The Pedestal

by Daniel Wimberley

  The problem is, my implant is useless in every other capacity, as long as it remains outside of my body. No contact requests—who knows how many have racked up over the past year?—no optional add-on updates, credit account accessibility, et cetera. I can get over not knowing where people are at any given time—in fact, I’ve always felt pretty slimy about that part of the nexus’s functionality—but never knowing who’s trying to reach me or the state of my financial affairs is an affliction I’m not able to cope with.

  Fortunately, I know a guy.

  As I pass through the lobby of my office building, I realize I don’t need any coffee for once. I’m plenty awake and feeling fantastic. There’s a line at the elevators, and for the first time ever, I blow it off to take the stairs.

  Just as Tim predicted, Keith is primed to pressure me about the IntelliQ project. I take it in stride—it’s much easier to tolerate Keith when his behavior follows my plan.

  “We need this thing done yesterday, Wil. Sorry if this puts you on the spot a little, but if you pull this off, IDS may survive the year. If not, well I’m sure someone’s already brought you up to speed—we’re barely hanging on right now. I had to let someone go yesterday, in fact.”

  I can read between the lines—he unloaded another programmer in order to make room for me on the books. It angers me that Keith would toss that upon my shoulders, when we both know who actually hopes to benefit from it. I feel my old irritability stretching its wings, ready to take flight. It slips through my fingers before I can get a hold on it.

  “Is that supposed to be flattering, that you fired someone to hire me on? Jeez, man. You should’ve just turned me away—I don’t have any seniority here anymore.” Oops. That’s not helpful, is it?

  I feel the temperature of the room cool a few degrees, but Keith keeps a firm grip on his composure. Glad one of us is in control of his faculties today.

  “Sorry,” I murmur. “I’ll make it my top priority, believe me.”

  Keith steeples his chubby fingers and watches me contemplatively. “It’s okay, Wil. I need to ask you something, though.”

  “Okay, shoot.”

  “I’ve never been one to question my employees’ personal decisions, but I gotta admit it makes me a little nervous that you’re always in privacy mode lately.”

  Oh, scrap.

  “It’s your right, don’t get me wrong. It just creates an impression, you know? Like you’re hiding something.”

  I gulp.

  “Just something to think about, that’s all.”

  I retreat from Keith’s office like a kid who just got busted cheating on a quiz. I don’t really care what Keith thinks of me, but he’s right about one thing: privacy mode will do me no favors right now. Too bad I can’t do anything about it, with my implant rattling around in my pocket like a loose coin.

  I poke my head into the rack room and when I catch Tim’s eye, I don ear protection and slip inside. He drops what he’s doing and follows me at a short distance to the back of the warehouse.

  The moment I’m certain we’re alone, I say, “I need a favor, Tim.”

  “Yikes. Those are words I never want to hear from you.”

  “Nothing big. I just have a little problem with my NanoPrint.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “The kind where it’s in my pocket instead of in my body.”

  “What? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I wish, buddy. At least, I do right now. Anyway, my problem is that I can’t access anything on it, and I need to figure out how I’m gonna stay on top of the day-to-day stuff without it.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “Sure. Dodgers do it all the time, right?”

  “Yeah, but that requires some illegal hacking. This is crazy, man. I’m surprised it hasn’t deactivated yet.”

  I don’t need more fuel for stress at the moment; I feel my blood pressure rising like a balloon. “Listen, can you help me or not? I don’t need to hear how messed up my life has become to know it’s messed up.”

  “Simmer down, toots. Let me think on it for a little while.”

  I leave him tapping his fingers against a server rack and return to my office. It’s absolutely filthy; I guess the cleaning crew hasn’t figured out that it’s in use again. I spend half an hour scrubbing things down, coughing and sneezing at all the dust I stir up.

  Just as I sit down to appreciate my work, Tim pops in—sweaty and breathing heavy, as if just returning from a run—and deposits a small device on my desk. “This should help.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  “I do not. Just keep it near your NanoPrint and you’ll be able to access everything manually.”

