“You called it the Net! That is so cool!”
Now Nina grappled onto Huggy Bear’s shoulders, although with a little more vigor and less care for comfort than Huggy Bear had exercised. He visibly wilted, a grimace of agony etched across his face. “How, Huggy Bear?”
Huggy Bear squirmed and wriggled, trying to break free of Nina’s vice-like grip. To little avail. “Well, we need to go to the outskirts of the City. Do either of you have a car? I don’t have one, and I hate the bus.”
CHAPTER 12
CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
They’d been in the Studebaker for twenty minutes, Huggy Bear chatting incoherently the whole time, pausing just long enough to instruct the car where to turn and when. He was leaning forward over the seat, practically ear to ear with Nina. When Marlowe tried to break into the conversation, the hacker just steamrolled over him with his mouth. If this internet thing didn’t pan out, the annoying man would have a long walk back to the shop after this expedition, most likely with a few bruises. And maybe a broken bone or two.
Jebediah sat stonily in his seat next to Huggy Bear, staring out the window and muttering under his breath. He’d initially been alarmed when Huggy Bear got in, mouthing to Marlowe, “What if he recognizes me?” But Huggy Bear hadn’t recognized the former head of the City, and Marlowe harbored a strong suspicion this lack of recognition mightily annoyed his father.
While annoying his father was a point in Huggy Bear’s favor, it was not enough to compensate for his otherwise general unpleasantness. Sadly, he was currently their only lead, so Marlowe struggled valiantly to find his mental happy place and endure the drive. It didn’t help that he still had the sense they were being followed. He looked in the rear view mirror, which revealed nothing, and checked the radar, which only returned a faint echo that matched the signature of a flock of birds. Of course, Marlowe couldn’t rule out a stealth jet; that was the type of radar signature it would leave and it was possible Obedere was interested enough in their progress to deploy one. But sensing something there and not being able to verify it galled Marlowe. It was like an itch behind his eyeball; it didn’t go away and nothing he did to alleviate it worked.
They were northwest of the downtown area, in a rundown industrial section. They were passing the sewage treatment plants, and the smell reminded Marlowe of the dumpster he’d been standing behind during that business with Toulene and her fake identity. The nasal filters were completely overwhelmed.
Nina, nose pinched and breathing through her mouth, coughed. “Ugh, this is worse than Coalinga.”
“What?” asked Marlowe.
“A city in southern California where they have, had, a lot of cows.”
Huggy Bear barked out another command, seemingly oblivious to the smell, before returning to his tirade on old video storage standards - something about VHS versus Beta. All completely alien to Marlowe, though Nina occasionally nodded understandingly. “Turn left down that service road.”
Marlowe felt a twinge of concern as he followed the direction of Huggy Bear’s pointing finger. “But that takes us to the old abandoned sewage treatment plant.”
This time Huggy Bear paused in his diatribe and actually responded to Marlowe. “Don’t worry, it’s completely deserted and perfectly safe.”
“That’s what I’m worried about. I don’t like deserted places. They always have somebody or something that isn’t supposed to be there…being there.”
“Do you want to get on the Net or not? Then turn left.”
Marlowe nodded to the car, which turned left.
The plant was actually not much to look at. This was due primarily to the fact the plant resided underground. The only thing they could see from the car was the entrance - a hole in the ground, about a meter in diameter rimmed with rusted steel, and with a red and rickety-looking ladder thrust out of it at a slight angle. They clambered out of the car, Huggy Bear putting on a backpack he’d insisted on bringing from his store. Marlowe discretely pulled his illegal gun out of the glove box, which eased his severe misgivings down to serious concern.
“Coming, Father?”
Jebediah remained seated in the car. He shook his head violently. “You’ll be with that inane chatterbox the whole way, right?”
Marlowe checked to see if Huggy Bear had overheard the less than complimentary remark. The man was already at the underground entrance, hopping up and down impatiently. “Unfortunately, yes.”
“Then I’ll just stay here in the car. Continued exposure to that man will drive me crazy, and I won’t be responsible for my actions after that.”
