Beautiful Red

by M. Darusha Wehm

  "Hey, Jack," Tony said, "have you seen the board by the break room?"

  "No," Jack answered, thinking he sounded more subdued than usual, but still leery of getting embroiled in some long conversation about waistcoats and dirndls.

  "I think Atomu in finance got us," he said, "either that or we're in minor shit." He broke the connection, and Jack became legitimately curious. She stood up and looked toward the break room. She could see something scrolling on the board next to the fridge, and a handful of people clustered around it.

  Jack wasn't a big crowd follower, but Tony's cryptic call had piqued her interest. She walked over to the break area and elbowed a path through the group. She stood before the board, reading the notice. It was one of those ubiquitous office bulletin boards, a pale organic light emitting diode screen that transmitted official notices, usually reminders to clean up after yourself and so on. It was supposedly accessible only by the designated admin, but a decent practical joker could almost certainly circumvent the crappy security on the device.

  Jack was pretty confident this wasn't one of Atomu's gags, though. The sign read:

  Security Alert

  Various items from the sub-basement four server room have been vandalized, stolen or destroyed. There is no evidence of an outside intruder, but the logs for the time period in question have been destroyed. Please be aware that a full investigation will be launched into this incident. Anyone who has any information about this situation, or any of the parties involved, must report to their supervisor immediately.

  Not bloody likely, Jack thought. Some of the people here might not be the kind of people she would choose for friends, but she didn't think any of them were likely to rat out a co-worker. Although you never knew who would be willing to be an asshole in order to curry a mote of favour with the bosses. She looked around, eyeing the others to see if any of them looked like they were about to go running to the supervisor's room with accusations.

  Jack went back to her cubicle, slightly more suspicious of her co-workers than she would like to admit. She didn't really think any of them were responsible, but she was starting to fear that someone would try to pin the blame on someone else in order to get a gold star. She didn't like that - didn't like the idea of turning in your co-workers and didn’t like believing that any of them would actually do that. I wish I never walked over there, she thought sulkily.

  She opened her messages and poked through the deleted items area, looking for any other information about this situation. She actually read every one of them, looking for more about the server room situation. There was nothing but the usual bullshit about logos, branding and team building exercises. She paged over to the Bellis internal news page, and its bright sunny graphics of unnaturally happy looking people in cubicles. She scanned through the profiles of random employees, like "Meet Sandy, the new Eastern sysadmin who likes bunnies and plays competitive Battle Ogres." She skipped past the images of last month's Birthday Club from the payroll department, a horrid mandatory five-minute affair each month with cake-style food bricks and free coffee.

  She found nothing in the internal news about the incident, and finally decided that as a Security Officer Class 5, it was her responsibility to find out if the sign was real or a very good hoax. She set her system to roaming, and headed out of the Security room. In theory, Security staff could go anywhere in the Bellis building, still connected to the Security system. All other positions had a shutoff at the door, to prevent people from wandering too far from their desks, Jack guessed. It was like making people come in to an office in the first place - ludicrous, but effective in breaking the spirit and bending the will. Still, as a Security staffer, she could come and go as she pleased - as long as she could explain it in full detail to her supervisor.

  Whatever. She decided it was her job to find out if there really was a problem in sub basement four or not. She made it into the lobby without anyone asking what she was up to, which seemed strange enough. She caught the down lift and clung to its central post as she rode the small platform down to the fourth floor below ground level. By the time she reached the ground floor, her system was being pinged by her boss. Jack answered, and heard her supervisor, a man whose name she never learned, say, "So… on a little jaunt are we?"

  His condescending tone always infuriated Jack, and she fought to keep her voice even. "The admin sign by the security room break area may be malfunctioning. I'm checking to see if what it's reporting is real."

  "I see," her boss said, obviously unaware of the sign or its message. There were enough levels of bureaucracy that it was common for the right hand to be oblivious to the left, so his lack of knowledge didn't surprise Jack. "Well… I want a full report when you have investigated. And be sharp about it. Those logs don't read themselves, you know." He broke the connection and Jack stepped off the platform and into the lobby of sub basement four.

  It was dank and dark, exactly what you'd expect of a floor that was almost exclusively occupied by machines. She marched down the narrow hall toward the server room, a large locked area at the end of the corridor. The lights flickered slightly, and Jack thought she could hear a slow drip off in the distance. She wondered what it was; even Bellis wasn't rich enough to let water just drip onto the floor.

  As she approached the server room, she could hear the hum of the machines. It was a sound she had always found comforting, though in the dark of the sub basement she thought it sounded a little bit eerie. She heard the door unlock in response to her proximity, and she pulled it open. She was unprepared for what she saw.

  The machines looked like they had been gutted, as if the intruders had opened them with hatchets or crowbars. There were wires and cables everywhere, trailing over the floor and other machines, leading toward the door. The scene was strange but oddly familiar. Jack had seen something like this before, in images accompanying the story of the theft in Brugges. She turned slowly, surveying the scene. There were no cameras in the server rooms, since it was so rare that there were ever people in them that it seemed a waste of security euros. Jack sought to rectify that problem.

