The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Makes sense. So do I have to stay down here till your house reestablishes security?”

  “Probably advisable,” I said. It didn’t matter actually but it was a chance for small talk with Markus. “How ’bout them ’Jacks?”

  “Football or basketball?”

  “I follow both.”

  That got the talk going, but just at the brink of agreeing we should go to a Humboldt State game together, my stupid house finished all the security checks.

  Markus bounded out of the chair (relieved? disappointed?). “I’ll go look around up top.”

  “I’ll do one more check on electronic security.”

  House had found plenty of breaches. That meant there had to be much more it hadn’t found. Ever since the Yan-Dimri fast factorization algorithm had flipped the advantage from the encryptors to the cryptanalysts, only isolated systems could be really secure (at the cost of being really useless). Of course, that was also why there was so much money in either side of encryption, penetration and security.

  Markus returned. “All right. Nothing hiding in the bushes for several miles around, no detected aerial activity, no gadgets I can detect in the garden or the house. You can come on out.”

  As we walked back through my garden, Daisy and Amaryllis went sniffing suspiciously through the flower beds, investigating whatever traces the firefighters had left. “Mostly the firefighters stayed on the paths,” Markus said. “You lost three soaproots, some twigs off your two trees, your rooftop solar, some branches the explosion broke and a couple cracked windows. It definitely could have been worse. But since you’re hacked and working against a dangerous and unknown opponent, purely professionally I suggest that you and the cats move to a secure location.”

  “Secure location?”

  “Well, there’s a Hilton with a secure floor down in Eureka, but I was hoping you’d accept a low rate on one of my secure guesthouses, because of the potential for—” did he hesitate just an instant? “—uh, further employment.”

  I think he did hesitate. Now what did it mean? “I’d feel safer in your guesthouse. You know enough to be afraid of my sister if you let anything happen to me.”

  “I’m terrified already. We should move you ASAP.”

  “I keep two packed bags. If your car has room for two medium-sized suitcases, three cat carriers and me, we can be gone in five.”

  It was three, actually.

  Markus’s cluster of four guesthouses around a courtyard had high, thick, slick walls; narrow, angled windows; and unmistakable firing positions at the corners. “Kind of like a castle,” I said.

  “Don’t mention that idea to Louise; she already wants a moat. Next she’ll ask for boiling oil. If you need anything, she’ll be on duty till four, when her husband, Stefvan, comes on.”

  I wondered why Markus wanted me to know his assistant was married.

  In the little blockhouse or cell—I couldn’t quite decide which it resembled more—I unpacked clothes and toiletries into the antiseptically clean drawers and cupboards. Louise had put a clean litter pan in the bathroom, and dry and wet cat food in the kitchen. As I settled back onto the sofa, a cup of chamomile-peppermint in hand, I felt practically human.

  Chime. “Incoming interactive video for guest Yi Ingrid Palacek, from Joy Sobretu, CAO of NameItCorp.”

  “Accept.”

  CAO. Chief Avatar Officer: the real-time animated face of a robocorp, a corporation managed by a suite of self-improving optimization algorithms. Some old-timers didn’t trust robocorps like NItCo; I didn’t see why anyone trusted anything else. Algorithms didn’t take bribes, drugs or liberties with employees; they worked around the clock at the board-specified strategy for making money, and reported success or failure honestly. Joy Sobretu was NItCo’s immaculately polished, impeccably polite and imperturbably patient avatar.

  A small square of light appeared on the wall. Within it, a talking head of Joy Sobretu said, “Ms. Zalodny said that the next step is the client interview?”

  “It is,” I agreed. “Let’s talk now.”

  The small square of light on the wall expanded into a doorway-sized rectangle, within which Joy Sobretu sat on a barstool-height chair, smiling expectantly. She was rendered at noticeably less than full resolution, looking slightly undetailed and geometric. Her light brown skin was too smooth; her hair, though rendered in individual strands, returned too quickly and completely to its style when she moved her head. Markus’s defense software must be using much of the bandwidth. That was comforting; Markus was 20 seconds away if stuff went all weird.

