by Jay Posey
But he had to shake all that off for now. Stay in the moment, neither in the past or the future. Elliot inhaled deeply, drawing in the smells of the environment, a technique he’d found helpful to ground himself in the present. He kept his head up, scanned the few others out at this time of night, looking for any familiar faces or anyone paying too much attention to him. So far, there weren’t any repeats. He took a couple more unnecessary turns, stair-stepping his way through town towards the general meeting area, and then doubled back again, making an extra loop around the block. Handy for detecting a tail, and potentially shaking one if necessary. In the spy world, they called it a surveillance detection route. Many years prior, Elliot had earned one of his instructors’ unveiled disapproval for calling it what it was: walking in circles.
Spy stuff was mostly like that. Fancy names for mundane activities. He’d grown up screening spy stories that had made the work look exciting and glamorous, full of clever and attractive people doing dangerous things. The reality had proven to be something different. There was a lot of paperwork. Most of the people were neither clever nor attractive. There were no car chases, no meetings in dark alleys. He’d only been in one gunfight in his entire life, and he hadn’t even had a gun. Being a master of tactics, he had just lain on the floor until there was a pause in the gunfire, and, being a man of stout heart, he had then very courageously made a run for it.
The job had its moments of genuine danger, of course. You couldn’t operate in the grey and expect it to be all coffee with friends and walks in the sunshine. But Elliot had found that typically the greatest risk came from not knowing what you were doing. Or, as in the recent case with Dillon and Wilson, from ignoring your instincts. Most people were embarrassingly easy to read, and despite what the average citizen would tell you, things never just happened… there were always signs, always warnings. It was just that most people were so blissfully unaware of their surroundings, to them, things really did appear to just happen. In Elliot’s estimation, a good ninety-nine percent of unpleasantness could be avoided simply by paying attention.
Of course, it was the other one percent that was the real trouble. And the biggest danger for Elliot was letting himself believe he was paying attention, buying into the narrative that he was an expert and was always on his game. So even though there was probably no threat and probably no reason to worry, he reminded himself that he was a foreign operative in a hostile nation, and tried to pretend at least one of the few people on the street was out to get him.
The night was in the transitional space between when respectable people were already home and somewhat less respectable people were preparing to emerge. Elliot was amongst the stragglers, or the early-birds, all of whom seemed to have adopted the hunched, brisk pace of folks trying to get indoors before a storm. He adjusted his pace to fall within the parameters of the environment, his goal to be the mediumest person in the bunch, the least likely to attract notice or to stick in a memory.
Across the street from him, a pair of men argued in heatedly hushed tones, sounding for all the world like a lovers’ quarrel. A snippet of the conversation floated over to Elliot, and he realized the disagreement was actually over the outcome of some sort of sporting event. Ahead of him, a young woman strode purposefully towards him, walking with her arms crossed and her head slightly down. Cute, he thought. As she neared, she flicked her eyes up and caught his with a hard stare. The message was perfectly communicated; she was not someone to be approached or chatted with, nor did she appreciate strange men evaluating her looks. Elliot gave her a little, respectful nod. She didn’t acknowledge it.
There were a few others that Elliot noted and mentally filed; Chatty Businessman, Overworked Mom, Drunk Guy Trying Not to Look Drunk. As best as he could tell, he was clear. Unfortunately, experience had taught him that the people you really had to worry about following you never caught your notice. This was even more true in the Martian People’s Collective Republic, his area of operations. None of the citizens of the MPCR seemed to consider it a surveillance society, which struck him as odd, considering the fact that they were all under constant observation and, far more intrusively in Elliot’s opinion, actual measurement.
The Collective Republic was the largest and most successful quantcomm on either Earth or Mars. A “quantified community”. A place where every adult citizen willingly submitted everything that could be known about themselves to their government. When they woke up, where they went, when they ate. But it was more than that. Body temperature, blood oxygen levels, activity levels, quality of sleep. Just about any human function that could be measured was collected and shared, all of it fed into an artificial intelligence, which parsed it and produced an aggregate of the overall health of the community. Policy decisions then in turn could be based on real-time data, the effects of governance measured and evaluated with clinical detachment, and everything could be tuned and adjusted. Iterative government. Theoretically, it seemed like a good idea. But then most things did when they were theoretical.
Of course there were other such communities, humans all living together, sharing everything about everyone. It was just that most of them collapsed after a few years. And the longest running ones that Elliot knew about were all under one hundred and fifty citizens. Apparently trust didn’t scale. People were still people, and power still had a way of corrupting.
But somehow the MPCR seemed to succeed where all others failed, on a grand scale; the greatest living proof of the concept. Elliot’s guess was that it had to do with the MPCR’s hybrid model of governance and the quality of its AI. Its name was Sigma. No one knew why exactly; it had named itself. There were a lot of theories.