Marlowe held his tongue. He surveyed the flat, empty expanse around them. “OK, just try to stay out of trouble. Shouldn’t be too hard out here.”
“Trouble’s my middle name,” said Jebediah earnestly. “Had it legally changed the second year I was…out of office.”
This did not make Marlowe feel any better. Still, Huggy Bear had progressed from hopping to whining noisily about getting a move on, so Marlowe reluctantly left his father to his own devices. “Keep an eye on him, please,” he subvocalized to the car. “Do not leave this site without me. Understood?”
The car subvocalized an affirmative honk back.
Huggy Bear climbed down first, followed by Nina and Marlowe. They descended five meters to the bottom of a small chamber with steel walls and a steel floor. A round, corroded hatch was set in the center of the floor. Huggy Bear opened a small panel next to the hatch, revealing a black hand crank. He started to turn it, and with each revolution, both Huggy Bear and the hatch let out a groan, and the hatch opened a little. Nina maneuvered herself over to the crank and relieved the hacker.
“Allow me, please.” She turned the crank, spinning it at three times Huggy Bear’s rate while excreting one third the sweat. The hatch creaked and protested as it jerkily slid aside. Huggy Bear looked a little embarrassed.
“She’s been living the last year or so under one and a half gees, so her superior strength is to be expected,” said Marlowe in an effort to comfort the crestfallen hacker. It didn’t work.
Huggy Bear descended another ladder below the now open hatch. Down they climbed, and Marlowe started worrying about how much work and personal effort the climb back up would require. He started to sweat just pondering it.
Down, down, down, deep into the bowels of the earth. The ladder had a tendency to wobble, which Marlowe found disconcerting. Finally they reached the bottom. The trio found themselves at the end of a long corridor that stretched out as far as the eye could see. The floor was a brown-encrusted metallic mesh with darkly stained concrete visible below it. Every five meters, a drain was set into the floor. The walls formed an inverted concrete U over their heads. Surprisingly, recessed lighting in the ceiling illuminated the entire corridor.
“The plant is shut down, but still has power,” explained Huggy Bear. “I tapped into the mains to get the lights back. They only come on when the hatch upstairs opens, so as to not draw a noticeable amount of power. Can’t have the City Municipal Power Service noticing unauthorized power drains, now can we?”
Marlowe leaned down with his hands on his knees, his chest heaving. “Now will you explain to us why we had to come way out in the middle of nowhere into the heart of a terrible, terrible stink, to get on this Internet thing?”
Huggy Bear answered between his own labored huffing and puffing. “Because years ago, the City banned it. Way back when the Big Fed fell, the RIAA started sending delegates to all the cities and convinced them to shut down the Net.”
“The RIAA?”
Nina, observing both men’s obvious signs of fatigue and rolling her eyes, fielded this question. “Recording Industry Association of America. They were a monopoly that controlled the music industry.”
“Still control it,” said Huggy Bear. “Anyway, they didn’t want people downloading music for free, and since there was no Big Fed, they couldn’t go after people in just one court system anymore. So they decided that
rather than sue people in different cities with different laws and legal procedures, they would just get all the cities to shut off their access to the Internet. It worked; they threatened military action or sent a little money to the right people, or both, and one by one the cities cut their physical access to the Net.”
They started down the long passage.
“But that doesn’t make sense,” said Nina. “The Internet was decentralized. If one hub went down, everything just rerouted to another hub.”
“Maybe a hundred years ago,” said Huggy Bear, “but once KFC bought all of the ISPs in North America, it was relatively easy to shut it off. Fortunately for us, some independent systems outside the mainstream are still up.”
“KFC bought the internet? As in Kentucky Fried-”
“Shh,” said Huggy Bear, eyes wide. “Don’t say the full name! They have ears everywhere!”
Nina still looked confused. “But why would KFC buy-”
“It isn’t safe to talk about,” said Huggy Bear in a whisper, looking furtively over his shoulder. “Please, just let it go.”