  “Thank you for allocating us this time.” Sobretu tucked some stray hair behind one ear and smiled warmly. “If you need anything, drop us the word, and we’ll arrange it through Markus Adexa.”

  She was reminding me that they were constantly tracking me. I waited, not letting nervousness lure me into small-talking and losing possible information.

  Sobretu’s face froze for a longish second; it dropped the “human warmth” vibe when it spoke again. “If we provide you with NItCo’s own analysis, will it disturb your process?”

  “Tell me what you think is happening.”

  The Sobretu avatar shimmered momentarily and became an almost-still, less detailed, more cartoonish image, still 3D, but with more regular planes and curves in the small details. The slightly less well-simulated voice said, “Here’s the structured version with graphics. Supporting data will download in background.” Sobretu vanished.

  The presentation was well-produced but the content was just a data analysis of the most obvious hypothesis: by shutting down so many of the panoply of routine penetrations, unauthorized leaks, backdoor monitors, electronic and human spies that rendered the guts of every modern corporation transparent, NameItCorp’s mystery benefactor had improved the efficiency of operations.

  Like any modern company, NItCo budgeted for the routine costs of involuntary transparency. Reducing those routine expenses caused NameItCorp to make slightly more money and perform slightly better in fulfilling its billion contracts per month. As NameItCorp’s expected performance went up and costs went down, they could bid higher on every little contract, whether to arrange a dog-walker for a bereaved dachshund, hire an orthodontist in Tashkent, or assemble a team to excavate a paleolithic settlement sitting on top of a dinosaur find under a planned hyperloop station.

  But though the mystery benefactor’s blockage of espionage was raising NameItCorp’s estimated value, it was also reducing the reliability of the estimate. Modern vendor-search software assigned much higher reliability to data from espionage. A drastic decrease in backchannel information decoupled the relation between perceived quality and trust.

  Conventional theory said that better quality of delivery would enhance NItCo’s profits, so long-term investing algorithms were buying the company’s securities. Using the same conventional theory, short-term investing algorithms saw soaring uncertainty destroying estimated value, and were selling. Most mutual funds used an optimized mix of long- and short-term algorithms, so NameItCorp securities were churning rapidly, often many times through the same funds in the same day.

  I’d already been dead certain something like that must be happening, and the presentation moved along quickly, saving me an hour or two of having to mess around in the data and confirm that.

  Then it got interesting.

  NItCo’s research team had looked at the hypothetical position of an insider who knew this was being done. Could that person predict either sharp rises or sharp declines in NItCo securities? You could make money going up or down, but to exploit this as insider information, you had to know which it would do next, and how soon it was likely to change again.

  They couldn’t.

  Any predictive function that could figure out the balance between short-run dumping and long-run grabbing was well into its chaotic range. All that motion the opposition was creating was too unpredictable for anyone to make any money.

  To create an artifici
al security wall around a corporation with many billions of entry points and keep it going for more than a week was insanely costly. Something had to be paying off. But securities manipulation was definitely out.

  So who else would make money on all that churn?

  The obvious answer was brokers. If your money comes from commissions per transaction, then jacking the number of transactions … could that be enough? There would be high thousands or low millions of brokers who could handle any given transaction, but if you could load up enough clients with enough NItCo stocks, bonds and options, and then keep shuffling them between clients, picking up a commission in each direction, maybe …

  I started to talk fast, saying “Read body” after a moment so that the system would pay attention to my gesturing. Soon I was standing in the middle of the room, waving around with my whole body as if I were conducting an orchestra while directing traffic in a swarm of bees. I get into data analysis with my whole body; I’d get into it with my whole soul if they’d just build soul-interpreting software.

  Things started to flow and shape together; homologies, correlations, and eigenvectors took shape in the dozens of inchoate graphs I had tossed up, and the immense, tangled, multicolored network on one wall collapsed repeatedly into simpler, more symmetrical structures. The representation of the overall process had begun to make a certain limited amount of sense.

