Beautiful Red

by M. Darusha Wehm

  Most of it was not actually all that interesting, but that was typical. The trouble with relying on the combined wisdom of other individuals was that no one had the exact same interests as you, so either you limited your search to very small topic area and then hardly got any information at all, or you had to wade through a pile of boring stuff. Jack chose the latter method, since usually she had plenty of wading time.

  It seemed like the big news was still the hardware theft in Brugges. Jack scanned a couple of the entries, and got the impression that the reason it was getting so much attention was that there had been a lot of vandalism in the theft. All the cases in one server room had been literally ripped open, the disk pulled out leaving behind an unbelievable mess. It was a 'Man Bites Dog' story for sure, since even though theft was common enough, usually thieves took great pains to be discreet. The whole point was to make it take as long as possible for the theft to be discovered, so that the logs for the time of the crime would have been destroyed. Such a blatant display was so rare Jack could never recall an incident like it.

  There was, of course, no end to the speculation on the nets about why this had happened. Some suspected streeters, others opined that a revolutionary group of anti-progress activists were making a political statement. Some thought that it was a regular theft gone wrong, perhaps interrupted. Jack took all these opinions with the weight they ought to have - very little - and headed over to a board created entirely by intelligent agents.

  There was still plenty of debate about intelligent agents, the name assigned to smart computer programs. They were kind of hard to define; one common denominator was that they were smart enough to pass the Turing test, though that piece of trivia only scratched the surface. Some people were concerned that they would achieve sentience and then all hell would break loose, mostly those people were labeled "anti-progress," though that was really an unfair characterization. The truth was that no one knew what would happen if a program became self aware, but the economic value of intelligent agents was undeniable, so they were common enough.

  There were plenty of tasks they couldn't perform - anything requiring subtlety, intuition, diplomacy or outright deception. But for logical analysis they couldn't be beat, and they were fast and tireless. Whether you could rightly call their assessments "opinions" was a matter of debate, but Jack wanted to read something other than political rhetoric disguised as analysis. She paged over to IA Security News Log, a site of "opinion" pieces by off-duty intelligent agents working in security. Jack had met Adrian on their companion board for what they jokingly (everyone hoped) called unintelligent agents.

  Jack ran a search for the Brugges theft and came up with a few articles. One pointed out that humanity had a history of illogical actions, and this latest example was no stranger than someone getting in a fist fight under a surveillance camera, an all too common occurrence. Another article focussed on the cost benefit analysis, the payoff versus risk of apprehension. That agent argued that for a person with sufficient motivation, the risk of leaving evidence and possibly being caught was lower than the possible benefits. Another poster, particularly well known for its provocative remarks, reiterated its usual refrain that humans were morons.

  Jack didn't find a lot of new information there, but the aggregate of all she had read definitely explained the incident's noteworthiness. Who would be sufficiently motivated to steal disk when you could just buy it off any streeter? Jack knew that streeters didn't earn enough from the wares they sold to make a theft like that worthwhile. It was an interesting problem, and made a good diversion from the problem still on Jack's mind - why was someone using corporate systems to cover their tracks on the nets?

  She wondered if the incidents were connected in some way. She suspected that she was just grasping at straws, and seeing patterns where none existed, but they were both unusual and seemingly illogical incidents. Jack almost hoped there was a connection, even though that would make the problem even more intractable. She shook her head and checked the time.

  Ugh, she thought. It was mid-afternoon already, and she had gotten only a few hours sleep the night before, waking in the middle of the night to go on her break and enter mission. She knew she was over tired, but didn't want to sleep. She looked out the widow, and saw that the day was moderately bright and figured that a walk wouldn't hurt. She changed her clothes, grabbed her non-uniform jacket and left the apartment.

  She walked out of her building and turned left instead of right like she would if she were going to the train stop. She walked along the sidewalk, not really looking where she was going, just walking. She passed a few streeters and regular folks coming or going to work. The street was like any other, lined with tall buildings of housing units, some of the nicer ones with shops or cafes in their ground floors. A few private enclosed vehicles hovered through the street, but mostly the street was used by people on scooters, as there weren't many reasons to be in this neighbourhood for people rich enough to own a car. Most people were on foot, though, heading to or from a train stop.

  Jack watched the other people moving purposely through the street. Everyone looked so intent, so focussed, and Jack realized that she usually did the same. Most people were online almost all the time, and walking toward a train stop or to a store was just something for their bodies to do. It was as if the physical body were merely a transportation device for the mind, just a way of getting to one physical location from another.

  As Jack looked at her surroundings more closely, she started noticing things she had never seen before, having always been online. The boring similarity of all the buildings, for example. Even her own building, which she loved for its antiquated wooden door, was essentially the same 20 story glass and platinum monolith as every other building she passed.

