by F X Holden
“Thanks, maybe later,” AJ said.
“Congressman Winter is with someone,” he explained. “Maybe another quarter of an hour, I’m guessing.” He looked around the office, “Usually this is where I would say, ask Mary if you need anything, but…”
“Washrooms?” he asked. “In case I need to go?”
He laughed, “I’d tell you, but if the Congressman comes in and finds his guest isn’t here, he gets shirty. And takes it out on me. So if you don’t mind, I recommend you try to hold it. I’ll show you on the way out. Unless you’re desperate?”
“I’ll manage,” he said.
“OK, good. See you later then,” he said, and disappeared back into the maze.
AJ thought about calling Leon, then realized that would be dumb, what did he have to tell him? He looked around the office, saw pictures he recognized as Winter, meeting various other people he vaguely recognized. Relying on his biological memory was an advantage in conserving bandwidth, but he had always sucked at faces. One he did recognize, was the current President, another was the last President. OK, another was the President before that. Seemed Winter had been in politics a while and wanted his guests to know it. He was stumped by the others so he quickly drifted to look them up, and checked his messages while he was at it. There was one from Cassie, early morning: I’m watching a damn surf movie, it said. Why am I watching a surf movie AJ?
He was still smiling at the thought of that when the door to the inner office opened and Winter walked out. So there must be another door his guests would leave through. That would make sense, AJ figured, because he wouldn’t want people knowing who he had just met with.
“AJ? Sorry, of course it is, I recognize you now,” the man said. He was as big as AJ remembered, nearly as wide as he was high, and he was dabbing his brow with a kerchief as he shook AJ’s hand. “Damn heating in this place,” he said. “I got two vents in my office, one blows hot, the other blows cold. Maybe they’re supposed to even each other out. Except they don’t.”
He held out his hand and AJ shook it, “Nice to meet you again, Congressman.”
“Just Kevin, please,” he said. AJ didn’t miss the gesture. Citizens usually made a point of expecting a cyber to keep referring to them by their title until they knew them well enough.
He waved toward the door and AJ went through, then stopped up. There was another guy already sitting there, and he stood slowly as the Congressman walked in behind AJ.
8. CONVERSATION WITH A CONGRESSMAN
The other guy was not overweight. Unless it was because muscle weighs more than fat. He looked like a bodyguard.
“This is Citizen Troy McMaster,” Winter said, going around to sit in an armchair in front of his desk, and pointing to a sofa where AJ could sit. “He’s like an executive assistant.”
Like an executive assistant, AJ thought to himself. And a sniper is ‘like’ a sports shooter? He held out his hand, “Citizen McMaster, I’m AJ.”
The guy shook his hand, rather softly. AJ was expecting a manly crush. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, in a pronounced Capitol accent.
“You want coffee, or water?” Winter asked, pointing to a pot on the table in front of AJ. “Help yourself.”
“I’m good, thanks.”
“I told Citizen McMaster about my friend Dave,” Winter said. “I want to thank you again for giving up your weekend to come here. I thought we should talk about it as soon as we could, so I can decide how to help him.”
“That’s OK,” AJ said. “He made it sound pretty urgent.”
Winter waved a hand in the air, “Oh, he loves a bit of drama, I’m sure you’ve realized that already?”
“You could say,” AJ agreed.
“Threatened to kill himself, you said?”
“Yes, Congressman.”
“It’s Kevin, remember,” Winter said. “How did that happen?”
AJ told him exactly how it happened. He and Leon had agreed he should stick to the whole truth, including Warnecke’s paranoia that AJ was working for Winter and keeping an eye on him. Told him about Warnecke’s ‘confession’, getting angry about Winter’s visit, sliding the document under his door, showing him the gun, threatening to kill himself and go public about something that turned out to be a sort of conspiracy theory. They’d been listening with interest through the whole story, but both of them leaned forward in their chairs when he mentioned the manuscript.
“But you’ve been working there what, five years? He thinks I put people in every old age care home in the State just in case he was going to check in?” Winter asked.