  “Whoa. I didn’t think implant readers were legal.”

  “Strictly speaking, they’re not. This is a law enforcement model.”

  “How’d you get your hands on it?”

  “Don’t ask, all right? The less you know, the better.”

  He walks me through a maze of touch screens. I’m sure that as soon as he walks out of the room, I’m going to forget a step and have to track him down again, so I ask for repeated demonstrations until I’m vaguely competent at navigating the menus.

  “Tim, what am I gonna do about this, I mean long-term?”

  “Get it reinstalled, man,” he says with a shrug, like it’s the most logical thing in the world. “Not that big of a deal.”

  I consider it for about two seconds before I feel a bad taste rising in my mouth.

  “What if I don’t want to?”

  He pauses. “Then you’ve got a problem. No telling when it’s gonna happen, but eventually that thing’s gonna deactivate and you’ll lose all access to the nexus. How long’s it been now? Three or four days? I can’t believe it’s still running, man.”

  “It’s been a week, actually. How long does it usually take?”

  “Dunno. Hold on a second.” His eyes lose focus for a few seconds as he consults the nexus on the subject, and suddenly his mouth curls up in a smile. “Normally twelve hours. Sounds like your implant has gone rogue.”

  “How can that happen?”

  “Human intervention is my guess. I’m thinking it’s time we took a look at it—maybe we’ll find something on there that explains things.”

  Tim calls up my files on his reader and begins sifting through them. Hundreds of updates await my attention—they downloaded to my implant as I reentered the planet, but they’ve yet to be installed. Tim gets them going and continues plunking around.

  “I wonder if my privacy mode has anything to do with all this,” I offer helpfully.

  “Maybe. But I doubt it. Looks to me like someone’s hacked the access point to your vital stats.”

  “Who could do that?”

  “There’s only a handful of people I can think of,” he admits with a frown, but his eyes are sparkling. “And one of them was Arthur.”

  We move on to my financials, and right off the bat, we stumble across something that absolutely floors me: evidently, I have received substantial credit deposits for every month I spent on Mars. Grogan and I never discussed compensation in any detail—after all, what choice did I have?—so I’m a little surprised—pleasantly so—to see a handsome sum piled in my personal escrow account. It occurs to me that this might well be the breadcrumb trail that led Gunn to my interplanetary doorstep. Tim and I do some quick and dirty math and find that I did better financially on Mars than either of us has ever done on Earth; it doesn’t hurt that I wasn’t in a position to spend anything there, either.

  But that’s just the beginning.

  The real surprise is revealed in a little something left behind by Arthur’s pedestal program. Gunn’s guys managed to scrape off Art’s files before I got my implant back, but they clearly didn’t find everything there was to see.

  Tim looks paler than I’ve ever seen him. I peek over his shoulder to see what’s got him so freaked out. At first, it looks like something has glitched. T
im spends a great deal of time chewing his lip and tapping around on the drive with shaky fingers, bobbing his head and saying things like, No freaking way, man! And, Are you kidding me? Eventually, he looks at me and guffaws. Closing my door, he leans back against it and says, “You’re either unbelievably lucky, or you’re seriously screwed.”

  “What does that mean?” I demand.

  So he shows me.

  One of Arthur’s parting gifts: embedded in his pedestal program was a procedure that shuffled eleven million credits—roughly one month’s extortion payouts—from IDS’s capital accounts into an unnamed offshore account. Because of the serendipitous timing of this process, the payout log has the appearance of transacting as usual, just before I dropped Arthur’s bombshell on the nexus.

  Technically, the payments stayed right on schedule—they just fell off the radar before anyone could claim them. When Arthur’s program was finished, it wrote out the account information, including its private-access credentials, to a commented field of a user-preferences file—one of thousands on my implant. This one only captured Tim’s notice in the first place because, like me, he’s in the habit of sorting files by time stamp, and this one was near the top of the list.

  Counting all those zeros, my eyes glaze over. “Oh. My. God.”