“Wait a sec,” interrupted Marlowe. “First off, enough with KFC, it’s making me hungry. Second, what in the City is the Internet? I’ve never heard of it before today. If the City made it illegal, I’d at least know about it.”
Huggy Bear shook his head. “It’s not illegal. It’s verboten. No laws, because a law banning something is an advertisement for the curious. No, if we get caught down here, we’ll just disappear.”
“Hmm.” Marlowe was starting to question the probative value of downloading pictures of Nina off the Internet. If it wasn’t supposed to exist, they might not be able to show people the evidence for fear of being disappeared. Still, he could at least know for sure in his own mind, which might make smuggling her out of the City easier on his conscience.
Just ahead Marlowe could make out what appeared to be some sort of door set into the right side of the corridor. A very sad, pathetic sort of door; it looked like it was made from badly abused, corrugated tin, and was affixed to the wall by two large, crude hinges.
“Through here,” said Huggy Bear, gesturing to the impromptu door.
“Make that yourself?” asked Nina archly.
“Yup. Had to cut the hole from this passage to the sewage tank on the other side. Took me a long time, but considering what lay on the other side, it was worth the effort.”
“Sewage tank?” asked Marlowe, unable to contain his alarm.
“Not to worry, the plant has been abandoned for nearly two decades. The stuff left in the tank is solid now, and doesn’t have much smell. It did at first; it was so bad I had to leave the hatches above open to help air the place out. Took two months before the stench dissipated enough for me to come back down. Found a couple of skeletons in there too, very disturbing. I have a feeling-”
“Stop. There’s no way I’m going in there.” Marlowe had been lazy and hadn’t changed the nasal filters after the last couple of uses, so there was no way they’d work well enough inside that tank.
“If you want on the Internet, you gotta follow me.” With that, Huggy Bear vanished through the door.
“Come on, this could be the resolution of my case. Think of it as an adventure.” Nina grabbed Marlowe’s hand and tugged him in after her.
“But I’m a PI. Every day is an adventure. I’m tired of adventures,” whined Marlowe. Then he noticed that the smell really wasn’t that bad. He just tried not to think about what constituted the rough, earthen surface he was walking on.
“It’s over here in the middle of the tank. There’s a fiber optic cable that’s part of the actual, honest-to-the-Governor Internet. I spliced in right here.”
Nina reached the spot, Marlowe in reluctant tow. Huggy Bear had strung some lights up in the tank, so they could see without difficulty. The spot Huggy Bear hovered over proved to be singularly unimpressive - a hole dug in the dirt, with a piece of cable sticking out of the bottom.
“This is it? An antique cable sticking out of a mound of dried feces? This is the famous Internet?” The trials of the day had forcibly expelled Marlowe from his happy place, and he could not keep the irritation out of his voice.
“Patience! Trust Huggy Bear, never doubt him. I’ll just plug us in and we can start looking for those pictures you were talking about.” Huggy Bear pulled a silver rectangle out of his backpack. He pressed a button on one edge, and it folded open to reveal an antique LCD display and another one of those keyboard things, only this one was integrated into the device. He pressed a button by the keyboard and the computer hummed, the screen flickering to life.
“I’m a little confused,” said Marlowe. “If all the cities disconnected from the Internet, wouldn’t the Internet cease to exist?”
“No, no, no,” said Huggy Bear in the annoyed tone of a teacher dealing with a particularly stupid student. “Remember, it’s decentralized. The Internet shrunk when the cities pulled out, but didn’t disappear. There are a lot machines in the former Union of European States, more than a few pirate systems on this continent, plus a couple of systems in Antarctica. As long as the network hookups work, all you need to do is plug in and away you go.”
“But if it’s smaller,” said Marlowe, “there’s a good chance what we’re looking for is gone, right?”
“Wrong.” Huggy Bear was beginning to look like a very annoyed school teacher. “The system has redundancies built into it, mirror sites duplicating each other all over the world. If the images you want were originally on a site that was maintained by the Big Fed before it fell, the chances are very good someone somewhere else on the planet has a copy. No guarantees, of course, but we’ll see.”
