Beautiful Red

by M. Darusha Wehm

  Jack didn't return to her room, and instead shared the small bed with Lars. The alarm woke them in the morning, and they smiled at each other after a brief moment of awkwardness. They showered together and walked to the meal hall. Only after having the first few bites of breakfast did they speak.

  "I guess that was the intermediate lesson," Jack said, lightly, grinning.

  Lars was more earnest. "I don't usually do that," he said, awkwardly, but also smiling. "I'm not one to see students as opportunities. I realize that physical intimacy has repercussions that aren't always evident, and I want to be clear that I don't expect anything of you because of last night."

  Jack laughed. "Don't worry," she said, trying for a world weary air, "It's not like I haven't had flesh sex before. I'm not going to make things difficult for you, it's okay. I do like talking to you, though, you have been very helpful. Can we have dinner tonight, if I promise to keep my hands to myself?" She smiled disarmingly, and Lars finally allowed himself a grin.

  "Sure," he said. "I'm just cognizant of my role as a teacher and how those power constructs can complicate matters."

  Jack laughed, and shook her head, finishing her breakfast. "You're funny as hell, Lars," she said, as she rose from the table and got ready to head back to her room. "For all your freedom, you're as trapped as the rest of us. I'll see you at the bar before dinner?" She asked, and they agreed on a time. She left the table, and walked back to her room. She changed clothes and left for her first class of the day, a study of community building.

  The content of the morning class was way over Jack's head, and she couldn't even tune it out because it was almost all class participation. The lecturer started the session by earnestly talking about the value of communities of like-minded people, and passed out the link to an online course that taught how to set up a local chapter of the Red. She gave a brief overview of the basic elements of organizing a group of vaguely like-minded but probably significantly disparate people.

  Jack was starting to doze off when the tone of the class shifted radically, and the participation began. She had to partner with another class member and do some kind of idea-sharing exercise, there were trust-building games, and Jack thought there was more touching going on in this session than the body work class yesterday. If Lars thinks there's some kind of special intimacy in body contact, Jack thought, he'd better steer clear of this group.

  After what felt like an eternity, the class was over. Jack was amazed when she realized that it had been one of the short sessions, and that she was due to report to the programmers' lab for a work session before lunch. She made a beeline for the lab and was one of the first people to arrive for this shift. The shift captain assigned her to work with debugging some experimental code for regulating the water supply, but she managed to trade shifts with a shy old timer who was scheduled to set up new users and found it a painfully boring task.

  Jack hoped that she would be able to set up a dummy user for herself to use while she was sneaking around. She set to adding the group of new users and found that there seemed to be a simple process for the task. She also discovered that the physical key they all carried, a token she had assumed was a necessary step in the authentication process, was really just the delivery system for a chunk of encrypted signed code. Sure, if she was trying to get into the viewer in her room she would need a key since there was no other delivery mechanism. But in the labs there was wireless, so she could just download the authentication code for the dummy user to her local system, and use it when she tried to log in. At least, she hoped it would work that way.

  She finished the first list of new users, then pulled out a list of user upgrades that were waiting for another staffer. She gave it a try, but her permissions were too low to enable her to perform the upgrade. So much for making a higher level user for herself. She went back to the new users list and added a dummy identity. No alarms went off, even when she downloaded the generated key to her local system rather than moving it to the central key creation folder.

  She noticed that she was flushed and sweating. She had always had a visceral response to doing things she knew could land her in the soup; it was one of the reasons she had decided to stay on the easy side of the law. She deliberately slowed her breathing down, and was just about looking and feeling normal when the shift ended. The shy guy who'd switched shifts with her met her on the way out and thanked her again for saving him a couple of hours of mind numbing boredom.

  "No problem," she said, trying to control her autonomic physical responses, "any time." They went their separate ways as Jack headed for the meal hall. She sat at one of the stools that was just under a section of the track and hoped no one came to sit next to her. She had another work shift immediately after lunch then an optional short class before her late dinner date with Lars. She was hoping to get into the higher level systems in her next shift, then depending on what she found, who knew what would happen.

  As she ate she pulled up her cracker's tool kit and looked through all the utilities. From what she had seen so far, the local system here seemed to be organized in a fashion pretty similar to the other systems Jack had used. She figured that her tools ought to be able to crack into the upper echelons of the system and that she would be able to access all the files. Her only worry was that the false user she had created would be too obvious, and that she wouldn't be able to cover her tracks. There wasn’t anything else she could do at this point to make the process go more smoothly, except abandon the attempt. So, she ate her lunch and prepared herself for the afternoon's attack.

  Chapter 26

  The system was different. At first Jack nearly panicked when she realized that her three D rendering engine couldn’t handle the configuration of the Red system and showed her nothing but an empty blue void. But, after backing out and viewing the system using her terminal emulator, Jack was able to navigate the system. She got a feel for the layout, finding her way through the hierarchical structure. Eventually, she banged up against the point where her dummy user's permissions ended.

