Sycorax's Daughters

by Kinitra Brooks, PhD

  fall to mortality. She could hear it in the site director’s voice, a tiny celebration that now she walked amongst them, no longer ahead. Her apparent failure had improved his day. Hearing it, Petal briefly contemplated finally joining the private sector and its much better paid assignments. But she knew it would never take. There was still good work to do; so she flew back home. She could have expensed a trip through the black. Such trips were built into HRO’s operating budget—but she savored the considerable time it took to move from one side of the world to the other.

  #

  Brian Dunphries ran the Seattle office. Petal spied him through the glass door as she entered the branch. She didn’t welcome the coincidence. No fresh start here, but perhaps that’s what HQ had in mind. She’d never needed a minder and didn’t now. Still she greeted him with a small smile and an outstretched hand.

  He had tried to be kind in Jakarta. She could only prove herself all over again though she had never truly stopped, a hazard of her extraction.

  “Ms. Scott,” Dunphries said. “It’s good to see you again. Let me show you to our teleport unit.”

  All the interior walls were glass. Standing from the front entrance one could see to the very back of the building. Petal followed Dunphries further into the translucent maze.

  “We run a controlled lab—no custom work and no outside software,” he said.

  Her algorithms. They wanted her to press buttons and take responsibility for anything that went wrong. Great. Is this supposed to be some sort of probation? Petal wondered. She didn’t know any colleagues who worked in a locked-down lab, though some may have welcomed the ease.

  “Is that on a probationary basis?” she asked.

  “It’s our standard protocol,” he answered. “And I’ll be acting as your supervisor. Because of your advanced experience it seemed the best fit. I’m sure you can appreciate that when things don’t go as planned, there’s a propensity to blame the operator. Here that’s no longer an issue. Our techs execute the protocol and any errors can be easily traced and recorded.”

  Recorded, not resolved, Petal thought. “I see,” she said.

  They rounded a corner and entered the unit through another set of glass doors.

  The room dwarfed any she’d worked in the last three years, the ones she’d spent in Southeast Asia and the Sudan. Just as she’d suspected the techs looked green as hell. They sat in three rows of three, talking across their terminals at one another.

  A couple of them stopped comming on their watches long enough to turn around and acknowledge her and Dunphries. Three of them looked as if they might still be in secondary school, and the balance as eager and unskilled as the kids who stopped her on the street to see if she’d sign a petition to legalize metamethamine.

  “Your colleagues,” Dunphries said. “I’ll leave you some time to get acquainted.” He pointed to a yellow door in the corner.

  “You can leave your things at the open terminal and there’s an orientation program already cued; just log on. You’ll find vending mechs in the break room there.”

  Petal wasted no time on introductions. As soon as Dunphries left she waved a hello to the room, sat down at the terminal, logged in and tried to take a look at the queue. She couldn’t access it without completing orientation.

  Petal exhaled.

  “You’ll find a lot is locked down here.”

  She turned to find one of the young techs standing behind her. He had a stocky build and sported a plaid shirt and unkempt beard.

  “Petal Scott, right? I remember hearing about you,” he said. Bad news apparently traveled fast.

  “Ten years and only one lost soul. Impressive.”

  Petal’s eye twitched when he said ‘one lost soul’. She could feel the furrow of her brow, and struggled to say thanks though she didn’t feel it.

  This is what they would say now. Even if it never happened again, but worse than that she would always have the girl’s face in the dark, a locket she couldn’t lose.

  “I’m Jeff Taylor.”

  She shook his hand, waited for something more.

  “Well, I’ll let you get back to it,” he said.

  The orientation program took much longer than necessary. By the time she’d finished, the waiting queue icon had disappeared from her terminal and afternoon had cleared the room. Everyone else talked in the break room, or had stepped outside. Now that she had access, Petal searched across the desktop to perform a proper orientation.

