Charity sets her half-eaten donut down on the table and takes a sip of coffee.
“Lovely,” she says. “I think I’ve had enough.”
“See? It’s working on you, too. Soon you’ll be as thin and pretty as I am.”
Charity giggles.
“I think we’ve actually got some fruit in the fridge,” I say. “Help yourself. We’re probably not going to eat it.”
She shakes her head.
“I’m good. I don’t usually eat breakfast anyway.”
I finish my coffee. Gary thoughtfully chews his second doughnut, while staring at Charity’s boobs.
“So,” I say finally. “Charity. What are your plans for the day?”
She grimaces.
“I have to be at the diner by eleven for the lunch shift, and I have to get home and get cleaned up before that. Speaking of which, I don’t suppose either of you owns a car?”
I shake my head. Gary’s not listening. He might as well have her nipples crammed into his ears. Charity sighs.
“I didn’t think so. It’s okay. I’ll get a cab.”
She pulls out a phone, and taps at the screen.
“Huh,” she says. “I guess I don’t need a cab after all.”
“You sure?” I say. “Don’t know where you live, but it’s a solid two miles from here to the diner.”
“I’m sure,” she says. “Apparently, I just got fired.”
“I got fired once,” says Gary. “That’s why I became an entrepreneur.”
Charity taps at her phone some more. “Thanks. I’ll get right on that. Is applying for government credit entrepreneurial?”
“Not really,” I say. “But suing the diner for unlawful dismissal might be. Did they give you a reason?”
“Nope. Just said not to show up today.”
“Just out of curiosity,” says Gary. “Is your boss Engineered?”
“No,” she says. “No mods, no implants.”
“RAHOWA,” says Gary.
“I haven’t looked into this RAHOWA thing,” I say. “But I’m pretty sure that firing waitresses is not part of it.”
Charity looks at Gary, then at me.
“RAHOWA?”
“Racial holy war,” I say. “It’s Gary’s new thing.”
“Cataclysmic battle to the death between the Engineered and the UnAltered,” Gary says. “First they came for the cave ladies, and I said nothing, because I was not a cave lady. Then they came for the hot waitresses, and I said nothing, because I was not a hot waitress. Then they came for the bastard offspring of Mickey Mouse and a seven-foot-tall transvestite prostitute, and I said nothing, because I was not Anders. Then they came for me, and there was nobody left to speak.”
Charity looks at me and raises one eyebrow. I shrug.
“Martin Niemöller,” says Gary. “You did go to college, didn’t you?”
Charity gives Gary a long, blank look.
“So you’re saying I got fired because I’m a Pretty?”
“Yes,” I say. “That’s what he’s saying.”
“Except I’m not,” she says.
“Not what?” I ask.
“Not a Pretty. I know I look like one, but I’m not.”
I try to give Gary a warning look, but his eyes are fixed on the point where her shirt snugs against the tops of her breasts.
“Come on,” he says. “There’s no way that this”—he gives a vague wave that encompasses everything from her ass to the top of her head—“just happens.”
She smiles.
“I didn’t say I’m not Engineered. You’ve got more in common with a bonobo than you do with me. I’m just not a Pretty.”
Charity is upstairs using our shower when Doug pings me.
“Connect,” I say. “Vid to the wallscreen.”
I walk into the living room and drop onto the couch. My side is still pretty sore, but my chest feels better, and I’m starting to think I got away with some minor strains. Doug’s face pops up on the screen. He does not look happy.
“Anders,” he says. “What’s the word?”
“RAHOWA, apparently. Have you been following the feeds?”
He grimaces.
“I have. That’s why I’m here. We really need your feedback on those documents. Have you opened them?”
I shake my head.
“I have not. Been kinda busy. Today, though, I will definitely get to them. In fact, I’ll start digging into them as soon as we disconnect.”
“This is important,” he says. “I may not have emphasized this before, but I really, really need you to get back to me on this as soon as possible.”
I roll my eyes.
“I’ve got it, Doug. I told you—no promises about what I’ll find, but I’ll have something to give you by this afternoon.”
“Good.”
The screen goes blank.
“Great,” I say. “Good to talk to you too, Doug. Have a lovely afternoon. Bye.”
There’s no real reason for me to work on this in my bedroom—I’m pretty sure Gary can monitor everything I do there just as easily as what I do in the kitchen—but I decide to do it anyway. I guess the illusion of privacy is better than nothing at all. I’m just settling into my work chair and pulling up the files when Charity comes into the room. She’s carrying her clothes over one arm, and wearing a towel wrapped around her torso.
“Hey,” she says. “Whatcha up to?”
I make a conscious effort to drag my eyes away from her.
“Something I should have been doing a couple of days ago, apparently,” I say.
She sits down on the edge of the bed, crosses her legs and looks up at the wallscreen. It shows a schematic diagram, rotating slowly in three dimensions.