  She systematically went through every room of machinery, on all ten sub basements, dropping micro recorders in each. She made up a cock and bull story for her boss about checking all the rooms for theft to explain why she was on the move, and hustled between them all, chucking a micro recorder in the open door and moving on to the next room. By the time she was done, she had almost used all the small spheres, but that was fine. The truth was that she'd never had a good reason to buy them and this way she might actually learn something about what was going on.

  Once she had recorders in every room, she caught the lift back up to her floor and marched back to her desk. The group by the break area had broken up by then but as soon as she got to her cube she found Tony streaking over. "Where have you been," he half whispered and half screeched, "did you get hauled in? What's going on?" He looked like he had worked himself into a pretty good lather about the whole situation. Jack knew he was high strung, and tried to pacify him with the almost whole truth.

  "Tony, man, we're Security," she said, trying to act like a cool leader from some vid. "We don't make trouble, we fix it. I was checking out the scene, seeing what we can do to figure out what happened down there."

  She hoped that this would calm him down, but it seemed to get him even more worked up. "So it's real?" His voice rose in pitch and volume. "There really was an intrusion?"

  "Yup," Jack said, seeing no way out of this conversation, "but it's no big deal. They took a couple of drives and wrecked up the place a little, that's all. It was probably just some pissed off clerk." Tony got ready to panic some more, then seemed to take in what Jack had said. She breathed a sigh of relief as he seemed to buy her pile of bullshit, and calmed down.

  "You really think so?" he asked, looking for reassurance.

  "Yeah," she said, "I don't think it's anything to get worked up over. Management has to look into things, but I don't think
they'll be bothering anyone else up here." Tony looked so relieved that Jack was afraid he might try and touch her or something, so she quickly said, "Just go on back to work. It'll be fine."

  He smiled and said, "Okay. Yeah, it will be fine, won't it? Thanks, Jack." He walked back to his cube, and Jack wondered, not for the first time, about his mental health. She spent the rest of the day checking the views from the micro recorders and finishing up the report for Gilles. She gave him a brief run down on what she had seen in the server room and alerted him to the Brugges incident by suggesting elsewhere in the report that he should check out "this interesting board I found." He should be able to put the two together, Jack thought, I just wish I could tell him about the micro recorders. Maybe I'll send him a message tonight. Jack finished the report, tidied up and logged out. As she left the security room, she saw Tony getting ready to leave also. He smiled weakly and Jack gave him the thumbs up sign. Man, he's a crazy one, she thought.

  Chapter 18

  Jack spent the evening going over the Brugges theft, comparing it to the incident in the Bellis server room. There was more information about the European crime by now, on the regular news boards as well as the specialized ones Jack has been paging through before. It seemed that the theft had been conducted by a pair of locals who had now gone missing. There didn't seem to be any link between the two prior to the incident; one was a service worker in a mid range upgrade salon and the other was an entertainment worker.

  Rowan, Jack thought. She was an entertainment worker from Brugges. Of course, that made as much sense as anything; more, really. Most of the analysis of the event had pointed out that the logic was quite poor, but only if the thieves cared about getting caught. If you had no thoughts of you own, why would you care about the logs, getting caught or having to disappear?

  Armed with this information, Jack did some more digging, trying to find any data that could prove or disprove this theory. She ran a search for Rowan's name, but came up with nothing she hadn't already seen. She scanned through the more speculative information about the Brugges theft and finally came across some blurry images enlarged from satellite views of the area. The images were of predictably bad quality and it would never be possible to identify someone from them alone. There wasn't enough of a face recognizable to run through the recognition programs to get a match, but Jack immediately saw the resemblance.

  It was Estella Rowan, along with someone Jack didn't recognize, leaving the area with armloads of equipment. There was no question in Jack's mind that the image on her viewer - larger than life, albeit highly pixellated - was the same as the face she had seen when she struggled with Rowan's broken consciousness. On the other hand, the woman in the image Jack had seen when she searched through the public area of Rowan's mind was nowhere to be seen.

  Jack closed the image and turned her viewer off. She sat at her table, grieving for Rowan anew. She had never known the woman, maybe wouldn't even have liked her. Hell, there was no reason to think they would have been friends, no reason to believe she was even a decent human being. Maybe she skimmed from her employer, cheated her clients, was mean to streeters. Still, Jack couldn't get past the images she had seen during her visit to Rowan's system. What must it be like to have such a conflict inside your own mind? And what had happened to her body? It seemed like the kind of fate no one should have to endure.

  Jack took a deep breath, banishing the images from her mind. She couldn't help Estella Rowan any more than she could stop the earth from spinning. She could, however, track down the people doing this and expose them or stop them or something. So she set her mind back to the task at hand - getting the evidence she needed and finding out as much as she could about the Red and the man she thought of as BlackEye.

