Freedom Incorporated

by Peter Tylee

  “He wasn’t just following orders,” Dan said bitterly. “He sat on the panel that proposed killing her.”

  “But PortaNet paid him to do it,” Simon countered.

  “I know, but I can only slay one monster at a time.” Dan wished he were big enough to crush Esteban in the palm of his hand.

  “So you’re going to fight this battle too?” Simon looked sad. He knew his friend would dash himself against forces many times more powerful than he could deal with. And it would lead only to one thing, his grave.

  “Up until my last breath,” Dan promised, though the threat sounded hollow. He’d been skirting a fine edge for too long and felt as if he was finally slipping over. The only thing he could see beneath his rage was the bottomless pit of depression and desolation that he was burning as fuel – the inescapable end was closer than he’d thought. That’s unfair.Eleven months ago he’d believed he could thrash against the world single-handedly for years, but hatred had gradually rotted his core and sapped his strength. I’ll make them pay. They can’t get away with this shit.

  Simon wished he could say something to change Dan’s mind. “Do you know why they did it?” He marvelled at Dan’s steadfast mask of calm, knowing his entire world must be burning around him. “What they were covering up I mean?”

  Dan shrugged, trying to remember the case he’d abandoned. Eleven months of dust had settled on the filing cabinet in his mind and retrieving the proper memories was tricky, but once they’d started flowing, the memories were crisp and bountiful. “An assassination. Some scientist I think. Lars Olssen? He was researching…” Dan stopped short. “Oh my God.” The others waited for him to continue. “Oh my fucking God!”

  “What?” Simon couldn’t take the suspense.

  He rubbed a palm over his forehead to stop the room from spinning. “He was researching portal material, uh, you know, that white shit they line it with – it all happened before the ban on portal research. Maybe he discovered something PortaNet didn’t want anyone to know. Trade secrets?”

  “Maybe PortaNet tried to fix the problem, fucked things up, and hired professionals to clean up the mess.”

  “Perhaps…” Dan scratched his chin. “But I wasn’t close to overturning any stones. I was ready to call it quits and chuck the case in my failures basket.”

  “Then, if they were so spooked, they must’ve been hiding something important.”

  “Anything a giga-corporation is willing to risk their reputation over must be huge.” He felt a twinge of guilt, Jen was probably being tortured and he was trying to uncover the mystery behind his wife’s downfall. “Cookie,” Dan turned to see him reassuringly stroking Samantha’s shoulders in the corner, “you’re the perfect person to answer my next question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “If I give you a mobile number, can you pinpoint the phone’s location?”

  His eyebrows twitched. “Yeah, I should be able to.”

  “Then I’ll deal with Esteban before digging fresh trenches.” He handed Cookie the slip of paper on which Michele had jotted Esteban’s mobile number. “This is it.”

  Cookie’s fingers trembled, itching for his keys. “A friend of mine has a backdoor to a triangulation service, but bear in mind I can only tell you the general area, okay?”

  Dan nodded and watched as Cookie weaved his magic. Simon took a pace forward, astonished by his remarkable keyboard skills. “Where the hell did he learn to do that?” he whispered in Dan’s ear.

  But Cookie heard and answered first. “I’ve been practicing since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.” Soon he had a form on his screen that was prompting for a phone number and network. He selected United States for the network and tapped Esteban’s number into the appropriate field. They watched a rotating egg timer for three minutes before a message blinked onto the screen. “No can do, man. Sorry. You can’t pinpoint free-talk phones.”

  Damn… there goes my best lead.He took the number back. It still might come in handy.“Okay, that’s it. Keep digging for anything useful in the UniForce database.”

  “Sure man, what’re you gonna do?”

  Dan swivelled just in time to catch Simon’s resigned look. “I’m gonna take another look at my last case. Lars Olssen had colleagues if I’m not mistaken, maybe they can shed some light on why PortaNet wanted him dead.”