“People in his condition don’t usually operate with that kind of logic sir,” AJ said. Then he realized, he hadn’t told Winter how long he’d been working at Sol Vista. His skin went cold. So the guy had checked up on him. Just like Leon said. And maybe he wasn’t an idiot, he’d slipped that into the conversation on purpose, to let AJ know what he knew.
“It’s terribly sad, his condition,” Winter said, shaking his head. “Worse than I thought. I mean, he seemed OK when I visited. I asked him why he’d checked into a place like that, no offense of course.”
“None taken,” AJ said. “But he is a resident, so I shouldn’t talk about his medical condition.”
“Course not, course not,” Winter said.
“You have the document with you?” the McMaster guy asked. It was the first time he had said more than hello, but he’d been following with interest.
“Sure,” AJ said. He pulled the bag with the rolled page out of his backpack, and held it out, not sure if Winter or McMaster would take it. Winter tried to look like he wasn’t that interested, leaned back and let his guard dog take it. “He seemed to think it was important you saw this, so you could ‘get ahead of it’, is what he said.”
McMaster scrolled through it. AJ knew it was about two pages long, and it took him no time to scan it. Got to the end, then handed it over to Winter.
“That was all of it?” McMaster asked.
“All he gave me yeah,” AJ said. “It seems like there is more, but I haven’t seen it.”
“He say anything else?” the guy asked.
AJ thought back, “He said he had off-Core copies. He accused me of working for the Congressman and said I should tell you he had copies and if Congressman Winter didn’t call a press conference and quote get ahead of this unquote, he’d kill himself and it would all be public anyway.”
Winter was reading the page a lot more intently than McMaster had. Every word on every line.
“So you haven’t seen the whole document?”
“No sir.”
“And that chapter is all he put under the door of your workshop,” the man asked again.
“Yeah.”
Winter finished reading and put the page behind him, on his desk. He didn’t ask AJ if he could keep it, that seemed to be assumed.
“You read that extract,” the Congressman said. It wasn’t a question. “What did you think?”
“Well, it’s some kind of conspiracy theory,” AJ said, “A coverup. And he makes it seem like he pulled it from the Deep Core, which...”
Winter smiled, “Is impossible.”
“Right.” AJ shrugged, “What is the FO Exploit?”
“Sorry?” Winter asked.
“FO Exploit,” AJ repeated. “The document finishes by saying ‘This data was retrieved from the Deep Core by use of the FO Exploit’.”
Winter looked at McMaster. The guy nodded slightly.
“I’m prepared to share a story with you, but you must agree to treat it as confidential,” Winter said.
“Sure.”
Winter nodded at McMaster, who lifted a slate off the coffee table and handed it to AJ. “Confidentiality agreement,” he said, showing AJ where to wipe for his DNA. “You can read it, but I can tell you it says if you share anything you hear in this room outside these walls, we can cut your nuts off and force feed them back to you.” Then he smiled, in a way AJ took to mean he was
only half joking.
AJ wiped his thumb across the signature field and handed it back.
“There was a terrible tragedy,” Winter said. “Happened forty years ago, when we were in college together. Me, Dave and our friend Farley O’Halloran, we went on a rafting trip together. It was a disaster, we were totally unprepared, none of us had been meltwater rafting before.”
AJ looked at him, staying quiet.
“We were friends at college, the three of us doing our doctoral theses in advanced quantum programming. We’d get together, drink and do drugs, solve mysteries of the universe and come up with ideas that AIs couldn’t even dream of. Farley had just been recruited into the military to work on AI Offense. We all had our areas of specialization, his was a little more specialized than most – how to use an AI to attack an AI.”