  Right there, smack dab in the middle of one transaction graph, was a dense red ball that represented brokerages doing almost nothing but trade NItCo.

  I didn’t know if they were the culprits, but I did know that they were benefiting more than anyone else on Earth. I drew a lasso-net around it with my hands, compressed the net, and said, “Identify business entities in this locus.”

  “Only business entity in this locus is AtlantiCrossers. Type of business, brokerage. Privately held. Disclosed ownership is Zalodny Integrated Security.”

  Not only was the mystery benefactor taking care of NItCo’s security for free, and better than anyone else; it was pouring the profits into a dummy company owned by my family.

  Or the mystery benefactor was my family.

  I stood stone still. All possibilities seemed equally mad. Maybe the same mystery benefactor who bestowed superb free invisible security on NItCo also funneled the money from that into my sister’s company because it just liked her. Maybe my sister, who would walk ten blocks to return a dime of extra change, had tricked the victims of her market-manipulation scheme into hiring me to investigate.

  Maybe I’d woken up in the wrong dimension.

  The intercom double-beeped. “Call from Markus Adexa.”

  “Copy and store all.” Graphs and tables vanished from the walls. “Accept.”

  Markus had changed shirts and shaved—a positive sign? “Hey, Yip, how are you doing?”

  “Better, Markus, much better, nobody has threatened to blow me up in—” I looked at the clock. “Wow, I’ve been working seven hours. I get a little lost when I’m working.”

  “Are you hungry? I’ve got secure catering available, and we could have dinner in your place, if you’re not too busy. Since Zalodny Integrated Security is giving me a big retainer for exclusive services till the NItCo case is resolved, this would be billable professional time.”

  “For me too; I’m a ZIS subcontractor, same as you. Sure, let’s get some dinner, talk some business, and send the bill to Yazzy. What else’re sisters for?” I was hungry; I’d had no breakfast before the explosion over my house early that morning. “Can we eat sooner rather than later?”

  “My secure caterer usually gets here within half an hour. Seafood, veg, Italian, Vietnamese…”

  “Can I admit I love retro-Cantonese? Too cliché, too trendy?”

  “My favorite cliché trend. This caterer does an awesome Tea Smoked Duck. So expect them, and me, in half an hour.”

  “Great, that gives me time to shower off the worst. And since you’re wearing a clean shirt, I will too.”

  “I just did it to have a better target for the food.”

  I gave him the raspberry, zoomed through my shower, and tried to remember how that stylist had intended me to arrange my close-cut hair. This was perfect. My first dinner with Markus would involve no scary date stuff and a guaranteed conversational topic. And because I’d fled in haste to this secure cabin on the grounds of his security company, I had no resources to dress up—wouldn’t even have to consider it.

  * * *

  Thirty-two minutes later, the caterers’ robot carts wheeled in, bearing a complete buffet. While the carts arranged themselves, unfolded into full steam tables, pulled out dishes, and corrected temperatures, three crawler bots swept the cabin for listening devices, finding only terrified cats.

  Markus came in. “Stefvan’s got the perimeter remote systems up. The opposition could invade with an army but they can’t sneak in with a gun. Let’s eat.”

  Smelling the food had made me ravenous. I didn’t talk much till we were both dishing entrees.

  “Good so far?” he asked.

  “Excellent. Grandpa Quang was actually a cook in an old before-it-was-retro Cantonese place down in Santa Barbara. That soup was second only to Grandpa’s.”

  “There’s a high compliment. If you’re here a while—” Did he sound hopeful? “—that service offers lots of cuisines.”

  “How about Bohemian?”

  “You mean, like, Czech? I can find out. They had Swedish but not Gambian.”

  “Gambian?”

  “Well, I call myself SwedoGambian, but I think of myself as Wolof-Viking. Long story. I’m guessing you’re Chinese-Czech?”