  She copied all the relevant information about the Brugges heist to a local file, including the blurry image of Estella Rowan. She searched through her own cache in the hopes of finding an image of Rowan from Jack's visit to her consciousness. Jack chose to run the search in command line mode, not wanting to relive the experience by seeing the images. Jack kept a fairly large cache file as a matter of course, so she was not surprised to find the record of her experience in Rowan's mind. She added the image to her report without looking at it.

  She sat up, cracked her neck and got a beer from the fridge. She realized she hadn't eaten anything, and heated up a meal in the zapper. As she ate she scanned the boards for any incidents similar to what had occurred in Brugges the previous week and at Bellis the previous night. She had trouble narrowing the search down, as theft of equipment was common enough. She eventually ended up on the IA board where she had previously read analyses of the incident. She checked for any new posts on the Brugges topic and any related information.

  She scanned the posts one by one, looking for any new leads or references to other incidents. Finally she found it: a post by one of the intelligent agents linking other similar incidents. It was a hell of a resource - a list of similar events and links to more information about them. Jack followed all the links, and as she paged through the evidence collected by the agent, a clearer picture began to form in her mind.

  All over the globe, over the past month or so, strange thefts had been occurring. They were all brazen attempts, leaving obvious evidence of the assault. The reports were filled with images of disemboweled equipment, cables and wires in torn and tangled piles on the floor. In none of these incidents had the perpetrators bothered to hide their crime, but any security recorders or logs had been disabled or destroyed. The satellite image from Brugges was the best image of the thieves from any of the scenes.

  The targets were all over the map, geographically and in terms of their natures. There were various machine rooms of large firms, warehouses of parts for a major wholesaler, the back room of an upgrade salon. The common denominator was the equipment taken. It was exclusively disk. In total, enough memory was taken to power a small firm's server room. And both Jack and the agent who had collected these examples believed that this was just the tip of the iceberg. Surely only the larger targets had gone public with these thefts, and that was only because with so many employees someone was bound to leak the information. Their PR departments would be sure to put the information out first to make sure that the correct spin was on the story. Smaller outfits would cover up the damage and pretend nothing happened so as to not alarm their clients and investors.

  Jack wondered about this epidemic of theft, and the stolen disk. It cost a bundle to get a huge pile of memory, sure, but the effort to subvert the logs and recorders wasn't free either, not to mention the cost in human lives and minds. Jack couldn't imagine that many people would be enticed into such an act by even the amount of money it would take to buy that amount of disk retail, so it had to be some kind of coercion. Jack was convinced that the thieves were all under the same control as Rowan had been; it was the only explanation for why people would willingly put themselves at risk of arrest and have to essentially disappear after the crime.

  For the next hour, she mechanically ate her food and sipped at her beer while paging through the boards. If the woman in the building across the street sat at her window and increased her vision five times, she would see Jack sitting at her table, transfixed on something a million miles away that only she could see, occasionally feeding her body. The woman across the street would turn from the window, thinking what an unremarkable life Jack led, and carry on with her own evening plans.

  You could look in almost any window in almost any city in the world, and nine times out of ten you would see exactly the same scene. People, home from work, eating food to keep their bodies alive, while their minds and visions lived on the nets. They played games, visited with friends real and imaginary, did everything people did when they weren't at work.

  Jack was deeply immersed in her research when the Escher started flashing. "Your timing sucks, Adrian," she muttered aloud as she switched over to her 3D interface. She walked toward the flashing fish and noticed that it
wasn't Adrian calling after all. The connection originated from the Bellis system. It was Gilles.

  >Hey G. This is a surprise.

  >>I know you can't get enough of me.

  >(laughter) Who could?

  >>I just thought I'd give you a teaser to tide you over 'til the morning.

  >Such a kind hearted guy.

  >>So, I was reading your report, and wanted to check a few things.

  >Such as?

  >>You went down there and saw it?

  >Yup.

  >>And it's like the one from Belgium?

  >Exactly.

  >>…

  >You know something I don't?

  >>I doubt it… you're looking into it now, aren't you.

  >Yup.

  >>Get anything?

  >Yup.

  >>Anything good?

  >I think so.

  >>Are you gonna share?

  >I'll put it in the report.

  >>When are you planning on passing that on?

  >A couple of days. Before the weekend.

  >>Okay. Good.

  >…

  >>…

  >Since when are you interested in this stuff?

  >>Always was, kiddo. Since before you were born, probably.

  >Christ, I keep forgetting you're older than dirt.

  >>What's dirt?

  >Funny stuff. See ya tomorrow, champ.

  >>Later, dude.

  Jack disconnected, and wondered what was up with Gilles. He had helped her break into Buyside and he had sent that message while she was off at the Red party on the weekend, and she was sure the conversations of the last week or so were the longest they had had in the entire time they had been working together. She knew he was as bored as she had been at work, and maybe he was just finding this all to be a pleasant distraction from the ennui of work.