  Their archive system was a mess. To make matters worse, this office used Diverse Triage for their queue, a program better suited to shipments than teleport tech. Petal frowned and started her review of the server. If she couldn’t use her own algorithms she’d have to learn this system front to back to see how far she could bend it before it broke. Mass-produced software had broad, deep limitations so better to find them now when no one’s life hung in the balance.

  Server capacity was lean, and they seemed to have the techs systems tethered in a way that bordered on the obtuse. She shook her head and stretched her neck. From the corner of her eye she spied the vectimeter back up files and credentials. She opened the properties. Last calibration: 4 months ago?

  “What the hell?” Petal whispered. She calibrated daily; industry standard dictated 48 hours. Four months was a fucking crime.

  “Or at least it should be,” she finished out loud.

  Anxious now, she continued to hunt around her terminal, opening files and mentally tracking what she found. The queue stayed empty, giving Petal time to explore this troubling new terrain.

  #

  The anomaly showed up on her third day in the office. She’d just successfully extracted a man from the roof of his truck in Oregonian flood waters. The intake rep expected him to spend the night at home. For the first time in weeks, Petal’s tension unwound a single centimeter; she took a cleansing breath. Someone had cranked the AC up and she bent over to get a sweater out of her bag. As she righted herself, Dunphries face popped up on the instant messenger in the corner of her screen.

  “Well done,” the screen read.

  Petal tried to think of a non-condescending interpretation, but failed miserably. The message required a perfunctory response, her least favorite kind. She typed her non-existent thanks and motioned the window to close.

  An ID window maximized on the monitor. She must have right toggled when she meant to left. Dunphries’ org chart appeared under his name with a tiny asterisk linked to a series of usernames. Odd that he would have so many but perhaps each piece of software required one. She shook her head; they didn’t even have password chains. Good luck to the person who forgot one of them or to someone trying to track overall usage. With the empty queue she could at least fix this problem for them. Conventional best practice required it, and she had more downtime than she could handle.

  Petal delved back into the files and then into the code behind the system. A simple administrative reroute should do the trick. She backtracked through the registry to find a way to track users though their devices, IPs, and usernames.

  In an hour she found a worm. It hid amongst the benign operational systems, tucked away from the temporary files but always running with them. With it came malware that would have made a mid-grade hacker proud. Dunphries had introduced it.

  At first, she thought the program must have been surveillance, recording keystrokes and the like for security’s sake, but the more she searched, the less she thought it had anything to do with official HRO business.

  As a creator of dozens of algorithms, execute programs and apps herself, Petal could understand wanting to customize the boilerplate software this office used, but she had a feeling she didn’t yet care to name. Uneasily she looked to her left and right, sure now that she was being watched, or at least her work recorded. She would have to go stealth. She felt for a mem stick in her bag. Petal loaded it into the terminal and waited. She had to find the right moment, the correct cloaking sequence, and a data pick fin
e as the few seconds she might have before detection. Things slipped into alignment and Petal let her finger twitch.

  The screen froze momentarily, but not before she saw the piggyback signal picking up each tech’s teleport work, the licenses that allowed the transfer and Dunphries’ worm trail hidden amongst the garbage commands that hid the breach. Much of HRO lay bare to him, or whoever he let in. They could have done anything—embezzled funds, stolen donor identities, sold HRO’s tech right out from under them—or rerouted the extractees to send them who knew where.

  A message box popped up on Petal’s terminal. “Please come to my office,” Dunphries had typed.

  Petal noted her location in the system, pocketed the mem stick, shut down her terminal, and with a quick, bracing breath went to face Dunphries.

  She had seen enough federal agents in relief centers to recognize that two of them were sitting in Dunphries office when she entered. With an effort, she kept walking inside. Her mind raced with possibilities. Before she could speak, one of the agents approached her.

  “Do you know this girl?” he asked, holding a photo of the Indonesian toddler up at her eye level.

  “Yes, of course. But— ,” Petal began.