  She breathed deeply, and turned away from her task for a moment. She had an assignment from the shift captain, and she guessed that if it didn't get done they might come checking up on her. She pulled out her bag of tricks and quickly modified a script to do her job for her. She got it running under her own user id and set it to notify her when it was done so she could check the work. She switched back to the dummy id, and held her breath.

  She started cracking into the higher level systems. It was slow going, because she was trying to be careful about leaving traces. Occasionally she would switch back to her real id and check on the script, but it seemed to be doing fine. After what seemed like an eternity but was really more like six or seven minutes, she was in. All the way up to Red One, the highest access level. She was somewhat surprised to see that it was mostly just separate repositories for each of the staffers.

  She opened one at random, and saw viewer logs, lesson plans, personal journals, the usual stuff you would find on a personal system. She went straight to Rackham's area, and started poking around. She found the text of a few lectures, an accounting file and a list of goals for the movement. She opened the list of goals and started to read. It was clearly a public relations piece, since there was nothing earth shattering on there and the tone didn't sound anything like the man she had talked to the previous night at the bar. It didn't even sound like the speech she had heard at the open house.

  She realized that she wasn't going to find the evidence just lying around marked with an X. She needed the equivalent of a map. She switched back to her own user account to check on the script and got an idea. She still had a copy of the code she had found at the Buyside Client Delivery System, and she could just write a script to compare the code fragment to the contents of all the files on the system. She found a search script in her local systems and began modifying it to suit the Red system.

  She tested it a few times on the lower level system, looking for know
n strings and it seemed to be pretty successful at finding what she was looking for. She input one of the code fragments from the Buyside raid, and set the script to run over the entire Red One system. She knew it would take some time, and switched back to her own account while she waited. The script for her assignment finished, and she checked its work. It was perfectly fine; no one would ever know that Jack hadn't done it all by hand. She had to wonder why they didn't just use scripts for most of the work - it was a real waste of time having people do it manually.

  As she was thinking of other ways to automate the various jobs that were assigned at the programmers' labs, her search script notified her that it had found a match. She felt her heartbeat quicken and sweat break out all over her body as if she had a fever. She swallowed hard and switched over to the dummy account. She opened up the matching file and saw that it was definitely one of the tools used to break into Buyside.

  This was conclusive evidence. She hadn't been on a wild goose chase after all; her hunch about Rackham had paid off and she figured that it would be fairly easy now to prove that he was the one who was behind the mind control programs. She double checked, and her script told her that this was the only match on the whole system, so it had the be him. Just to be sure, she ran the command to show which area the file was located in. And she nearly lost her lunch when she saw that it wasn't Rackham who had broken into Buyside; it was Lars.

  Jack was stunned. Lars? Sure, she hardly knew the man, and a few hours of grab-ass the night before didn't change that fact, but he seemed so… benign. How could anyone who taught ancient body language and wanted to talk about his feelings be responsible for the horrors she had seen? It didn't make sense, or maybe she just didn't want it to make sense. Maybe she was wrong, maybe this didn't prove anything. She wished she had never come here.

  A chime sounded, indicating that her shift was almost over, and it brought her mind back to reality. She had to be sure, so she took a risk and started a file dump of Lars' entire area to her local system. She had to turn off her automatic recording routine and trash some temp files to make room, but she was pretty sure she'd be able to get it all. The weight in her head as the download took place was painful, but she welcomed it. She knew the throbbing would end once the files were all received, and hoped that the roiling feeling in her stomach would end as well. The chime for the end of her shift sounded, but she waited a few moments for the download to finish. She logged out of the system, not bothering to take the time to ensure that any traces of her visit were erased.

  She left the labs in a daze and walked straight back to her room. Once inside, she took off her clothes and got into the shower. She set the shower to remain on until she turned it off manually and stayed under the water for a long time. She alternately tried to make herself not care about the situation, forget her relationship with Lars, minimize its significance - anything to get through the next few hours. Eventually she brought up the image of Estella Rowan's face. She focussed on the small knot of rage and pity that had built inside her since the moment she found Rowan's ravaged mind, and finally shut off the water. She dried herself under the blower, left the bathroom and got into the small bed. She lay back, closed her eyes, and started sifting through the files from Lars' system.

  At first she tried to group them according to their titles, but quickly realized that as a basic security precaution he hadn't labeled any of them obviously, so she would have to scan through them all. Fine. She set to work. She sifted through his teaching schedule, a few academic-style essays regarding the loss of physicality in modern society, and some of his correspondence with family in Europe. None of these files contained any hint of a reason for breaking into random systems, let alone an indication that he was behind the mind control program.

