At length, Tomba came up with the following:
There was most likely a connection between the container bomb and the attack on my house. The time between the call from Fallow yesterday afternoon and the explosion on the docks last night had been only a matter of hours. Tomba suspected that somebody was trying to find out what I might know about Kell Fallow. Maybe I had a bit of display paper stashed somewhere in my house containing details of what he’d said to me. I didn’t, but the bad guys wouldn’t have known that.
“Do you have a copy of the android’s call to you?” said Tomba.
“No,” I lied. “He barely had enough time to tell me what ship he was on, and that he was in some kind of trouble, before the connection dropped out.” Which was near enough what I’d told Gideon, I hoped. I glanced over at him. He was back in the kitchen. I heard his espresso machine hissing and gurgling. The aroma was very distracting.
Tomba was working the numbers out on his paper. “From when you got that call to when the Claudia unit got into your house was a little over three hours,” he said. It was just barely long enough for someone to cook up a Claudia unit, customize her and get her going. I was assuming the bad guys had hacked Cytex’s internal systems to get the Claudia unit specs, and that they might even be employing former Cytex tissue synthesis engineers to help. The production of bootleg or pirate models of famous and desirable androids was a lucrative, but illegal business throughout interstellar space. A sophisticated operation would be very hard to roll up and prosecute.
All of which led us to one nasty conclusion: the whole thing had been planned ahead of time.
“They” (whoever “they” were) had been aware of Fallow’s plans since he set out from New Norway, perhaps fifteen days earlier. Which was certainly long enough to quietly set up a homebrew operation in a secluded house. There were quite a number of such out-of-the-way houses scattered around the habitat. They were expensive, but quiet, offering marvelous views of the sea as well as the forested mountains. If I hadn’t been so drawn to the Greek Island theme of the condo complex where I had been living, I might well have been a customer for one of these isolated retreats.
How could the bad guys know that Fallow intended to come and see me for help? It strongly suggested that Gideon’s theory was possible. They knew because they sent Fallow with his little tale to tell me. On the other hand, I could not rule out the possibility that Fallow was telling the truth, and that he did know about me in the time before our activation, when we were being tested and so forth. Of course, given the fact that we were created in a matter of hours, I couldn’t imagine us knowing each other for very long. The problem with this theory was that recent events demonstrated that these mysterious bad guys also knew what Fallow knew.
That thought got me thinking in a new direction: what if two disposables “woke up” the way Fallow and I had woken up? Why not other disposables, too? For that matter, why not all of them? This led me too close to the slippery edge of the “what is real” conundrum. I was keen to get back to basic police work.
Fallow told me someone believed he had murdered Airlie, his wife. If he were found guilty he would be recycled. It was what you did with defective disposables — it was cheaper to get a new unit than to fix a defective one — and killing someone was definitely a sign of a defective unit — unless of course the disposable had been programmed to commit murder. Now there was a lovely thought for me to contemplate. I shuddered quietly.
At this point we didn’t know if Fallow had indeed killed his wife. But we also didn’t know if the whole thing was a ploy to get back at me. Tomba, I knew, was also baffled. I hoped I had not given him enough of the facts that he could somehow infer the rest. The thought crossed my mind: whoever had killed Kell Fallow might be interested in silencing anybody who started sniffing around in their business, cops included. I did not think I could live with myself if, in the course of spinning my lies, I wound up getting a fellow copper killed.
All I did know was that someone was prepared to spend a fair amount of money and go to a lot of trouble to involve me deep in the heart of things.
To give Gideon’s theory its due, I did have a lot of enemies. I was telling the truth about that. And, some of the people I helped put away early in my career would now be eligible for parole. It was something I tried not to think about. You couldn’t live your life worried about that kind of thing. All the same, villains were getting out of prison all the time. Most of them, fortunately, weren’t the type who could put together an operation like we were seeing here. Coming after me with a blunt axe, on the other hand, that I could see.
Tomba put down his espresso, suddenly grinning. “Look at this!”
I looked at his paper. He showed me an intricate pattern he’d found in household power consumption stats for the past two weeks. There were no big, obvious spikes centered on any one household; instead Tomba had found a subtle pattern of energy siphoning from, what looked like, almost every household on the habitat. “Every house’s power consumption rate is up by a fraction of one percent,” he said, “enough that nobody would notice anything wrong with the overall pattern of their charges — some months you’re up a little, and some you’re down a little. Thing is, though, it’s a new thing, starting up just this two-week period.”
“Can you see where the siphoned power is going?”
“That will take more analysis,” he said, “but it’s a good start.”
Gideon surprised me at this point. “If they’re running a homebrew android operation, why wouldn’t they use their own power source, rather than tap into the local grid?” he said.
I sat, looking at Gideon, pleased to see him engaged in what was going on again, rather than dwelling on my behavior.