  “Guess you’re buying dinner tonight, huh?”

  I’m too tired to watch a movie tonight—after a shameful display of fresh-seafood gluttony with Tim, it’s all I can do to stay awake on the way home—so I settle for the news. For once, I’m glad I bothered. The networks are saturated with constant tidbits on Palmer Gunn. After years of fruitless investigation, the FBI finally convicted their man—thanks to Arthur. Evidently, as the nexus was permeated with Arthur’s whistling from the grave, hordes of victims came out of the woodwork to testify against Gunn, documenting his otherwise untraceable hand in more crimes than anyone could’ve imagined.

  An added bonus: Palmer Gunn’s blood link to our dear president has also made mountainous waves. Coupled with her implication in the IDS extortion ring, it has secured her membership in one of this continent’s most exclusive clubs: the impeached presidents. Her administration is crumbling at this very moment, and the new regime is chomping at the bit to take control. I doubt they’ll be any less filthy than her, but I must admit I feel considerable pleasure to witness—and even play a role in—her fall from grace.

  Incidentally, Miritech was ripped to shreds at the first sign of President Carlisle’s demise, and all of its subsidiaries are rapidly disappearing into vapor. I still know nothing of Fiona’s status, and I’m loath to drag Tim into my world of espionage to find out. All that aside, I continue to lose sleep over a single, haunting thought: did any of the blood plant seeds make it back to Earth?

  Speaking of Tim, he explained over dinner that I can have an anonymous token issued on Arthur’s phantom account, since I’m in possession of all the necessary information. The token can be retrofitted to just about any inanimate object, though they’re most popularly fitted to jewelry. I’ve decided to order a handsome watch—for this purpose, and also because I have absolutely no sense of time without my NanoPrint. Normally, this is an option reserved for corporate entities. But eleven million credits tends to sway customer service a bit.

  I’m grateful to have Tim by my side through all this—not only for his technical expertise, but because he’s one of a handful of people on this planet who I believe is trustworthy enough to be a part of this without undercutting me for a piece of the pie.

  All of this amounts to one thing: I’m comfortably financed—wealthy by most people’s standards, including my own. Perhaps I should be excited by this—and I suppose I am, at times—but I’m equally terrified. I fear that at any moment, Palmer Gunn, or perhaps the FBI, is going to kick in my door and plunder what’s left of my earthly life. Rationally, I know Gunn is no longer a real threat—even his own cohorts have abandoned him at this point—but there remains a scrim of uncertainty over the money, which prevents me from relaxing completely. I don’t dare spend a single credit.

  So I work out instead.

  I’ve often heard people say they’d continue to work for a living, even if fate called their number in the lottery and bestowed unimaginable wealth upon them, because they enjoy working too much to leave it behind. It hasn’t taken me long to learn that I would not be at home among these people. Now that I’m ostensibly well-to-do, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to drag myself to work. I’m still very much motivated by my yearning to bring Keith down, yet every day at work feels like precisely that—another day at work. I know my presence is serving a purpose—at least, I think it is—but I’m wondering if it’s possible to just buy my revenge.

  Apparently I can afford it.

  I’ve been working closely with our nexus consultant, and with his considerable help, we’re finally making some progress in moving IntelliQ towards public consumption. The programs are actually on the test partitions now, where the nexus can scan for memory leaks. This is a far cry from our endgame, though. Assuming we bridge this phase, there still remains the formidable task of installing and securing the library on our nexus portal. I’m happy to defer to our consultant for this, and I have every reason to believe he’ll pull through. IDS is truly at his mercy, because if by chance he fails, I’m not gonna be much help.

  If we weren’t so close to making this all come together, there’s a chance I’d drop everything. I hate to think that I’d selfishly leave Tim in that sort of a bind, but I suspect I’d find a way to minimize the guilt. Maybe I’d buy him a set of dragon-wing placemats to complement his dining room decor.

  “Hey, Wil—I mean Wilson,” Tim says, “don’t want to freak you out or anything, but I just found something I thought you should know about.”