  “You should.” The agent looked at her with disgust. “Since you sent her there. You look confused. I guess you don’t pay attention to where they end up. This photo is from Fun Things, one of the blackest holes in the darknet.”

  “I didn’t send her anywhere. I lost her before—”

  “Petal Scott, you’re under arrest for kidnapping, conspiracy, corruption of a minor, and sex trafficking.”

  “What?! No! I didn’t do that! None of that! Dunphries! He was involved; not me. I—” Petal turned to face her accuser. And she found herself on her knees, unable to move. She fell on the floor, the taser wires now visible.

  She felt the full weight of the man on her back as he ground his knee between her shoulder blades and cuffed her. The other agent pulled her up to her feet. She saw the mem stick on the ground.

  There! Look at that! At first she didn’t realize that they couldn’t hear her. The taser had left her only able to mumble and pant for her next breath. Dunphries stepped on the mem stick. He stared into space as they pulled her out of HRO and dumped her into the back of their vehicle.

  #

  Lock-up stank of desperation, body odor, and the urine of a homeless woman camped out in the corner of the cell. Petal ached where they had tasered her and winced from a tender spot on her back whenever she moved. She couldn’t imagine a worse day.

  It came when the court deemed her a flight risk and sent her to the Salem Federal Facility for Women.

  She spent the first week crying, cultivating a migraine that left her curled up on the thin mattress, shielding her eyes from the fluorescents that lit up the cell all day and most of the night.

  Intermittently she rushed to the toilet in the corner and vomited as her body tried to acclimate to the food and her soul to the pain it now bore. Her cellmate, a tall, brunette woman with a thick Slavic accent, ignored Petal as best she could, but on the 8th day when the smell had coated every surface in the room, she spoke.

  “Enough,” the woman said. “It stinks. Stop it.” Petal heard her take a few steps.

  “Stop retching up what got you here and start dealing with where you are.”

  Petal felt something small land behind her and turned to find a foil packet of antacids.

  “For your stomach. Otherwise you’ll have to go to the infirmary. You won’t like the guards there.”

  Petal raised her gaze to look the woman in the face. “I am Kasia,” she said.

  Petal started to unfold herself, and reached for the packet. “Thank you. I’m Petal.”

  “Hm. I’d suggest using your surname here. The C.O. said it was —Smith?”

  “Scott. Why won’t I like the guards?” Petal asked.

  “They believe they should be paid for the privilege of medical attention. They prefer flesh as payment.” Kasia walked back to her bunk and sat. “The world loves its skin trade.”

  “Is that why you’re here?” Petal asked.

  “No, Scott. But I’ve done that time. Not you though, I can tell.” “How?” Petal asked. Kasia chuckled, ignored the question. “What did you do outside?”

  “Teleport tech.”

  Kasia hummed. “You must have done well for yourself then. There are so many things people want relocated into their possession.”

  “Not like that. I worked for an NGO, a—” “I know what an NGO is,” Kasia said. “You’d be surprised.”

  “Rarely,” Kasia responded.

  That night Petal slept. She began to eat her meals, to speak with the other women, to accept the reality she found herself in. But she also fought for her freedom, cleaning out her bank account to pay lawyers and keep up payments on her tiny house. With the rest of her savings she arranged for her personal rig to be boxed and stored. She would get out she told herself.

  In the meantime, Petal created a routine. After the exercise allotment, enduring inspections, and picking her way through the day’s dangers she returned to her cell where she wrote code by hand and listened to Kasia’s stories of the bumpy road from Plotzyk to Portland by way of every dark alley imaginable.

  “I was raised in crime,” Kasia said from her bunk, a crossword in her hand. “So you see, I was cultivated, but most people are corrupted,” Kasia said. “An easier process than you might imagine. Where there is virtue, vice lurks.”

  Petal looked away from the code and up at her cellmate. Kasia seemed to contemplate something and spoke again, this time softly.