  “Which means you probably need me to get you inside the station.” Simon grimaced. So much for my weekend.

  “Hey guys, I can access police records from here,” Cookie reminded them helpfully. “It’s not like their network is Fort Knox.”

  “Don’t bother,” Dan said with a dismissive wave. “UniForce is too thorough; they would’ve purged the Department’s database, as much for their protection as for PortaNet’s peace of mind. Neither wants anyone tracing them to the deal. To be honest I’m surprised UniForce kept anything at all.”

  “Ammunition,” Simon sneered.

  “Probably, yeah. Just in case relations turn sour.”

  “If you went digging on PortaNet’s network you’d probably find something similar.”

  It made sense, Dan admitted. “Well they should’ve thought of the consequences – now we have it.”

  Cookie chuckled softly. “That’s probably why they burnt so much money installing a UG7-rated network.”

  Neither Dan nor Simon fully appreciated the joke. Only Samantha understood how much effort had gone into the hack.

  “Does the Department still store backups in the cellar?” Dan asked hopefully.

  Simon nodded. “Sure do.”

  “What about Jen?” Samantha’s reminder stopped them before they reached the door.

  “Esteban’s waiting for me,” Dan said. “So I’m going to let him wait.” But his calm demeanour hid the inner conflict that was tearing him in separate directions.

  “Ah…” Samantha took an instant dislike to the new plan. “But what about trying to find her before they…” She couldn’t say it. “Do their thing?”

  “I’m still going to tear Esteban a new arse.” Dan limbered his lower back by twisting left and right. “But his two friends are better targets and the police basement is the best place to unearth them.” It was the next best thing he could think of.

  “Good luck,” Cookie said, already tapping at his keyboard. “We’ll buzz if there’s anything new.”

  When they stepped into the star-streaked Australian night, Dan couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d never see Samantha and Cookie again. Don’t be silly.He didn’t believe in intuition and wasn’t superstitious. Still, it took ten minutes before he could bend his thoughts back to more constructive affairs.

  *

  Nathan sat motionless, staring at the pixels on his screen.

  The tension in the room was palpable and it radiated from just behind his sternum.

  “Put that out.”

  Nathan ignored his wife and took another drag on his cigarette. He felt the smoky coil fill his lungs before adding to the haze in the room when he exhaled.

  She sat next to him, eased the smouldering cancer-stick from between his fingers, and then squashed it onto the jade plate he was using as an ashtray. She was reaching the end of her patience – every day she threatened to leave. She desperately wanted to pack a bag and go to stay with her sister, though she’d never tell him about her desire. Sometimes she wondered whether it would even register if she did tell him. Their marriage was a sham. There hadn’t been any life in their relationship for over a year and she was growing tired of the puerile games they played. She’d leave him alone for five minutes and he’d light another cigarette, pondering deep thoughts while staring listlessly into space. The weekends were the worst. At least during the week he went to work instead of lingering around the house like a bad smell.

  She wasn’t angry anymore. She was over that. The anger had given way to acceptance.

  Nathan’s fingers were shaking, just one of the many physical manifestations of his extreme anxiety. The doctor
s had warned him to change his lifestyle if he wanted to see 30. Huh… 30?He shook his head, or thought he did, his muscles hadn’t actually responded. He was a statue, his fantasies dancing only in his mind. And his rigidity had affected his bodily functions. I’ll be lucky to reach 28,he thought, despite being three weeks shy of his birthday.

  “Is it really worth all this?”

  Nathan didn’t answer. He didn’t hear the question. And even if he had, he was too paralysed by indecision to answer anyway. He didn’t know what to think or do anymore.

  We’re all fucked.

  *

  Saturday, September 18, 2066

  23:19Sydney, Australia

  The records vault was both the pride and the scourge of the Parramatta office. It burrowed six floors beneath street level and stretched for hundreds of metres in every direction. But, embarrassingly, they were running out of space. Not that Simon was surprised when he thought of how much data the vault housed. It wasn’t actually a single vault, there were many vaults within vaults, simultaneously catering for different access requirements and minimising the potential impact of a fire.

