Shadowplay

by Nigel Findley

  Relative being the operative word, of course. Even with the attentions of the corps averted, there were others who'd just love to pay Agarwal a visit. After all, his home looked like a security nightmare, virtually impossible to defend against a group of determined thieves.

  But appearances were deceiving. Aren’t they always? Sly thought. Agarwal's home was as secure as a couple million nuyen’s worth of high-tech defense systems could make it. Again, judging by the street buzz, no fewer than four major B and E gangs had made moves against Agarwal’s place over the last few years. None had succeeded, and none had survived to dissect their failure afterward. None. No bodies, no clues as to what happened, nothing. They’d just disappeared. (When Sly had once asked Agarwal about it, he merely shrugged and smiled. After knowing him a while longer, she decided she really didn't want to know.)

  Sly had met Agarwal five years ago, soon after her final Matrix run. She’d been trying to get her brain back together, and her fixer, a chummer named Cog, had found it in his heart to help her out, to put her together with someone who understood the trauma she’d experienced. That someone was Agarwal.

  Cog had been right in thinking that talking to Agarwal would help. It was Agarwal who convinced Sly that there was life after punching deck, and who helped her through the nightmares and terrifying fugues of those first few months. Of course he understood what she was going through. He'd suffered in much the same way, his own crash having been the stimulus for finally retiring from the shadows. Even after eight years he still had fugues from time to time, but he managed to control them, minimize their impact on his life. That had given Sly hope that she could come back fully as well. Which was the way it had turned out, of course. She'd done even better than Agarwal, her younger brain bouncing back faster. Her last fugue—a minor one that snipped no more than two minutes out of her life—had been more than two years ago.

  She climbed the stone steps to the front door, pressed the intercom button. No response for a few seconds, but Sly knew she was being scanned by a sophisticated suite of sensors. She smiled up at where she guessed the vid camera to be, opened her leather jacket to show she was unarmed.

  The door buzzed, swung open of its own accord. She stepped into the front hall.

  Agarwal's modifications to the inside of the church had left almost nothing of the original structure. In contrast to the anachronistic exterior, the inside revealed the cutting edge of contemporary decor. Concealed indirect lighting, flooring that looked like gold-veined marble but gave under her feet like plush carpet. Furniture in the modern reductionist school of design. And everything in off-white, eggshell blue, or iridescent mother-of-pearl. Sly felt as though she’d stepped into an image from Interior Design datamag. She crossed the hall, passed through the other door.

  Agarwal was waiting for her in his library, a high-ceilinged room, every wall lined with tall bookcases. (Real books. Even after knowing Agarwal for years, coming in here was always a shock to Sly, reminding her of just how rich her friend was.)

  “Sharon,” he greeted her warmly in his precise Oxford accent. “A pleasure to see you again, a pleasure. Come, I want to show you my latest project.”

  With a smile, she followed him out of the library toward the stairs.

  Agarwal was in his late forties, about Sly’s height, slender and with narrow shoulders and hips. He had a long, thin face, dominated by a hooked nose. His skin, the color of milked coffee, was rough, with large pores. He wore his thinning hair combed straight back from his face, showing the single datajack in his right temple. He always wore wire-framed spectacles—a strange affectation in these days of permanent-wear contact lenses and corneal surgery—behind which his brown eyes looked soft and weak. Every time Sly had ever seen him, he’d been wearing a two-piece suit, always new, always impeccably tailored, but several years out of style, and a tie. Doesn’t he ever dress casually? she wondered.

  He led her downstairs into his workshop, a large, open area that took up the entire lower floor of the building. This was one of the most significant modifications he’d made to the old church. He flipped on the lights.

  The large room was filled with cars, an even dozen of them. Sly counted. Half were in various states of disrepair; the others looked in mint condition, like they’d just rolled off the assembly line. Which was impressive in and of itself, since not one of the cars was less than fifty years old. She let her eyes wander over the rows of vehicles. She’d seen most of them before, but the sight of so many antique vehicles—some of them unique in the world—was awe-inspiring. Right next to her was a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud, model year 2005, she thought. And over there an Acura Demon, the fastest production car built in 2000. And her favorite, somewhat out of place among the speed and luxury machines that surrounded it, a lovingly restored 1993 Suzuki Sidekick 4x4. As always, Sly tried to estimate just how much Agarwal’s collection was worth, but gave up after she reached ten million, with half the cars still to go.

  Agarwal touched her arm, ushered her across the workshop toward the three up-and-over doors that opened onto the sloping ramp leading up to the back alley. “This,” he said, pointing, “is my latest acquisition.”

  She looked at the car. Black, sleek, and low-slung, it reminded her of a shark. Its long, sloping hood bulged a little strangely, hinting at a massive power plant. It looked vaguely familiar; Sly knew she’d seen something like it before, probably in some historical drama on the vid. “A Corvette, isn’t it?” she guessed after a moment.