“They might know that we can track all the power on the habitat, both on and off-grid,” Tomba suggested. “Even a modest solar-powered operation would show up. Some households even sell power back to the habitat, they produce so much.”
“What about computation cycles?”
“Mr. Smith?”
“Making an android is an incredibly computationally-intensive process,” Gideon explained. “If they were making their own, or drawing on public computational resources, it would show up somehow, probably much like the power siphoning.”
Computation was a plentiful and self-renewing resource. All it needed was energy and some kind of physical substrate, typically in the form of nano-based self-powered processor foam, which was cheap to the point of nearly being free. Increasingly, uninhabitable planets and similar rocky bodies were having their material resources removed and replaced with industrial quantities of this processor foam. Equipped with massive interface structures and communications arrays, these worlds of computation, owned by squabbling multistellar corporate consortia, were becoming the hardware nodes of the human space infosphere. Serendipity Habitat, like many others, was no different: its infostructure had been grown into its hull, and filled its hollow and picturesque mountains.
Tomba was thinking about this, and working his paper to check into patterns of public and private computation consumption. He frowned and looked frustrated. “We have no way to know if these figures are true,” he said.
I nodded. “What’s HabMind say?”
He checked. “They’re showing 98 percent confidence,” he said, indicating the degree to which you could trust the integrity of the system data. It was about as high as you could expect in a system which involved input and supervision, even from enhanced humans. That two percent error could hide almost anything if it was distributed cleverly enough.
We contemplated the idea of someone smart enough to use public computational resources not only to cook up their disposable Claudia, but also to conceal the evidence that they were in fact doing so, using that two percent to their advantage.
It was while we were thinking about all this, however, that I
suddenly had a very chilling thought, and I swore under my breath.
“Ms. McGee?” Tomba asked. Gideon was looking at me, still frowning. It was getting on my nerves.
“How’s your system intrusion stuff?”
He laughed, but without much humor. “It never stops. I have it updating constantly, behind my awareness, trying to keep up with all possible threats.”
Tomba was right about that. There were people out there who, as at all times in the history of information processing, spent all their time creating ways to break into secure systems. Headware was a particularly popular target, subject to attack all the time, whether you’re awake, sleeping or, it was said, even dead, if you were foolish enough to be interred with your headware still installed. As threats evolved and developed, so headware systems engineers did their best to keep ahead.
At any given time your headware was subconsciously receiving a high-bandwidth encrypted stream of data not only containing all the usual newsfeeds, media, entertainment, advertising, mail and everything else, but also the most powerful, most robust security your money could buy. This security was not simply protecting everything in your headware so that the interface displayed properly and your mail was safe. Headware had subsystems that helped to moderate physiological and psychological processes. If these were compromised, you could be driven into a homicidal rage, for example, something I’d seen many times. Your body itself could come under attack, with systemic organ failure merely one of the more pleasant possible outcomes. For disposables like me, equipped with a self-destruct feature, the urgency and necessity for protection from all possible infowar assaults was even more apparent, and I did not stint when it came to making sure my headware security was up-to-date at all times. And yet, it was sometimes not enough. You had to get periodic external checks.
“Run a check on my headware. Check everything,” I said to Tomba. This was a huge risk. I wanted to make sure my own systems, including the security systems designed to identify threats, had not been compromised. The thought had occurred to me that the bad guys, failing to find anything incriminating in my house, might resort to a covert inspection of my head, and the first step would be to bypass my security. Tomba could identify such an intrusion — but, and this was very unlikely, he might stumble across those secret areas in my headware, such as my self-destruct switch, and the files that revealed my android nature. All the same, I had to know I was not under surveillance, and I didn’t trust my own systems to check.
Meanwhile, I was going through my own online files, making sure I’d destroyed anything incriminating, including the recording of Fallow’s phone call.
I felt like I might be sick if I had to keep up this deceit much longer.
Tomba sat back, looking a little surprised, and I watched him blink and double-blink his way through his interface. Presently the small “headware running” gleam in the corner of my field of vision expanded and the display unfurled, appearing to hover before my eyes, showing the status of all my systems. Advisories informed me about Tomba’s attempt to inspect my systems. I blinked permission and let him in.
“Thanks,” he said.
“No worries,” I answered, feeling nervous and clammy, my guts in turmoil.
Advisories flashed up. There were problems.
“Uh-oh…” I never completed the utterance.
I fell unconscious.
CHAPTER 8
I woke, feeling sick and weak, curled up in Gideon’s strange-smelling bed. He was quickly up out of his bedside chair. “McGee?”
“Need to throw up…” I managed.
He produced a large bowl in the nick of time. He said, “The doc said you’d probably need to spew when you woke.”