  Then Jack came across some specs from the original European study with the bonobos and her heart sank. She realized she had again grown hopeful that she was wrong, that Lars wasn't the one. She scanned through the information, and saw that he had filled the document with marginalia about adapting the tool to human use. Jack checked the author information, and the annotations were all attributed to Lars. It was circumstantial evidence, but it was proof enough for Jack.

  She kept looking though his files, and found some strange documents labeled Beautiful Red. Most of the files were schematics about building huge racks of disk. She looked through them, and saw that Lars was trying to get large quantities of disk networked together to run a program he was developing called the Maker. Jack ran a search and found the beginnings of the code for the Maker. She read through the code, expecting to see the mind control program. Instead, it seemed to be a fully recursive program that did nothing but analyze itself. Jack could see why you would need a lot of disk for it, but couldn't see any reason why you want to run such a program. It was unfinished, and Jack could tell from the dates and the modifications that this fragment was the first version. There were indications that a subsequent version had been written, but she could find no copy of it among the files she had downloaded.

  She found some more files tagged "BR", and quickly scanned through them. It was a strange mix of information. There were some more specs from the European chimpanzee study, several clippings from boards devoted to the creation and study of intelligent agents, some philosophical studies of sentience and old work on creating artificial intelligence. That last grouping was pretty strange. Long ago, scientists had concluded that intelligent agents could only ever achieve sentience though an evolutionary-type process - that only through learning could they become self aware. While it hadn't happened yet, this was the commonly accepted theory. But Lars had been collecting work from before that theory became common, designs for ways to create fully sentient machines from scratch.

  Jack scanned through the documents, but there wasn't anything she found interesting there. It was just full of old theories that would interest a historian more than they would a programmer. She kept searching through the files she had taken, looking for connections, evidence, looking for answers. She skimmed over the names of the files and directories tagged "BR" again: ai/docs/, building_log, root_access_v2.6, sentience/docs, study_756/specs/, the_maker_v1.1. Her eye stumbled on what appeared to be a program - root access. She opened it up in her terminal emulator and started reading the code. She gasped, realizing that this was the mind control program.

  She opened her eyes, and sat up, gasping for breath. She had been looking through the files for about an hour, and she needed water. She got out of the bed, and grabbed a bottle from the cupboard. She drank it, and put on some clothes. She walked around the small room, getting energy back into her body. This was it - the evidence she needed. She left her room, and walked back to the programmers' lab, still gripping her water bottle as if she were trying to strangle it.

  She arrived at the lab, and snuck into one of the unused areas. There was a shift on, but it was a small crew working and Jack was pretty sure she hadn't been seen. She logged into the system using her dummy id, and quickly got into Lars' directory. She dropped a script she had quickly written on the way over into the top level of his directory, and backed out. Then she started looking for a way out of the local system and onto everywherenet. She wanted to contact someone, anyone, and tell them what she had found, but it soon became clear that the Red system was completely closed.

  Frustrated but determined, she logged out of the system and snuck out of the building. She was supposed to be meeting Lars for drinks in half an hour. Part of her wanted to just leave now, and turn him in to the authorities. But she had come so far and found so little; she needed to know why. She went straight to the bar, and order a large very strong gin and tonic. She was halfway through the liquid courage, when he walked in.

  She had planned all kinds of clever things to say, violence to perform and cutting looks to deliver, but when she saw him her first reaction was that she must have made some kind of mistake. He seemed so kind to people, so interested in their welfare and now he looked so
happy to see her, that Jack had a hard time believing her own conclusions. He waved to her, and gestured that he was going to the bar first. She nodded, and drank more of her g & t, her well rehearsed lines dying unsaid in her mind.

  He came to the table with a couple of real ales for them both, and set them down. He leaned over to kiss her, but Jack put her hand on his chest, stopping him. "What's Beautiful Red?" she asked, her voice soft as she looked him in the eyes. His pupils dilated and he looked as if she had hit him in the stomach.

  "What… how… " he stammered, "I, where did you hear that?

  Jack swallowed hard. "I've been through your directory on Red One," she said, matter of factly. She sighed, air escaping her lungs as if she were deflating. "Just tell me and get it over with." Lars looked around him, as if preparing to run away, then Jack could tell he just gave up. He looked as if someone had let the air out of him as he sagged into his chair.

  He took a large drink from his beer, and said, "I was just in there dropping off some class notes. You're very good. I didn't notice a thing."

  Jack closed her eyes, breathing slowly and carefully. She could feel her eyes stinging and her throat was closing. She fought her body, and opening her eyes, said, "Just tell me what it is, Lars."

  So he did.

  Chapter 27

  00111

  I pulled out all my implants today. The pain was strong, but I took a glass of Demer-ade, so I didn’t care. Now my face looks like someone attacked me with a fist full of knives, but I can have it fixed tomorrow. If this ends the blackouts, the terror and the horrible almost memories, it would be worth it even if I had to stay this way forever.