“Seriously,” she says. “What is that?”
I shrug.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
I wave my hand and the schematic disappears, replaced by scrolling columns of numbers and symbols. When Doug told me that he wanted me to review some documents for him, I assumed that he meant . . . well . . . documents. These are not documents. There is nothing here that was meant to be parsed by a human.
Charity scoots a bit closer. I’ve never seen a Pretty this up-close before, and although she claims not to be one, she definitely has those mods on top of whatever else she’s got. Her breasts have absolutely no sag to them. Gene cuts or no, it’s not clear to me how that’s physically possible.
“So,” I say. “Do you think you might want to put some clothes on?”
She smiles.
“I think that may be the first time anyone’s ever said that to me. Am I distracting you?”
“A bit, yeah.”
She leans back on her elbows.
“Are you sure you don’t want to be distracted?”
My eyes slide up to her face, then back down again.
“You know,” I say. “I’m starting to think you might be a succubus.”
I wave again, and another schematic comes up. It shows what looks like a molecular diagram. Charity scowls, picks up her clothes and starts pulling them on. I point and push, and the view moves to a three-dimensional representation of what I’m pretty sure is a protein. Another wave, and a third diagram appears.
Which I recognize.
It’s a schematic for a simple nanomachine, one that I’ve used as an example in my lectures. It’s a temperature-sensitive molecular cage, similar in its basic structure to a buckyball. You can put a small molecule inside it, and it will stay chemically isolated from its surroundings for as long as the cage maintains its integrity—which it can no longer do after its temperature exceeds 36˚ C.
Charity slams the door behind her on the way out.
I know what these files are n
ow.
Doug is definitely trying to get me killed.
“So,” Doug says. “What have you got for me?”
He’s grinning. I am not.
“Well,” I say. “I’m pretty sure I know what these files are, and what they’re for. I’d like to know how you got hold of them.”
His grin widens.
“Come on, Anders. I can’t tell you that. Trade secret, blah blah blah. What are they?”
“Do you seriously not know?”
His left eye begins vibrating its way through a download.
“Do you have to do that?” I ask.
“Do what?”
“The eye thing. It bothers me when people do that. Shouldn’t you be doing all of your downloads through your brain thingie now?
“My what?”
“Sorry. Your wireless neural interface. Shouldn’t that be handling your downloads now?”
He shrugs.
“It does. But any visuals still get fed through my ocular. That’s more efficient than trying to tap the optic nerve directly if you’ve already got one implanted.”
I run one hand back through my hair.
“Great. I was kind of hoping that the advent of brain thingies would end the whole lizard-eye thing, but whatever. Anyway, do you really not know what you gave me?”
He gives me a drawn-out, theatrical sigh.
“Did I not agree to pay your war-profiteering consulting fee? Would I have done that if I already knew what was in the files?”
“I have no idea what you would or wouldn’t do at this point, Doug. Where did you get these files?”
He shrugs.
“I jacked them from a server.”
“Right. Whose server?”
“Another jacker.”
“So you seriously have no idea what these are?”
“None whatsoever.”
I suddenly realize that I’ve let the heavy augmentation color my view of Doug for the last fifteen years. He is not, in fact, an intelligent man.
“Then how do you know they’re important?” I ask, speaking slowly now. “Why did you agree to pay my fee?”
He smiles. Doug’s smile is a very creepy thing.
“Because the guy I jacked them from had them locked up very, very tight.”
“So if I told you this was somebody’s encrypted home porn?”
The smile disappears.
“I would be bitterly disappointed. Unless it was something really freaky, and we could associate it with somebody rich and closeted. Is it porn?”
I sigh.
“No, Doug. It is not porn. You did at least glance at the files, right?”
“I did not.”
“So you . . . wait, what? You didn’t even look at them?”
“I did not.”
I’m not sure what to say to that.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he says. “I thought there was a chance they might have come from NatSec.”
“And?”
“NatSec puts tracker bugs into anything that goes onto their servers. Anytime you open one of their files, the bugs pop their little heads up and check to see if they’re in a NatSec environment. If they’re not, they start screaming for help on any accessible channel. I’ve got containment systems, of course, but NatSec programmers are tricky. I’m not one-hundred-percent confident they’d hold.”
My stomach is suddenly churning, and I can feel my jaw sag.
“When you say ‘help,’ ” I say slowly, “I assume what you mean is a crowbar?”
He nods.
“If you’re lucky, yeah.”
I stare at the screen. Apparently, my earlier reassessment needs to be reassessed. Doug is not stupid. Doug is the devil.
“Come on,” he says. “You knew all this, right? Why did you think I agreed to give you hazard pay?”
“Hazard pay?”
He rolls his normal eye. The other one is in full-on lizard mode.
“Six hundred an hour? I know what you make, Anders. Why would you throw out a crazy number like that if you didn’t know you were putting your ass on the line?”
