves. All you do if there is a disaster is you turn on your VAO, and the microwaves fuel the suits.
About the only people my software is programmed never to zap are rescue workers in exoskeletons.
Carte Blanche. We’ve given them Carte fucking Blanche and her sister Sadie too.
All four of them move like fingers playing piano. They scamper up to rows of strong boxes and just haul them out of the wall.
The suits already have these huge blue tubs on their backs. Nobody likes to say, but they’re for the body bags. The crew just dumps everything into them—heirloom jewellery and bearer bonds and old passports for new identities. Bullion or rare stamps. For the suits, it all just weighs a feather.
Mandy turns and looks at me like I’m a lizard. “Well duh! That’s why they call it burglary.”
Just then the bank’s security guards come running in. They’re covered head to toe in foil, so they can’t be area-denied. They start shooting.
You’ve never seen anything as beautiful as the movement in those mechanical arms. The old guys inside don’t have to do a thing. The arms just weave magic carpets in the air. And they go ping ping ping like harps as the bullets hit off them, and they flash like fireworks.
Then the suits coil and spring, and one of them grabs a guard by his head and throws him three yards straight into the wall. The guard kinda hangs there for a second and starts to slide down it. Through the back of the silver suit, blood gets sprayed in a pattern like a butterfly. The guard hits the ground stays sitting, his head dumped forward. He looks like the bridegroom after a stag party.
I don’t see what happened to other guards, but it looked messier. He’s nothing but a shape in the corner.
And then these beautiful suits turn to the cameras and wave like astronauts. They put a hand on each other’s shoulders. And they dance off in line, like Dorothy and her tin men.
And Jazza is still staring at the strip lights.
I say, “This is one problem we gotta own.”
Mandy barks a laugh. “Hell, I was thinking of running off and joining them. That looked like a lotta fun.”
“Those guards got kids,” says Gus. From the look on his face, I don’t think he likes Mandy much right now.
“We gotta get information and we gotta get it to the cops.” I tell them. “We all got to start hacking. I can get into SecureIT.”
Gus is still in pain. He can’t get the guards out of his head. “You reckon the company that sold that video will use any of the money to help their families?”
Thug says. “What do we hack?”
I got this one sussed. “They either bought those suits or they stole them. Either way they’ll be a transaction or a report. The manufacturers are called. ...”
Great, I draw a blank. I hate this, I really hate this. Just before despair comes, I remember the name. “XOsafe. XOsafe Ltd. They’re in Portland.”
Mandy cuts in. “The first thing I’m doing is take care of my own business so I have some money. That’ll take a while.” Suddenly she looks down and says in lower voice. “Then maybe I can look at who the guys in the crews are, OK?”
It’s probably as close to an apology as Mandy can get. Since nobody ever apologised to her.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” she tells me and goes off.
I go and give Bessie a call. “How ya doing, babe?”
“Aw, grand Dad,” she says soft and faraway and grateful. She tries to sound like it’s all covered, skin grafts etc but it can’t be covered, it can never be covered. You see she was confident, she was sussed, and I’m scared. I’m scared it will make her timid when she used to be so up front.
All I can say is, “Baby, I’m so sorry.”
“Hey, you’re the Brewster. Nothing gets you down.”
“We’re going to get him for you, babe,” I promise.
I retrieve my transcoder, which is a more delicate operation than sticking it was. I get my glasses back and go to Jazza’s room because I want to use his station to hack. Never put an old hack back from the same place. I go to his room but he’s not there. I keep the lights low, and make like I’m loading my pro golf program onto his machine. Money starts flowing back into my account but from a different source this time.
After a while I ask: where is Jazza?
I go back to the bar. My crew’s not there. Neither is Jazza. Oh god, he’s wandered again.
I get worried; I turn on his terminal to trace his bracelet. It’s pumping out signals. It’s coming from the shower. But there’s no shower running.
At our age, you’re always thinking in the back of your head: who’s going to go next? And I’m thinking maybe this time it’s Jazza. I can just about see him crumpled up on the floor. So I go to that shower with everything in my chest all shrivelled shut like a fist. I turn on the light, and there’s no Jazza there.
Just his bracelet on the shower floor.
Oh fuck. I push the buzzer. It seems to take an age. They’ve done these experiments that show why we always think a second is longer than it really is. The brain is always anticipating. It starts measuring time from the thought, not the vision. So I cling on to the buzzer saying come on, come on.
I think of all those times I check Jazza’s buzzer before going to bed. Jazza nice, and secure in his bed, it shows, or Jazza happy in the shower.