  “For instance— you use the tech to help people; others want to help themselves. If one can pay, it’s a lot easier to steal a girl tripping through the black than one off the street. And what better girl than one who can’t be traced, a girl who might be dead anyway? There are men that do this, who gather their resources for it, like—” Kasia said.

  “Like the people who crowdfund HRO’s rescues,” Petal finished.

  “I was going to say wolves. These wolves stole the virtuous model and twisted it to their purposes. They call themselves voiders. ‘To be avoided’ we girls used to say,” Kasia said with a tight, angry smile.

  The loss of her last bit of naiveté burdened Petal. Her head drooped with the weight of this new knowledge, all the way down to the tabletop. She sat with her eyes closed.

  “Of course. Thank you, K,” she said quietly.

  In time, Petal’s eyes opened. The florescent light overhead looked brighter, the shadows it created, deeper. Underneath the table, at the page’s corners, even outlining her hands—the gloom behind everything, emboldened, emerged. It called to her.

  Would it swallow her finally? Do what the fire and the work had not? If it did, what would become of the people so easily lost —and the perpetrators who, for her, could easily be found? She picked her head up wearily. As she did, the shadows shifted. Petal paused in mid-motion. Even shadows can be displaced.

  “Leave nothing up to the judges,” she whispered.

  Petal looked at the code and a new, bolder imperative clicked into place. She reached for a fresh sheet of paper and began again, hand flying across the page to capture her rushing thoughts.

  #

  Petal spent 28 months sharpening her skills. It took those two years and a spring for the court to find the prosecutor had insufficient evidence to convict. Kasia was impressed. She said

  Petal must have some kind of luck to get out at all—even if Petal’s lawyers said the arrest ruined her professional reputation. Petal didn’t believe in luck, only in doing. At work, she used to say she made other people’s luck; now she understood how short the distance to misfortune. She had just spent 28 months calculating it exactly.

  Her first day out Petal sprung her rig from cold storage. Two years of lost updates would slow her down. It would mean at least a week of getting back up to speed: Petal relished the thought.
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  Her first crooked job came easily. She sat in the one bedroom house she stopped calling home after her second HRO assignment abroad and logged into the darknet with the rig she’d retrofitted specifically for the task. The darknet’s layout looked unnecessarily opaque and seedy—someone’s idea of what elicit should look like—all choppy fonts and DOS aesthetics. She moved to a search page to retrieve “trafficking” results. She’d specified “art trafficking” to save herself from images she wouldn’t be able to forget. She planned on tracking the voiders later and in some way that wouldn’t keep her up at night. Kasia had assured her that identities were cheap here, and each sex trafficking site kept a list of its patrons complete with all chip and location info, hacked back to their origin from the moment they logged on. Because of it Petal would have to spend her first payment on a specialized sub-rig invisible to anyone but her. If she hadn’t already had her own chip removed she would have spent her second payment on that, but now she could put that money to better use.

  The second “trafficking” hit provided the results she wanted. She found a job board of sorts and posted her skills and experience. Soon after, she proved it with a series of tests. After a long vet process her reply came back in flashing chartreuse characters.

  “You’re hired,” it read. “Ready to get to work?”

  Petal assented. An icon appeared at the corner of her screen. When she motioned it open a building schematic appeared and Petal prepared to extract a Degas from a vault in Tel Aviv. The job paid a year’s salary.

  With her third deposit she bought a backdoor key into HRO’s systems. There she set her long-honed algorithm loose. It took longer than she had anticipated, but in five minutes the uplink completed: she had full access to HRO’s systems and had fully cloaked her actions. Her second screen filled with live natural disaster info: latitude, longitude, magnitude, description, and estimates of the number affected. She pressed her list of coordinates onto the edge of the screen. Next she searched the HR records. Dunphries had been terminated, the stated reason: a statistically unacceptable string of lost souls on his watch, all attributed to user error and equipment failure. In another module, she found that none of the lost extractees had been located— even those that were chipped. The stolen girl had no chip.