  Even the people were eerily alike, with their vacant plugged in stares, fashionable bodies and faces, uniforms or corporate approved dress code outfits. Jack stopped and looked at her reflection in the mirrored window of the building next to her. She knew she wasn't as fashionable as most of the other people on the street; she couldn't be bothered to get a new face every year and she while she went through a phase when she was younger of going through several body types, she finally found one that felt right and just kept it. Even her hair colour had remained the same since she was a teenager - she now bought number 772 (sapphire) by the wholesale case.

  She supposed that she had always had a slightly rebellious streak with her appearance. Almost all her implants were subdermal; the only exception was a small stainless stud beneath her lower lip which she got at the age of twelve, in an adolescent attempt to look like everyone else. She had to admit that she still liked the way it looked, somewhat striking against her otherwise unadulterated skin. She once toyed with the idea of getting tattoo-skin, a programmable layer just under the epidermis that could render any image, but she had never bothered and now it was so common that hardly anyone who had it used it for more than changing skin colour.

  So she looked young but out of date, with a compact body just shy of 1.7 metres tall. Today, she wore loose pants of a dark strong material that ended mid calf and draped over her knee high boots. Her shirt was made of an iridescent material that had been popular six months previously; Jack liked it because just over her breasts was a red flashing 12:00, a symbol of technological incompetence that was the unofficial logo of the loose group of security pros that gathered on the IAs' human board. As a top layer she wore a hip length black shiny jacket with eighteen pockets so cleverly built into it that an observer would never know there were any pockets at all. After looking at herself for a full minute, as if she were a stranger, Jack decided she was pleased with her appearance, even though she would never be singled out in a crowd and asked how she did it.

  Chapter 7

  00010

  Okay, maybe I have been being a touch melodramatic about this memory problem. I have done a little research now and I think it may be some kind of brain problem, but nothing serious. Most
likely it's an artifact of one of the new implants. Blackouts supposedly are a symptom of incorrectly calibrated wetware connections. It's uncommon, but it happens.

  I've decided to go to the upgrade salon tomorrow and see if the people there have heard anything about this side effect. I can't find anything on their boards, but they don't like to advertise their problems, so hopefully I can just get a replacement or something. I hope I won't have to spend a lot of time in installation, but this needs to be fixed. I can't go on like this - I'm tired all the time and I'm starting to worry about what's happening during the time I'm unable to remember.

  Just to be safe, I have turned on automatic recording. Even limiting it to audio, this is going to take up a huge chunk of memory, no irony intended, but at least I'll be able to hear what I've been doing in those lapses.

  I think the smartest thing I've done in the last little while is taking the mood stabilizers. I was starting to really go off the rails there. Looking back, I'm surprised no one has turned me in to the crazy police. The way I had been acting before the stabilizers, anyone would have thought I was some kind of lunatic.

  Chapter 8

  Jack started walking back to her apartment, planning her next move. If she could trace the path of the unknown login back from the Bellis system, she may be able to find out where it originated. If she could find where it came from, she might be able to figure out what they were doing. She was pretty confident that whoever it was, and wherever it came from, the Bellis system was not the final destination. There were no flags raised by the security system and, as far as anyone could tell, no damage done aside from the downtime the other day.

  Jack also wanted to play with her new toys, and she came up with an idea that she hoped would be a cross between a gritty crime vidcast and a urban documentary. She walked a few blocks away from her building to a darker area more heavily populated by streeters. She saw no uniformed security goons, and for once didn't look at the situation as a potential training exercise. Instead, she felt compelled to watch the streeters themselves. She looked at them as if for the first time, as if she were a tourist and they were novel and interesting scenery. She was accustomed to seeing them only as a potential threat or source of some grey market bargain. More often than not, Jack, like everyone else, didn’t even notice them.

  This particular street had many unauthorized dwellings – everything from packing boxes, holo-tents and piles of blankets were being used to mark out where one person’s territory ended and someone else's began. By the circulation of goods and the permanence of some of the encampments, Jack saw that many of the streeters had clearly been living this way for some time, but there were a some who had the look of someone who was fairly new to street life. There were a few indicators - some were wearing tattered uniforms as opposed to well patched generic items, and they seemed to have a wild and afraid look rather than the resigned attitude of someone who has seen pretty much all of what the street had to offer.

  Jack approached an alley that was well known to be a popular scrounging ground for streeters. There was a mid range upgrades store in the building, whose staff often discarded unfashionable items that the steeters could use or sell. Also, the alley was fairly well sheltered, and it appeared that many of the new people were staying close to it. Jack stood at the mouth of the alley, looked around and saw that there were not too many people nearby and those who were there were preoccupied with their own concerns. She fished in one of her pockets and grabbed a couple of the micro recorders. She quickly rolled them one at a time down the alley, then abruptly turned and headed back to her building.

  Partly she just wanted to see how well the recorders worked, but partly she was genuinely interested in seeing the streeters’ lives. The popular boards had been full of prurient tales of streeter crime and degradation, and Jack suspected it was mostly propaganda to keep people from helping them. Still, she thought it would make for interesting watching. All her life she had done some of her best thinking while watching video, so she hoped that this might be a good diversion as she worked out the path of the mystery visitors to the Buyside and Bellis systems.