  If Agarwal’s smile had been any broader, he’d have swallowed his ears. “A Corvette, yes, Sharon. But a very special Corvette, a modified Corvette. This is a Callaway Twin Turbo.” He caressed the sleek black hood. “A wonderful car, built in 1991, if you can believe it—sixty-two years ago. The engine is a five-point-seven V-eight, producing four-oh-three horsepower at forty-five hundred rpm, and five hundred seventy-five foot-pounds of torque at three thousand rpm.” The statistics rolled off his tongue easily, almost lovingly. Sly knew how much joy he got from memorizing such minutiae. “Zero to a hundred kilometers per hour in four-point-eight seconds, lateral acceleration zero-point-ninety-four gravities, top speed”—he shrugged—“Well, I don’t know that, but probably almost three hundred kilometers per hour. A marvelous car. An absolute joy to restore.”

  Sly nodded. This had been Agarwal’s hobby, his vocation, since he'd left the shadows a few years back. He was as knowledgeable about vintage cars, about internal combustion technology and automotive engineering, as anyone in the plex, maybe in the country. He could, if the project interested him, strip a car down to the nuts and bolts and then rebuild it better than it had ever been before. She glanced over at him. As always, his area of interest just didn’t match his appearance. Does he take off his suit when he’s grubbing under cars? she wondered with concealed amusement. Or is that why he’s always wearing new clothes every time I see him?

  “Looks wiz, Agarwal,” she told him. She grinned wickedly. “How does it handle?”

  He smiled mildly. They both knew that Agarwal never drove any of his cars. The sport, to him, was taking a drek-kicked rustbucket and restoring it to pristine glory, then simply enjoying the knowledge that he owned something of beauty. Actually driving the cars once he was done with them held no interest for him whatsoever.

  After giving Sly another couple of minutes to silently contemplate his vehicular “babies,” Agarwal led her back upstairs to his study. This was a small, cozy room on the upper floor, with windows that looked west toward the sky rakers of downtown. He seated her in a comfortable armchair, put a cup of Darjeeling tea on the table beside her. Then he settled down in his high-backed desk chair, steepling his fingers in front of his face.

  “I understand life has been . . , interesting ... of late, Sharon,” he remarked.

  Sly nodded, smiling at her friend’s understatement. She thought back over the last twenty-four hours. Her visit to Theresa Smeland. The assassination of her Johnson. The hard meet with Mod
al. Sending a copy of Louis’ encrypted file to Agarwal over the phone lines. And then the multiple phone calls—all from different pay phones, all to different corporate and shadow contacts—to rat the black elf to Yamatetsu.

  Is it going to work? she wondered for a moment. It seemed like it would. Modal’s cunning, and his understanding of corporate psychology and human nature seemed unchanged since the old days. Improved with practice, if anything. The body of rumors, evidence, lies and wild speculations that he’d concocted certainly seemed to paint the picture of someone who’d sold out his corporate masters to an old lover. Unless there was some angle that she was missing, Modal’s name had to be worse than drek with Yamatetsu, and the corp would probably have soldiers out gunning for him as well as for her. And that was the goal, of course, to remove any possible benefit Modal could gain from killing her or turning her in. Sure, down the road apiece he might try to buy his way back into the Yamatetsu fold with her head, but any move like that would be very risky. The Yamatetsu reps he contacted would be more likely to set up an ambush than a clean meet.

  Yes, she thought, I can trust Modal . . . for the moment. That conclusion hadn't made it easier to leave him behind this morning, but there was no way she’d take him along to her meet with Agarwal.

  The ex-decker was watching her silently, giving her time to decide what to tell him and what not. His mild smile was unchanged.

  “It’s been an interesting twenty-four hours,” she allowed at last. “Did you have a chance to work on the file I sent you?”

  “Since your call, I have worked on nothing else, Sharon,” he told her. She felt a twinge of guilt at that.

  Any time he spent helping her was an hour he couldn’t devote to his beloved cars, but this was important.

  “Did you learn anything?”

  Agarwal nodded. “First of all, I conclude that something very important, and very unusual—unheard of, I might say—has been happening in the corporate culture. For one thing, the activity on the stock exchange has been . . . abnormal, to say the least. Over the last two days, perhaps more, there has been a great deal of reshuffling of corporate affiliations. Megacorporations have been attempting hostile takeovers of smaller corps that had been, until now, considered off-limits because of their associations with other megacorps. Do you understand the significance of that?”

  After a moment’s thought, Sly had to shake her head. “Not really,” she admitted. “Economics isn’t my strong suit.”

  He sighed. “Economics is everything in this world, Sharon, you should know that.” He paused for a moment, re-ordering his thoughts. “All the major corporations walk something of a tightrope when it comes to competition. Each megacorp is competing with every other corp for market share, for money it can extract from the market. Since the market is, in most sectors, mature, that means that we have a zero-sum game. Any gain by one corporation is a loss for a competitor, or competitors. Thus, success comes to the corporation that can compete best.

  “Unfortunately, there is a downside to, shall we say, overzealous competition. If one zaibatsu were to openly war on another, the aggressor might improve its market share considerably. But the chaos such major conflict would cause in the financial markets and elsewhere would mean that the potential market was reduced. As an analogy, the aggressor corporation might get a bigger slice of the pie, but the pie would be made smaller by the disruption. On an absolute level, the aggressor’s revenue would be diminished.