Huggy Bear sat on the ground, resting the computer on his lap. “Now it is a little slow. It would be a lot faster if there were more network connections, but the RIAA took care of that. It’s odd, the only computers on the Internet now run on an OS called Linux, but we’ve seen references to other OSes. Stuff I’ve never heard of, and wouldn’t mean anything to you either. Amazingly, most of the computers still online aren’t actively maintained; they’re just still on and accessible over the network. Unbelievable they could build such a rock solid operating system back in those days, but they did.”
“Yeah, yeah, very interesting.” Marlowe tried really hard not to roll his eyes. “Can you search for the pictures now?”
“What are the search terms?”
“Search terms?”
“Key words.”
“Try Nina Minari, Odyssey I, 55 Cancri, heck, even International Space Station and murder,” said Nina. “That incident made the news too.”
“OK, hang on.” Huggy Bear pecked away at the keyboard. A couple of minutes passed, with nothing but a small timepiece suspended on his display. Then the screen flickered. “Hey, I’ve got something. This what you’re looking for?”
Marlowe walked behind Huggy Bear, the desiccated raw sewage crunching with each step. On the screen, he saw pictures of Nina standing next to various individuals, some of them the same people who appeared on her disk. Pictures of her floating in zero gee, pictures of her standing with others at a press conference. By far the largest number of pictures, however, were of her in the nude.
“Fakes,” declared Nina from behind her blush. “If you were female and even remotely famous, people cut and paste your head onto a nude body and put them online.”
“These are pretty good fakes,” said Huggy Bear, his nose touching his screen as he inspected one.
“OK, they’re mostly fake. I needed money in college. I’m not proud of it, but I did pose for some pictures which weren’t published until after I became well known. They’re hardly relevant to this case though, right Marlowe?”
“Well, if the real ones can be be verified, they actually would help. Better save ‘em, Huggy Bear. All of them, just to be safe.”
“Not a problem,” said Huggy Bear.
“Marlowe.” Nina’s tone didn’t bode well. “We’re
not using those pictures for my defense. Under any circumstances. Do you understand?”
Marlowe studied the current image Huggy Bear had up and sighed. Even the fakes looked…very nice. “OK, no nude pictures.” Huggy Bear started to delete the ones he’d downloaded, but Marlowe gave him a slight kick to stop him. Maybe not for use in her defense, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t keep copies. Huggy Bear’s stock with Marlowe went up considerably when he noticed that the hacker was continuing to download more images in the background. He was a bastard, but he was shaping up to be Marlowe’s kind of bastard.
Some of the more straight-laced pictures had articles associated with them. Huggy Bear dutifully downloaded those as well.
“How do we transfer those to my PDI,” asked Marlowe.
Huggy Bear smiled. “That’s another beauty I cooked up. I’ve got a little interface here that plugs into this old laptop and can do a wide-beam dispersion transfer to any PDI within ten meters. Hang on.”
He started poking around in his backpack, pulling out a thin card that he slid into the side of the computer. “What do you want?”
“All of it,” replied Marlowe. “Except for the nude pictures, of course.” He winked at Huggy Bear, who nodded imperceptibly.
Marlowe perused the articles as they transferred over, a process that turned out to be incredibly time-consuming. Articles about the Odyssey I mission to 55 Cancri, bios of all the crew members, and an interesting story about Nina’s pivotal role in solving a murder, the first murder in space, aboard the international space station. Another article about the Odyssey I crew implied that the juice Nina had gained in helping with the murder case had enabled her to get a berth on the 55 Cancri mission. Despite his inclination to believe her early on, Marlowe still felt a bit stunned to have it confirmed that he had been walking and talking with a real, bona fide, over one hundred years old spacewoman.
“Do you think these images and the ones on the disk will be enough to clear me?”
“Maybe. I don’t think we have much else to go on at this point. House, you getting all of this?”
Marlowe and the Spacewoman Page 19