At length, slumped there with Gideon holding me, rubbing my back, I finished. He took the bowl away into the bathroom. I flopped back against the pillows, feeling spent and wretched. The back of my throat and palate were sore; there was a vile vomit smell everywhere. Idly, I wondered when was the last time I’d puked; it was hard to remember anything. There’d been a few times at crime scenes when things on display were harder to take than usual. And my early days attending postmortems were memorable in that respect, too. The smells were the worst. You’re never more grateful for having skin than when you’ve had a good whiff of what goes on under it.
Laying there in bed, feeling clammy now, I pushed the covers off me.
The view from Gideon’s bedroom windows showed late afternoon, shading towards evening. It took me a moment to think, but I realized that meant it was now about 24 hours since my dinner last night with Gideon. It felt like a long time ago.
Gideon returned and gave me the clean bowl, in case I needed it later.
“Tomba did a hard system eject on your headware,” he said softly.
I swore, hearing that.
And realized what was so strange. Up to this moment I’d been distracted, vomiting and feeling like crap, but I’d been aware that something wasn’t right. A noise that had been part of my existence for as long as I could remember was no longer there. I was offline. There was no headware looped around and through my brain and threaded deep within my nervous system. The only sound in my head was my own thoughts lurching about. As far as I knew, I’d never been offline before. I’d “grown up” knowing how to use the infosphere like another sense.
“Hard system eject, eh?” I said, my voice not the best, and touched my nose gently, thinking about all the blood and crap you get pouring through your sinuses with a hard eject. “Messy.” I wondered how Gideon and Tomba dealt with it all.
“Your gear was extensively compromised,” Gideon said. “Looked like it had taken complete control of your headware, monitoring everything, while allowing you to access an emulation of your system. You’d have no way of knowing…”
“Complete control?”
“That’s what Tomba said. Direct access to your autonomic functions. Could have killed you at any moment.”
“So when he checked for intrusions…”
“It had a red hot go at killing you, yes. Tomba stopped it and got it out of you.”
I swore again, this time with more feeling, thinking about what he said.
The silence hung between us awhile. “Any idea how long I’d been compromised?” I asked at last.
Gideon was looking down at the ground. “McGee…” he said, looking gravely serious,
“Smith? What’s the matter?” I felt a gathering of tension deep in my gut.
“We’ve been friends a long time now, haven’t we?”
“Yes…” I said, the tension worsening. I hoped I wouldn’t have to vomit again.
“I figure you’d tell me if you needed help, or you were in trouble—”
“Of course,” I interrupted, knowing now where this was going, and knowing, too, that Gideon was almost certainly onto me and my dreadful secret.
“Last night, McGee, you kept me from giving a statement to the cops. I thought it was odd, but it was after all an extreme situation, your house was burning down, and things were bad. And that was fine.”
“Oh God…” I murmured, feeling now like I was going to cry and vomit.
“Then, when we were talking to Inspector Tomba, you gave him a version of yesterday’s events that…” He glanced at me, looking puzzled. “That didn’t quite fit with what I remembered.”
“Smith, I…” I had to wipe my eyes.
“And I thought to myself, ‘hmm, why would McGee, herself a former police detective, lie to a fellow police officer?’ It made no sense. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
Wiping my nose, and sniffling, I managed to say, “I wanted to tell you. I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time.”
Gideon handed me a monogrammed white silk handkerchief. I honked and wiped and sobbed. “What’s going on, McGee?” he said g
ently.
The moment was here. I had often thought if I was going to have a big revelation moment I would do it in a classy way, like having a small dinner party with my closest friends. We’d eat well, get mildly pissed, and then, when I made the big Announcement, it would all go very well. We’d all have a little cry, lots of hugs, and we’d move on. This, on the other hand, was not what I had in mind.
“Come on, Zette. You can tell me.” Gideon reached across and hugged me around my big shoulders. “It’ll be all right.”
I looked at him, not understanding his apparent kindness. It worried me. It didn’t fit my models on how this scene should play out. Still looking at him, still wiping my eyes and nose, I said what I’d always wanted to say to him. “I’m … I’m an android. A disposable.” And, saying that, I did the classy thing and cried my guts out while Gideon held me close.
After a while, he said, softly, “I had wondered, McGee.”
“You … knew?” I said through the sobbing.
“No,” he said, “but you did have me guessing. There was something funny about you. Like you had this big fat secret, and you were acting all bristly so nobody could get close and find it out.”
It’s never good to find out you’re a terrible liar.
“I mean, who retires from the Police Service, or from anything, as young as you were?” he said.
I’d felt as old as rocks in my last few years in Winter City, but it was true enough. Compared to some of the century old retirees on Serendipity I was a teenager.
I sniffled and felt awful, my breath coming in shudders. My guts felt awful and sour, the tension gone.
“I couldn’t help thinking about it,” he continued. “You wouldn’t be the first person to punch out of a high-level job under murky circumstances, or knowing things you weren’t supposed to know. So I didn’t bother you about it. But then yesterday, you tell me about this phone call from a disposable that’s suddenly awake and conscious and full of volition…”
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