“Anyway, we decided on the spur of the moment to do this rafting trip.” Winter smoothed a crease on his pants, “Crazy remote river up near Whitehorse, polar cap. Raft overturned in a rapid about halfway down the river, we lost most of our food, still had a week left on the water. We argued about whether it was better to push on, or try to walk out. Dave and me wanted to push on, Farley wanted to walk out to a survival hut about a day away and try to bounce a signal off the Skycap, call for help.” The Congressman took a breath. “I need to go back a little. We’d been arguing a lot around the campfire, like Q-programmers do. Q-programming is more like philosophy than science, so discussions get a bit heated. One night, Farley was using some kind of mood accelerant, I forget what, he started talking crazy.” Winter nodded at the page I had given him, “He said he’d found a way to use the Core to attack the Core. To hack the Deep Core by tricking the Core itself into doing the diving. We laughed at him. Dave Warnecke nicknamed his idea the FO Exploit. Short for Farley O’Halloran, short for Freaking Out-to-lunch. Dave kept coming up with new acronyms starting with FO that all meant ‘dumb-ass’. By the time we had the spill and lost our food we were hardly speaking to each other and he insisted on walking out. So we put him ashore, agreed to wait two days, see if he could get out and get help. After two days, no sign of him, our food gone, we pushed on to the end of the river, got rescued. No sign of Farley.”
Winter was looking at AJ like he expected some reaction, but AJ just waited. He could drift later for any public details that might back the story up. Winter looked at the page Warnecke had written, then back to AJ. “I stayed searching for Farley with Dave Warnecke and the police until they said there was no point staying longer, and we went home. They declared him missing, presumed dead. His parents had been off-world, and when they came back, they put out a reward, paid for a private search party to go back over the same ground the police had covered. I can only imagine how his parents felt.” Winter looked at McMaster. “I never met them. They wouldn’t talk to me. I tried a couple of times to contact them, then gave up. They never held a funeral for him, refused to accept he was dead. They passed away a few years back, maybe ten, still hoping he’d turn up one day.”
“Wow,” AJ said. “That’s sad.”
Winter gave a tight smile, “We stayed in touch over the years, but I know Dave blamed me, for us not waiting for Farley. He always felt it was possible Farley had made it back to the river, but we were gone. Maybe he drowned, maybe grizzlies got him. He convinced himself if we’d just waited a couple more days, we’d have been there when Farley got back. He blamed himself too, felt bad about giving Farley such a hard time, which I guess is why he hung onto Farley’s idea, not letting it go. I heard he got the family to give him access to Farley’s cache and the code he’d been working on privately. Now it seems he’s trying to claim he’s made it work.” He looked at McMaster again, “This…” Winter said, pointing at the page again, “… is just coincidence and speculation pulled into a narrative, and not even very original. People over the years have blamed LPA-2 for everything from mind control to infertility. TGA? Why not? Anyway, he called me, asking me to back him when he started releasing all these dark secrets he’d found in the Deep Core, claiming he could prove it to me, then getting angry when I wouldn’t listen.” He sighed. “He tried to talk to me about it when I visited him last time, but I had a pretty good idea what it was about and I admit I wasn’t minded to indulge him. Farley’s idea was dumb forty years ago, it’s still dumb now, and there’s no way a guy like Dave, working on his own, could have pulled off what entire battalions of coders on New Syberia tried to do and failed. I told him to forget it. I told him the world has moved on, he has to let Farley go. I never realized how deeply disturbed about it he is, until you contacted me.”
McMaster coughed, like it was a signal Winter had said enough. He said to AJ, “The Congressman deeply appreciates you came to him with this, and that you’ll kept it confidential. You said you haven’t discussed it with people at your work, his family … other friends?”
“No,” AJ lied. Only Leon, Cassie… “No, like I said, it seemed pretty personal and I was pretty shaken up when he showed me that gun.”
“Yeah, that must have been terrible,” McMaster said, like a man trying to sound sincere. “Not the administrator there? Citizen Tanike?”
“No. I came straight to you.”
“She’s New Syberian, I recall,” Winter said, in a dangerously offhand way. “Came here after running a military camp?”
“Refugee center,” AJ corrected him.
“Right. Right,” Winter said, not sounding convinced.
McMaster gave him a short look that stopped him in whatever track he was heading down about Cyan. “Look, AJ, we appreciate your discretion. So to compensate you…”
“I don’t want compensation,” AJ said quickly.
“You don’t?” McMaster asked, a little skeptically.