  “Jeez, what now?”

  “It’s Mitzy.”

  My breath catches in my throat. “Oh, scrap. Did they find her?”

  “What? Did who find—wait; wrong Mitzy. I’m talking about the other one. Miss Victoria’s Secret?”

  “If you’re going to tell me she’s dead, it’s okay. I already know.”

  Tim gives me a blank expression. “Dead? What are you talking about?”

  “Gunn’s people got her. On the day I fled the planet—I saw her dead on the sidewalk.”

  “Well, that’s pretty bizarre, considering she left you a contact request four days ago.”

  I’ve taken a recent liking to watching the news. I used to despise learning about the depressing state of the world; these days I devour current events like candy. I suppose, if I’m being completely honest, I’m more than a little hopeful I’ll learn something about Fiona; after all, if Grogan was to be believed, her research is supposed to be the stuff of legends here on Earth.

  But I never hear anything.

  I’ve been home for more than a month now, and I figured I’d be back to normal by now—and for the most part, I am. Yet as I sit before one of my Viseon walls this Saturday morning, sipping coffee and thinking that life has finally taken on a sweet hue, something threatens to rip it all to shreds.

  It’s a text ticker, crawling almost unnoticed across the bottom of the screen. A woman on the screen is talking about the local reception of a recent tax proposal—I’m sure you can imagine how that story’s flavored—and I’m so busy enjoying the sweet deliciousness of my coffee that I nearly miss it.

  “Two youths found dead in public restroom outside Houston. Cause of death attributed to germination of unknown seeds within victims’ digestive tracts, which later ruptured.”

  Oh, no.

  Moments later, Tim’s unshaven face has replaced the news broadcast on my wall. To his annoyance, I’ve called him to put his researching abilities to work on his official day of rest. He returns the favor by taking his sweet time to oblige me, poking away at his keyboards and subjecting me to some New Age gothic scrap in the background that makes me want to claw my ears out as the minutes tick by.

&nbs
p; It’s not that I blame him for minimizing the significance of this situation; I’ve done my best to describe the horrors of the blood plants, but until you’ve experienced them for yourself—until you’ve personally witnessed the death and flowerpotting of a human being—it’s pretty hard to wrap your mind around.

  “Not much more out here than what was already reported.”

  “Anything about the victims themselves?”

  “Like what? What’re you looking for?”

  If I’m on the right track here, I believe Fiona’s little experiment slipped past Miritech’s dismantling and into the illicit drug scene. “Did they fit the profile of a drug user, or what?”

  “Can’t tell from this. You know how it goes; no one wants to be the mudslinger in this type of thing. The story is the deaths, not the victims themselves.”

  I don’t disagree completely, but I imagine the families of the victims would have a very different perspective on this. One thing I know for certain?

  I’ve got to do something.

  I’ve talked myself out of it twice now, but as they say, third time’s the charm. When I step into the police station—for the second time in my life—it’s as if no time has passed at all since Stewart was killed. The memory of his murder is abruptly fresh on my senses and I find myself tearing up before I can prepare myself to bear the burden. And my frayed nerves aren’t exactly helping. The last time I sat in a room with Rackley, he set on me like a bloodhound. Drawing his attention again—intentionally, no less—might prove to be my dumbest move yet.

  I half-expect—or perhaps just hope—for Inspector Rackley to be out of the office—after all, it’s hard to inspect crimes from a cubicle—but he’s in and agrees without hesitation to see me. I’ve changed physically over the course of the last month; my morning workouts, along with a newfound appreciation for earthly portion sizes, have transformed my body into something that I’m somewhat proud of. Everyone seems to have buffed up these days, but just as that sports store lady warned, the indiscriminate increase in muscle mass looks pretty odd, and the add-on’s conflict with the night-burner has already diminished its popularity. I haven’t yet reached a state that’s noticeable to the opposite sex, but those people who have known me long enough to have some frame of reference are slack-jawed every time they see me lately.