  “That’s why the megacorporations play by the rules of the Corporate Court and by the unwritten laws that all successful executives understand instinctively.”

  “But corps do pull raids on each other,” Sly pointed out. “Frag, Agarwal, you did enough of them.”

  Agarwal chuckled. “So true,” he agreed. “But the shadowruns that one corp commissions against another are small matters.” He waved his hand airily, indicating the building around him. “Oh, not for the likes of me or you. But for a zaibatsu with annual revenue in the trillions of nuyen, our efforts are no more than a pinprick to a dragon.”

  Sly digested that in silence for a moment. “Those ‘unwritten laws’ you’re talking about,” she said finally, “they’re being broken? That’s why those takeovers are important?”

  “Exactly. Something has happened to spur the megacorps into more direct competition. There are even reflections of this on the street. Have you noticed an increased presence of corporate security forces in the metroplex?”

  “Not really,” she said. “I guess my mind’s been on other things.”

  “Yes, quite. And very understandable. My searches through the databases show that there are many people looking for you. my friend. Denizens of the shadows, informants, street ops, and the assets of several corporations.”

  That shook Sly. “Several?” she blurted. “Not just Yamatetsu?”

  Agarwal’s face grew serious. “Several,” he repeated. “Granted, Yamatetsu seems at the forefront, but there are others. Aztechnology, Mitsuhama, Renraku, DPE, plus other smaller players. All are interested in learning your whereabouts.” An edge of concern came into his voice. “I trust you are taking adequate precautions?”

  She nodded distractedly. “I’m taking care of myself.”

  She paused for thought. “What’s going down, Agarwal?”

  “It seems like the prelude to a corp war,” Agarwal intoned grimly, “an all-out corp war. Though I pray not, for the concept terrifies me.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “I could say, a lot, as it will affect everyone in Seattle. But I understand your meaning. My guess would be that one of the corporations—perhaps Yamatetsu, perhaps one of the others—has lost something. Something of immense value, not only to them but to all the other corporations in Seattle. Of so much value that they're willing to risk corporate war to get it for themselves.

  "Further, I would suspect that the corporations have somehow decided that you have what they seek or know where it can be found.” His voice was suddenly impersonal, totally noncommittal. “Would you have any idea about that, Sharon?”

  Involuntarily, Sly shot a glance at the sophisticated computer sitting on Agarwal’s desk—the machine he’d have been using to decrypt the file she’d sent him. He saw the movement of her eyes, nodded gently to himself.

  “Did you crack the encryption?” Sly was disgusted to hear a faint quiver in her voice.

  “Have you kept current on the mathematical theories of data encryption?” Agarwal asked elliptically. “Some,” she answered.

  "Then you understand public key encryption?”

  “A little. Enough to get by. That’s what was used on the file?”

  “In part. There are multiple levels, which leads me to believe that the file is something highly significant. The primary level of encryption uses the Milton paradigm and a seventy-five-bit key.”

  Sly pursed her lips, whistled soundlessly. “How fast’s your computer?”

  “On the close order of five hundred teraflops.”

  Five hundred teraflops. Five hundred trillion floatingpoint operations per second. A very fast machine. She closed her eyes, ran through the math in her mind. Then she cursed under her breath. “It’s unbreakable, then,” she pronounced. “Even at five hundred teraflops, that machine’s going to have to chew on it for a thousand years before it can break the code.”

  “Closer to fifteen thousand years,” Agarwal corrected gently. “If I use simple brute-force computation. Are you aware of Eiji’s research into recursive series?”

  She shook her head, then said quickly, “Don’t bother to explain it to me. Just cut to the chase.”

  He bowed his head with a smile. “As you wish. Eiji developed techniques that can be applied to public key encryption, and yield certain . . . short cuts.”

  “You can break it, then?”

  “I believe so. It will take time—a day, maybe more— but significantly less than fifteen thousand years.”

  “And t
he other levels of encryption?”

  He shrugged. “I doubt they would be anywhere near as complex as the primary level.”

  She nodded. A day, maybe a couple of days . . .

  “What will you do in the interim?” he asked, echoing her own thoughts.

  “Pull a fade,” she answered immediately. “Keep my head down and wait.” She paused. “Maybe do some digging on Yamatetsu, find out if there’s anything in the Matrix ...” She saw his eyes widen in alarm, quickly reassured him. “I wouldn’t ask you to do that, Agarwal, you know that. I’ll find somebody else.”

  The tension melted from his face. “Yes,” he said quietly, “yes, of course. Forgive my reaction, but ...”

  “Nothing to forgive,” she told him. “Remember who you’re talking to.”

  He sighed. “Of course. I ... of course.”

  “Do you have the time to work on it now?”

  Her friend nodded. “I’ve already put aside all my other projects. There will be no distractions.”

  “About payment ...”

  He raised a hand to stop her. “If we are seeing the prelude to a corp war, averting it would be payment enough.”

  She nodded, reached out impulsively to squeeze his hand. Friends. Rare in the shadows, but more precious than anything else.