  It was quiet at night. A handful of uniformed officers lounged lazily at the counter and nodded greeting to Simon as he passed, glancing only casually at Dan before lowering their eyes to their scintillating game of cards. Detectives often had late-night flashes of insight and came to the office to test a theory.

  They shuffled to the elevator in silence. The government, always frugal, expected its employees to use obsolete elevators and stairs rather than riding portals around the building. The first elevator descended only one floor; a special elevator would take them to the vault.

  A metallic ding signalled their arrival and the elevator opened to a short corridor with a polished titanium door at the far end. The Department had opted for an old-fashioned entrance because some bureaucrats believed PortaNet could override microchip restriction circuits and smuggle people inside unnoticed. In truth, they could. But PortaNet’s line of security products depended on word not escaping.

  A high-powered wall mounted scanner to the right of the door controlled the lock. It logged everyone who entered and exited. Simon theatrically raised his arms while it deciphered the details on his chip and the attached computer recorded his name. A hiss of compressed gas seeped from the vault when the lock clanked free and the first door swung ponderously ajar. It opened to a small chamber where a second scanner intended to sweep them. They had to seal themselves in before the final check would commence. Simon had authority to access the vault, but the automated security system required reassurance that nobody was coercing him and that nobody would rush in uninvited once the door was open.

  The blue tinged light reflecting from the walls of their metal tomb gave the vault a sterile feel. The second scan began, or so the monitor reported. It took nearly a minute because the computer had to verify Dan – or, more to the point, Mr Tedman Kennedy – wasn’t on a black list of suspected troublemakers.

  Simon staggered on weak ankles when he saw the name on the display. “What the…?”

  “I can explain,” Dan said quickly.

  “I would hope so.”

  The system found no excuse to bar them access and the inner door opened with another hiss of gas. It’d been a long time since Dan had been in the archives and he felt mildly nostalgic – it hadn’t changed much. “I don’t want to announce my presence to Esteban. I know he’s trying to track me.”

  “So you had surgery?” He looked aghast. “You can’t do that.”

  “Sure I can,” Dan retorted. “I already have.”

  “Then you’ll have to get a legitimate chip reimplanted.”

  Dan adamantly shook his head. “Not until this is over.” He eyed his friend with a guarded expression. “What’re you going to do? Alert a chipping squad? I need to sneak up on him and I can’t do that with my chip.”

  Simon felt his blood sugar level plummet. It was late, past his usual bedtime, and he wasn’t in the mood for arguing. Besides, he didn’t think it was wise to argue, he might say something he’d later regret. Instead, he dipped a hand into his pocket, unwrapped a Nutri-Bar, and bit off a huge chunk.

  Police protocol dictated that administrative staff must complete a network backup every night and store it in the vault. It wasn’t such a problem after the Department had spent money on crystal-cubes, but bulkier media stuffed older areas of the vault to the brim. Some very old records were on tape and laserdiscs that nobody had the equipment to read anymore. And vault management had dedicated two entire floors to paper records. An infestation of paper-lice was steadily eating them and the records were essentially useless, having no reliable catalogue. But the law said the Department must keep them for a hundred years, so there they were, stacked in boxes from floor to ceiling. An environmental control system maintained optimum temperature and humidity to minimise the breakdown of storage media and inevitable loss of data.

  It was a giant cross. Long corridors stretched in four directions, inviting them to explore the nether-regions of the information superstore. Two elevators at inconvenient locations ferried passengers to lower levels where they were even less likely to find what they sought. Computers with crystal-cube readers were in most vaults so that investigators would have no excuse to remove media. Police, it seemed, had gathered notoriety for forgetting to return things.

  “Now where?” Dan asked.

  Simon shrugged. Still crunching on his bar, he mumbled around the mouthful, “Check the directory.”