“No, I want to be kept right out of whatever this is,” AJ said. “It’s between you guys and Citizen Warnecke. I’ve done what he asked, passed it on to you. I want that to be the end of it.”
McMaster looked at Winter, something passing between them, but AJ couldn’t be sure what. “This would be a very bad time for any sort of scandal, however unfounded, to distract the Congressman from his important work,” McMaster said.
“I know about the Commonwealth Commission into New Syberian activity on Orkutsk,” AJ said. “I get that it’s a big deal.”
“A big deal indeed,” Winter smiled. “Some people AJ, they’d be tempted to take a copy of that page, or maybe even get a copy of the whole manuscript. They’d be tempted to try to sell this story to the gutter press who could twist it any which way and use it to drag this forty-year-old tragedy out of my past and use it against me somehow.”
“Yeah,” AJ said, “But that isn’t me. Congressman, I work at an old folks’ home, I fix stuff that breaks, I make sure their scrubber works and their roof doesn’t leak. I like to surf.” He tried to keep it simple. “I go surfing most days before work, some evenings after work too. I have a good life. I don’t need the excitement.”
McMaster laughed at that, “You don’t need the excitement.”
“No sir,” AJ said. “You can check my bank statements if you want. Between my salary and the money I earn trading bandwidth, I have no debts, I pay all my bills on time, even got a little money saved in case my Ma needs an operation. I’m good.”
Winter looked at McMaster, “I do believe you are good, AJ. Citizen McMaster, it is not often we meet a good man here in the Capitol, but I’d say we did today.”
“No sir, it isn’t,” McMaster agreed. “Maybe we did.” He was giving AJ a look which was impossible to decipher.
Winter stood up, so AJ did as well, “OK then AJ. You have my word we’ll try to keep you out of this business from now on. You’ve done your bit. We’ll take it from here.”
“What about Citizen Warnecke?” AJ asked.
It was McMaster who spoke, “The Congressman has access to certain resources,” he said. “Considerable resources. We’ll consult with the most advanced TGA specialist A.I.s on the C
ore. And then bring in his family. But I suspect Citizen Warnecke would be better managed at a facility that provides more intensive supervision. He sounds worse than his family probably realizes.”
“A facility, for example, that doesn’t let the residents carry guns,” Winter joked.
They shook hands all round and McMaster put his finger to his ear and called William on comms to come walk AJ out. They waited at a door that led straight out to the corridor.
“I know you said you don’t want compensation, but you are going to take me up on that tour of the Capitol I hope,” Winter said, as they waited for the intern.
“Sure,” AJ said. “I’d like that.”
“Good, good,” Winter said. “It’ll be William showing you the sights, you can arrange it with him while he shows you how to get to your hotel. He’s one of the few people in this building who is actually a Capitol native. Very proud of the place, loves showing it off.”
“Sounds good.”
“He’ll organize a ride to the drone port for you too. He said there’s a late flight should get you into South Coast City before midnight, so you can sleep late, eat lunch somewhere, look around, maybe have dinner together then go out to the drone port. Sound OK? Ah, here’s William.”
AJ and the aid headed off and turned a few corridors, then William sent a map to his earbud. “They give these to tourists as a souvenir, but it’s got your hotel marked on it. It’s about three blocks, the Capitol Hill Hotel. Nothing fancy, but nice and central and clean. Your room is paid, but not any extras like massages or breakfast or mini bar. You can take a car from out front if you like, or walk?” He led them back the way they had come, chatting happily, but at the lift AJ stopped him calling it. “I really need that bathroom before we go much further,” he said.
“Oh, of course, sorry about that,” he said. “There’s one right in here. I think.” AJ waited while William pushed a nearby door open to check. The bathroom was huge, with entrances leading out four ways. “Okay, yeah here we are,” he said brightly, but kept talking. “Now, tomorrow, I’m going to pick you up at the hotel around 12, so it would be good if you ate before then because we have a packed-ice program. You have a look at the map, decide what you want to see - I can get you back-stage most places, see stuff visitors don’t usually see.”