  Back in her apartment she brought up the recorders' software and activated the units she had left in the alley. At first she was thrown by their fly-eyes multiple view of the scene, but she quickly learned how to isolate individual views or start a three dimensional view. In the 3D view it was uncanny how lifelike the scene felt. It was exactly as if she were standing near the northern wall about a third of the way in. She could turn around and look up or down like normal and see everything as if she were there. She could hear audio in three dimensions also; an airbus screeching overhead prompted her to look up and the subtle change in sound felt entirely realistic. The only thing that was missing was smell and touch. And of course, she was rooted to the spot. It was eerie and fascinating.

  She paged out of the three-dimensional mode and set up a series of individual views to run in the background while she worked. She set them to her left eye, her usual choice for secondary input. She put on the coffee and heated a meal packet and called up all the information she had about the intrusion. She pulled up the list of addresses used – the incoming address from Buyside and the outgoing address at Bellis, as well as the tools she had found on the scene at Buyside’s Client Delivery System.

  She started to look at the tools by reading the code directly, not expecting to learn anything explicitly, more just to get a feel for her quarry. She found you could often tell a bit about a person or group by the code they wrote. As she was scanning the lines of text and symbols, her attention was drawn to one of the images from the micro recorders. It looked like a scheduled dump of castoffs from the upgrade station was about to occur, since a small group of streeters had gathered in the alley and seemed to be waiting.

  The group seemed to be mostly veterans, a few faces Jack recognized from the neighbourhood. She suspected that, like in most ad hoc communities, the old timers got the pick of the goods and the newbies had to salvage what they could from the sloppy seconds. Jack noticed a few obvious newbies, one who stuck out particularly. He had the same age appearance as Jack, and looked like he was wearing a corporate uniform, though it had certainly seen better days. His appearance wasn't what made him stand out from the crowd, though, it was more his behaviour.

  The other streeters were all vying for a position around the hatch at the back of the store, while simultaneously trying to maintain control over whatever goods or other belongings they had with them. This streeter had no items with him at all, which was unusual, and he stood some distance from the others. He didn't participate in the light conversation or arguments the others were engaged in; in fact he almost looked as if he were involved in some terribly interesting activity online - he had the vacant stare, the slack jaw and the lack of apparent interest in the goings on of the alley. Jack thought was odd how a behaviour that is appropriate in most circumstances for someone with a job and money was entirely strange and even a bit disturbing in another context.

  There was no point in playing with the micro recorders if she didn't fully test them, so she switched the view to three dimensions. She felt a strange lack of equilibrium as it appeared to her that the alley materialized around her. She could see and hear the action as if she were right there, and she found she had a strong desire to hide, which of course simply reinforced the other bizarre feeling of being unable to move. The reality of the sounds and moving images combined with the artifact of being rooted to one spot was, Jack discovered, quite unnerving.

  Things got even more strange when the hatch in the back of the building opened and the action began. Various items of hardware - diodes, implants, disk, transistors, wireless nodes, whatever - came dropping out of the hatch into the large grey bin in the alley. The majority of the streeters mobbed the bin, but in a very orderly fashion. As Jack had noticed earlier, the more experienced streeters somehow managed to find themselves at the right place to get the prime items, while the other
s had to sift through the remainders to look for the salvageable objects. Jack looked at the unusual man, not entirely surprised to see that he seemed to not even have noticed that the action had begun.

  All of a sudden, though, he seemed to come to life, sputtering about the mouth and lurching forward toward the group. Jack involuntarily tried to jump back and was momentarily struck by a feeling of terror when she found herself unable to move. She quickly remembered that she was really just watching a clever film, but her physical fear was difficult to control. The man lumbered into the fray of other people around the bin, and completely disregarding what appeared to be the mores of the situation, plunged both arms into the bin. He threw the uninteresting items out of the bin and into the crowd, while literally pulling apart larger items to get at the more valuable parts inside. He stuffed the parts he wanted into his pockets and scattered the crowd with his flailing arms and flying detritus.

  When he had finished amassing his collection, he walked straight through the stunned crowd, and headed out of the alley. He was walking straight toward the micro recorder that Jack was monitoring, so she had a clear view of his face. He was wearing the same thousand metre stare he had before, as if he were online. He lumbered toward Jack, who reflexively recoiled as he approached, when it seemed as if he walked through her as he stepped over the micro recorder. Jack turned to watch him go, as did the other streeters. Jack was still watching his retreating back when the other streeters regained their composure and began sorting through the items he had left behind.

  Jack finally disconnected from the recorder and found herself sitting at her table in a similar physical state as she had been after her break and enter at the Buyside system. What the hell was that? She couldn't recall ever seeing anything like it. It was as if that man were not paying any attention at all to his actions. Jack admitted that a lack of attention to the physical world was a fairly common occurrence, but not when someone was actually doing something physical. It was easier to pay partial attention to the network while being almost fully engaged in the real world than it was to go the other way.