  The vault door closed behind them with a resounding rumble, jarring their nerves. When Dan was finished watching it, he strode to the terminals, which officers used to locate desired records in the expanse of useless data. One terminal had an ‘out of order’ sticker slapped haphazardly across the screen, but the other one responded to his request. “Vault-1D,” he said. “According to this.”

  “This way.” Simon felt less jittery and far less crabby now that his stomach had something to digest. “Just down here.”

  “I know, I remember,” Dan reminded him. “I used to spend hours down here too, remember?”

  Simon looked sheepish. “Oh yeah, so you did.”

  The light above the entrance to Vault-1D was flickering erratically. The effect reminded Simon of a B-grade horror movie as he let the scanner read his microchip. The Department hadn’t bothered with two-tier security on inner doors. Vault architects had presumed anybody capable of passing the first two titanium doors had a legitimate purpose and was therefore unlikely to force entry into places they shouldn’t.

  An ear-piercing siren wailed as soon as they opened the door. All inner doors had a self-locking mechanism that engaged after 20 seconds and the siren was to remind officers not to leave their fingers anywhere nearby. Dan put his fingers in his ears. He’d always hated the siren’s pitch and its ascending urgency grated his back teeth.

  Once inside, and once the siren had stopped, he set to work. He located the appropriate box and began fishing through thousands of tiny crystal-cubes. Each was stored in a separate plastic container and each was capable of holding a snapshot of the Department’s network. Isn’t nanotechnology wonderful,Dan thought as he rummaged. Without an adequate budged to secure the network, officials had mandated the storage of crystal-cube snapshots as the next best alternative. So, if data went mysteriously missing, someone could always recover it by scrounging through the archives.

  The air in Dan’s lungs felt heavy as he plugged the correct cube into the reader and launched the retrieval application. He couldn’t keep the trepidation from his voice. “I think this is it… yes. Here we go.”

  Simon curiously peered over his shoulder, swatting absently at a trail of sweat trickling down his sideburns. “What’re we looking for?”

  Dan chewed his lip – he often did when reading. “I’m not sure yet.” He’d located a record from the day before Katherine’s murder and a shiver ran down his spine, accompanied by an overwhelming des
ire to turn back the clock. “Look.” He stabbed the screen with a finger. “He was from Sweden, here for a conference… didn’t have many friends according to this.”

  “Maybe they cleansed it before you got a copy.”

  “I doubt it. He had one friend, a colleague in The Netherlands, see?” He stabbed the monitor again, hard enough to make the surrounding pixels swirl with colour and smear a fingerprint on the matte screen. “It was an angle I never pursued. Nothing indicated…” He trailed off, unwilling to finish the thought.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Simon asked, hoping he wasn’t.

  “Yeah, I’ve never been to Holland. It might be nice.”

  Simon sighed deeply, wondering why he chose such high maintenance friends. “I guess I should come.” He yawned. “I can sleep next century.”

  *

  “Give me your weapon.” Dan held out his hand.

  New South Wales police didn’t have permission to carry weapons or ammunition out of the country so Simon reluctantly complied. “I assume your new identity has clearance?”

  “Yeah.” Dan added Simon’s pistol to his arsenal.

  They strode to the immigration counter and Simon’s disbelief grew with each weapon Dan placed in a neat row for tagging. “What’re you… preparing for World War III or something?”

  Dan ignored him.

  “That’s four bottles now, chief.” Chuck winked. It was a slow night and wondering what Dan was doing kept him entertained for hours.

  Chapter 9

  How much harm does a company need to do… before we question its right to exist?

  Slogan for uncommercial from adbusters.org

  Saturday, September 18, 2066

  15:42Groningen, The Netherlands

  Hans felt a tingle at the back of his neck, which set his nerves on edge and made him jumpy. Kat was complaining about the pile of trash in the kitchen, unambiguously letting him know how disgusted she was by spraying the mound with urine and meowing furiously for his attention. He’d been in the middle of another doomed experiment when the altercation started.