When Elliot had first been assigned by NID to the Republic, they’d given him ample reading material on the subject. He’d skimmed it. Sigma shared governance with a council of elected officials, each advising the other, casting votes, or some sort of mathematically democratic arrangement or other. Sigma acted as an impartial check against some of the council’s worst human tendencies, and the council balanced Sigma’s occasionally impenetrable proclamations. Elliot didn’t really know the details of how it all worked, beyond the fact that it did in fact seem to work. He’d operated there for almost fifteen years, and the citizens typically were generally happy and healthy. Nothing was perfect, of course. But he had to admit the average populace seemed more content than most. It was one of the most productive societies on either planet. All it cost to belong was the total surrender of your right to privacy and your concept of self.
The important bit to his line of work, the part that was never far from his mind, was the fact that supposedly all of that information was encrypted and obfuscated and depersonalized; the idea wasn’t to track individuals, it was simply to use them as datapoints for a grand-scale picture of community health. Only Sigma could identify what data went with whom, and it wasn’t particularly interested in anyone’s love life. Given the raw intelligence value of such data, though, Elliot didn’t believe for a second that the MPCR’s Internal Security Services didn’t have some way to access it.
He himself was free of the citizen’s mark. He was just a Trusted Visitor, a status that gave him unrestricted travel access as long as he behaved himself. But it didn’t matter that he wasn’t plugged into the quantcomm. His every interaction with citizens could more or less be deduced from their measurements. Elliot was just a hole in the data, his absence made conspicuous by all that surrounded it.
That knowledge made surreptitious meetings with sources and contacts all the more stressful. Finding the acceptable deviations from the norm that wouldn’t draw the wrong kind of attention. It was exhausting.
The all-seeing-Sigma was a constant background concern, brought to the fore when his contact pinged him the final meeting point. Not his contact, exactly. Someone at the Directorate had arranged this one, which always made him even more nervous.
The information came in as a chime only he could hear, a destination point only he
could see. The hardware tattooed on the back of his skull fed the data directly to his visual cortex, floated an orange waypoint in his vision. He’d replaced the standard icon with one that had a smiley face wearing a fedora and sunglasses on it. The icon had originally come from a kid’s game about catching spies. Editing the Directorate’s protocols wasn’t exactly officially sanctioned. But then again, neither was a lot of what Elliot did to get the job done. It helped to have a sense of humor.
Just down the street, Elliot turned and followed a narrow lane between a restaurant and a hotel, around to the back. There was a service entrance to the restaurant, where it backed up too closely to another building. His contact was already there waiting, leaning against the wall, in the gap between two orange pools of light. Elliot paused for a moment, checked his surroundings, then chuckled to himself. A dark alley.
It still occasionally struck him as strange that in such modern times people would go to all the trouble to have actual face-to-face meetings just to pass messages to one another. But when virtual avatars could be spoofed and communications intercepted, he had to admit that there was something reassuring about doing this all in the real, physical world. And, Elliot supposed, certain secrets were only worth sharing when someone else had skin in the game. Of course, it was only his skin, which wasn’t particularly encouraging.
He approached, and his source fluidly slipped from the wall and glided towards him. She smiled as they met in the middle of the light, and shook hands. Two friends, with nothing to hide. He’d never seen her before.
Facial recognition kicked off, verified she was the right person. Elliot reached under his sleeve, swiped a fingertip across the dermal pad on the underside of his forearm, traced a sigil that sent a message back to his controller.
WHITEHALL is secure.
Somewhere far, far away, someone received that message, and began a protocol, while Elliot stood there in a dark alley with a woman he didn’t know, exposed and waiting. This was, hands-down, the absolute worst part of his job.
The linguistic implant sat up there in the Broca area of his brain, if the pamphlet he’d read before the procedure was correct. Or, Broca’s area, to be correct about it. Calling it “Broca’s area” had always rubbed Elliot the wrong way, though, because it made it sound like that part of his brain belonged to someone else.
Unfortunately, now, that was entirely true.
Every so often, someone way up the chain at the National Intelligence Directorate needed to pass secure messages to someone else on the ground in less-than-friendly territory. Messages so secure that even the messenger couldn’t know the contents. It was a feature of this particular model of implant, provided to Elliot courtesy of the NID, that it could be used to pass messages through him. In those times, the “no discomfort” was a lie. Elliot could always tell when it was about to activate, to start receiving. A micromigraine, a pressure just behind his left eye. A mild clenching of his throat, the bare hint of gag. It was very much like a fear reaction.
And in Elliot’s opinion, fear seemed appropriate to what amounted to a total surrender of self.
The woman waited patiently for the few seconds it took for Elliot to begin, a pleasant look on her face that wasn’t quite a smile but that communicated warmth nonetheless.
A few moments later, the channel clicked open. Elliot suppressed a gag as his mouth opened and spoke words he’d never heard before, delivering a message he would never understand.
Vocal encryption.
When activated in such a manner, the implant was one-way; it gave him the words, but not the comprehension. And to call them words was a stretch. To his own ears, they were a tumbling torrent of phonemes. Any sound the human voice was capable of making was fair game, and the experience was, he imagined, something akin to a seizure or spasm of the vocal cords. It always went better if he could relax, but it was hard to do that when his brain kept telling him something had just gone catastrophically wrong with his body.