Has he done this before? You see Alzheimer’s, they wander off, they try to buy ice cream in the middle of the night in a suburb or they pack a couple of telephone directories and go catch a plane. They don’t understand, they feel trapped, sometimes they get frustrated and start to punch. They disappear and leave you to worry and grieve and hope all at the same time.
“We find him, don’t worry Mr. Brewster,” says the Kid.
So I see them, on the lawn, with flashlights. A light little feather duster of a thought brushes past me: the ordnance is turned off. The lights dance around the trees. The bricks in the wall are lit from underneath like a Halloween face.
Nothing.
I haul myself off to bed, and the callipers are really doing it to the side of my knees, scraping the skin, and I’m old and I just don’t sleep. Here in the Happy Farm there aren’t even passing car lights on the ceiling to look at. There’s only walls, and what’s up ahead, closer now. At night.
When you’re old you got a few things left and one of them is your promises. You can keep a promise as slow as you like, and as fast as you can, just so long as you don’t give up. I promised Bessie. I turn on my machine and hack.
Who knows SecureIT like me? Well, it’s been a few years. I get to work through a whole new bunch of stuff, but I do get into the Human Resource files. I mean, who would want to hack personnel, right? Just everybody.
And I go through every name, every face, every voiceprint recording. I see a face, I know it, but only sort of. I know that girl, sort of. She went and got a patent out on a new polymer, then joined. Real scholarly, real pretty, real nice legs. And I realise hell, she’ll be 40 now. She left years and years ago. After I did.
I see some old guy like me, pouchy cheeks and glasses and I can’t place him at all, except there’s a weird sensation in my chest, like I’m a time traveller. I used to say hi to that face every day.
One after another after another. Who are these people, being replaced?
One guy I knew now heads up a department. What? He was nothing. He was a plodder. Guess what? That’s who becomes head of the department.
I look a skinny, hollow staring scared face and I suddenly realise, shoot, that’s Tommy. Tommy was a nice young kid who taught himself to program, he had talent. Now he’s staring out at me wide-eyed with creases round his mouth like he’s been surprised by something. Like failure, like going nowhere. It makes me want to get in there and sort it out, and tell them, no you got it wrong, this guy’s got talent, you’re supposed to use it for something!
It makes me want to show up again every day at 8:00 am, and work my butt off, and take the kids out for a drink. It makes me want to make something happen again, even if it’s just in some little job in an office.
And I look at face after face and there is no Silhouette. There just is no Silhouette.
And then I find my own record. I see my own face staring out at me. Hey, maybe that guy’s Silhouette.
First time I saw that photograph I couldn’t take it, I thought that’s not me, that’s not the Brewster, who is that old, double-chinned geezer? Now, I look at it and I’ve got most of my hair and it’s black, and think how young I look.
And I read my record, and it tells the story of a middle manager who got a couple of promo
tions. It doesn’t say I came up with loop recognition iterations. It doesn’t say I was the first guy to use quantum computers on security work. It doesn’t say I was the guy who first told the CE about ISO 20203 and that getting registered to that standard got us Singapore and Korea and finally China.
What it does have is my retirement date. And then it says down at the bottom. “Left without visible security compromises. No distinguishing features.”
No fucking distinguishing features. What was I expecting, a thank you? A corporation that tried to credit its employees? I guess I was expecting that since I did some pretty extraordinary stuff for them, big stuff, stuff that got a whole congress of my peers on their feet and applauding, I guess I somehow thought I’d made some kind of mark. But they don’t want you to make a mark. They want that mark for themselves. But they don’t get it either.
We just all go down into the dark.
And I feel the fear start up.
Oh you can blank out the fear. You can turn and walk away from it. Or you can let it paralyse you. The one thing you can’t do is what you would do with any other fear. You can’t just turn and walk right at it. It won’t go away. Because this fear is the fear of something that can only be accepted.
The only thing you can do with death is accept it, and if you do that at our age, it’s too close to dying. You accept it, and it can come for you.
You get something like angry instead. You do what you do when you’re trapped. You writhe.
I can’t stay still. I go lolloping and limping like I’m stoned and drunk at the same time, because my room is like a coffin and the dark is like my eyes will never open. I go off down the corridor hobbling and jerking like some kind of goddamn puppet that something else is making move. I’m slamming my ribs against the wall and I don’t care.
And then I see a light under Mandy’s door. I don’t have my shirt on, but what the fuck. I’m scared. And I can’t afford to let myself stay scared. I knock on her door.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 63