  “Sort of. Really, Mama is fifth-generation Chinese-Californian, or ‘like totally Huayi’ as she puts it. Táta is Czech but he got citizenship right after he graduated from Michigan State. The world is one big salad these days.”

  “Yeah. I’m a UNHCR brat. Grew up in offices near refugee camps all over Africa and Asia. I share my parents’ interest in keeping people safe, but I work retail instead of wholesale.”

  We chattered about family stuff all through the entrees and right up to the green tea ice cream.

  Then conversation turned to work. It was a good decade for both of us to be in security, though not much of what we did overlapped. As borders and national authority crumbled and the lines between irregular corporate operations, organized crime, and political violence blurred, guys like Markus were much in demand, especially in the tech industry where highly skilled human beings were critical assets and therefore targets. “But really,” he said, “what I do is pretty simple. I keep the people who don’t pay me from beating up on the people that do. On the other hand, I don’t really know … will you think I suck if I admit I don’t really understand what you do, Yip?”

  “I won’t think you suck, and it is pretty strange, but it’s not as complicated as people make it out. You’ve heard ‘follow the money,’ all your life, right? Well, a scheme architecture analyst like me is a professional money-follower. If something’s not supposed to be going on, someone has figured out how to collect money for it, and usually a whole plan for washing the money clean on the way. I figure out the pathway.”

  “Like, uh, for example?”

  Oh, well. I had now established Markus was definitely straight, almost certainly single, and probably compatible. Enough of my social life; back to business. “Well, here’s an example. Just before you called, I caught my sister.”

  He looked up from his tea with a polite raised eyebrow, signaling me to go on and tell it my own way. More points for the man.

  I explained quickly, finishing with, “So I went looking for a broker that might be churning NItCo securities, and it turned out that although there are some later opportunists who spotted a chance, there’s just one that went into business right before the mystery benefactor operation against NItCo started, and since then has done nothing since but churn NItCo: AtlantiCrossing, which is wholly owned by ZIS; my sister Yazzy’s company is the
main profit recipient from the operation that she’s hired us both to investigate.”

  * * *

  “Our most secure link is at Mama and Táta’s house,” I explained. Markus and I were belting into an apparent minivan with much more armor, speed, and maneuverability (and possibly firepower) than most soccer moms needed. “I’m sure that Yazzy isn’t working for the opposition, but she needs to know, privately, ASAP, that they set me up to find that. We won’t be disturbing my folks—since they retired they tend to go to bed very late. Unfortunately, since you’re guarding me, you’ll have to come along.”

  “Unfortunately?”

  “Unfortunately, Markus, you are a very attractive single man, and I’m going to have to introduce you to my mother.”

  I liked the way he smiled but didn’t laugh: plausible deniability that didn’t squish any hopes. The reinforced doors opened in front of us; it felt like Markus’s weaponized minivan was departing the Batcave.

  * * *

  My parents’ house is a scatter of cabins down a hillside, “all independent, resilient structures working together to form a home. On a tilted slab of Jurassic limestone, solid as anything you can find around here, and if it moves, it’ll all move together—” Táta was already rolling on his standard spiel as he led Markus down the main path for the moonlight tour.

  “He seems like a very nice young man, Ingy.” Mama was pulling iced beers, wiping them, and setting them on a tray. “We’ll have these at the patio table and then I’ll drag your father out of your way so you can use the secure link without interruption.” Mama was the only person who called me “Ingy”; to everyone else I’d been Yip since I could write my own initials on my finger-paintings. “Is he just a very pleasant colleague, or am I completely misreading all the signs?”

  “Mama, I’d rather not—”

  “Of course you’d rather not.” Mama had that expression. If you have a mother, there’s one expression of hers that you and she both know is that expression. This was that expression in its purest form. She shrugged. “And maybe you are right. You have cats to feed, us to fuss over, your sister to work for, and no reason to shake up your existence. Except, Ingy, you act like you like Markus, so I think I’ll go right on being encouraging. Is Markus just possibly overdoing it by pretending interest in your father’s architectural engineering lecture?”