“It didn’t occur to you that I was just being greedy?”
His face goes blank. Apparently, it did not.
“I’m really sorry, Anders,” he says finally, his voice dripping with mock sympathy. “I’ve been going under the working assumption that there’s a brain inside your cranium. It would have saved us both a lot of trouble if you’d told me up front that it’s just a big wad of hair in there.”
I open my mouth to tell him to go fuck himself, then close it again. He’s right. A man who won’t leave a two-dollar tip to prevent a busboy from licking his pancakes agreed to give me an open-ended six-hundred-dollar-an-hour consulting gig without batting an eye. I drop my head into my hands.
“Oh, buck up,” Doug says. “It doesn’t matter anyway. You’re working through Gary’s system, right? He’s an order of magnitude tighter than I am. That’s one of the reasons why I approached you with this in the first place.”
This is probably not the time to mention that my original plan was to review his files in my shared adjunct’s office at Hopkins.
“Look,” he says. “You’re not currently being anally probed by a NatSec operative, and your house is not a smoking hole in the ground. So it all worked out, right? What have you got for me?”
I look up. The smile is back. He looks like a kid on Christmas morning.
Well, a kid who’s been partially digested by his toys, anyway.
“First,” I say wearily, “these are not documents. They’re configuration files.”
The smile widens.
“Bingo. Configuration files for what?”
“For a nanoparticle fabricator, Doug. They’re formatted for a Siemens machine, I think, but I’m not positive about that.”
Doug pumps one fist in the air, and does a little dance. Calling the effect disturbing is a huge understatement.
“Score!” he crows. “What are they plans for? What can we make? Is it a weapon? It’s a weapon, isn’t it?”
I rub my eyes, then push my hair back from my forehead. I really, really need a nap.
“No, Doug. It’s not a weapon. I’m actually only about ninety percent sure what we’re looking at. I recognize one of the schematics, and I can infer what a couple of the others are intended to do, but the rest are still pretty much a mystery.”
“Come on,” he says. “You’re killing me. Am I a rich man or not?”
“Well,” I say. “I’m not sure how exactly you’re going to monetize this, but you’ve definitely got something of value. I’m pretty sure you’ve managed to steal the secret formula for the nano suite in BrainBump.”
Doug’s jaw sags open, and for a moment he looks like he might cry—but then he shakes his head, and the half of his face that’s still made of meat smiles.
“Okay,” he says. “Right. I can work with this. There’s gotta be a buyer out there for something like that. Pretty sure’s not gonna do it, though. I need totally sure.”
I shrug.
“I don’t have access to a Siemens fab unit,” I say. “I can run the files through an emulator if you want. You won’t get any nanos out the back end, but it’ll give you a full roster of whatever particles would have been produced if you provided the files to an actual fabricator.”
“Good enough,” Doug says. “Don’t care about the actual particles. I just need enough proof to show a buyer.”
I glance up as I boot the emulator and feed it the config files. Doug’s leaning toward the camera, almost like he’s trying to look over my shoulder. I think about explaining to him that getting a forehead print on his wallscreen is not going to give him a better view, but he’s back to the kid at Christmas thin
g. I start the production run. I’m expecting a return after twenty or thirty seconds. It comes back after five.
“Well?” Doug says. “What do we have?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Your files crashed the emulator.”
That gets me five seconds of awkward silence.
“Uh, Anders? What does that mean?”
I shrug.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it happen before. This is freeware, but it’s been around for a long time. Most of the bugs got ironed out years ago.”
He leans back away from the screen. The smile is gone.
“So what do we do?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve got source for the emulator, but the code is way too involved for me to debug. Gary might be able to work his way through it . . .”
“No,” Doug says. “I don’t want Gary in on this right now. What else do you have?”
I think about mentioning the fact that if Gary wants to know what we’re doing right now, he can find out without being invited, but I don’t want to get Doug any more agitated than he already is.
“How about this?” I say. “I can feed the files for the different particles to the emulator one by one. Maybe it’s just one of them that’s causing the problem.”
“Fine,” Doug says. “But make it quick. I’m not paying you for downtime.”
I shoot the screen a poisonous glare.
“As near as I can tell,” I say, “you haven’t paid me for anything yet.”
“Yeah, well . . . if you want that to change, figure it out. Chop-chop.”
I fold my arms across my chest.
“Really, Doug?”
He stomps both feet and turns half around.
“Come on, Anders. You’re killing me.”
“What’s the magic word, Doug?”
“Ass-monkey?”
I laugh. “Close enough.”
It takes me about ten minutes to parse out the files. There are plans here for five distinct particles, ranging in size from a huge bot that I’m guessing is designed to interface with a specific implant, to a modest neuro-stimulator, to the little molecular cage. I start with the biggest one, reasoning that the more complex files are more likely to have fatal errors. The emulator runs for ten seconds or so, and then spits out reams of output data.
Three Days in April Page 14