His contact, of course, undoubtedly had her own implant and the necessary key to understand whatever was coming out of his mouth. Or, Elliot thought, maybe her handler had the key. He wondered if she too was just a conduit for some other person too afraid to do the dangerous work for themselves. It was another strange side-effect of the experience, that his mind remained his own, free to observe and consider while his mouth belonged to another.
For five or six minutes, the conversation continued, the two of them speaking the same caricature of language. Then, the woman nodded curtly, turned and walked away. It caught him by surprise, the abrupt end of the meeting. The same awkward feeling as when someone left the dinner table offended, and you weren’t quite sure what you had said to upset them. That didn’t necessarily mean that the conversation had gone poorly; only that doing business this way had weird social ramifications that none of the techs back at the lab seemed concerned about.
The pain behind Elliot’s eye lost its edge, receded into a dull bulb of ache. He cleared his throat, verifying that his voice was once more his own. It always took him a minute or two to shake off the experience, as his brain learned to trust his body again.
He took a few deep breaths, stretched his arms out to the sides, cracked his neck. Tried to determine if he was nauseated or hungry. He decided to call it hungry. The restaurant was still open. A bowl of ramen seemed like a good idea just then. A really good idea. And even though he knew it was going to completely wreck his ability to sleep, Elliot decided he’d treat himself anyway.
He went back around to the front, wondering how many bottles of sake it would take to turn his really good idea into a really bad one.
“Mr Goodkind?” a voice said from behind him.
Elliot turned, surprised by the sound of his own name. There was a woman standing by the corner of the building, someone he’d walked by without even noticing. She looked vaguely familiar, but the haze from his verbal-encryption hangover prevented him from dredging up the connection. She smiled, extended her hand in way of greeting.
“I thought that was you. Out for a bite to eat?” she asked. He shook her hand, returned the smile while his mind spun to figure out who she was, where he’d seen her. The alarm bells kicked off, but he couldn’t tell if he was reacting to some subconsciously-detected danger, or if he was just still off balance from the previous communication.
“I was thinking about it,” he said, and then patted his belly. “But trying to think better of it. I really don’t need the calories. And it’s late.”
He wasn’t going to risk it. He still couldn’t place her, and there was no way he was going to stick around to find out whether or not she was as harmless as she appeared.
“I know what you mean,” she said, looking up and around at the buildings nearby. “But there’s just something about this time of night that always makes comfort food and good conversation seem so inviting.”
“It does,” he answered. “But I really do need to get home.”
“OK. Nice to bump into you.”
“Yep, see you around, I’m sure,” he said. He gave her a little nod and turned to leave. As he was doing so, the familiarity snapped into place. He’d nodded to her before, about twenty minutes prior. The cute girl he’d passed on his way in.
Elliot’s hands went ice cold, and his heart rate kicked up.
“I couldn’t help but notice, Mr Goodkind,” she said as he was walking away. “You have an interesting way of speaking. Do you mind me asking what language that was?”
A grim-looking man stood a few feet ahead, blocking Elliot’s path. A car waited at the curb, to his right. They’d boxed him in. Whoever they were.
He played it the way he knew best. Roll into it, trust the solution would present itself in the midst of the chaos.
“I don’t mind at all,” he said, turning back with a smile on his face. Ignore the man, ignore the car. Pretend this nice young woman is just some mild acquaintance whose name had slipped his mind. “But I am embarrassed to admit th
at your name has completely escaped me.”
“Mei,” she answered. She hadn’t left her spot by the corner of the building. He walked back towards her, saw her shoulders roll slightly. Coiling herself for whatever he might do, but trying not to give it away. Elliot stopped in front of the door to the restaurant, well out of arm’s reach.
“Mei, that’s right,” he said, snapping his fingers as though her name had been on the tip of his tongue. “And we met at uh… was it a conference out in Rocknest?”
She smiled and shook her head.
“No Mr Goodkind, we haven’t actually met. I’m with Internal Security.”
He tried not to let his face react, but knew he’d failed.
“Oh, well… I must have met your twin somewhere then.”
“Not likely,” said a man from behind. Elliot glanced over his shoulder. The grim-looking man had advanced on him, close enough to pounce if necessary.
“Ah,” Elliot said. “You’re the brother then?”
“Something like,” the man said.
“My partner,” Mei said. “Gregor.”
Elliot nodded.
“I see… Well, you hungry?” He turned back and smiled at Mei. “I was just thinking this time of night was perfect for some comfort food and good conversation.”
“My treat,” Mei replied. And together, the three of them walked into the restaurant, the agents on either side and Elliot caught right in the middle.
ELEVEN
Master Sergeant Wright moved down the passageway with careful steps, her weapon shouldered, muzzle sweeping a graceful arc back and forth as she advanced. Keeping the weapon in controlled motion made it faster to snap on target if one should present itself, and also caused less fatigue in the muscles than trying to maintain a static aim-point. Mike followed a few paces behind. Not that she could hear him. If not for the small icon in her view marking his position and distance from her, she would have had to glance over her shoulder to be sure he hadn’t disappeared.