by Anthology
4,560 milliseconds later, Febby proclaimed in a loud voice: “Willam Mundine is alive, I repeat, Willam Mundine is alive!”
After 940 milliseconds of silence, H6 asked, “How do you know his name?”
“Willam Mundine is being held in the basement,” Febby said, pointing to the door. “His K&R stripe number is bravo-charlie-9-7-1-3-1-0-4-1-5. Challenge code SHADOW MURMUR. Please authenticate!”
“What the hell?” said another man (H7).
“It’s gotta be the admin software,” H5 said. “She can hear it. The necklace induces audio by conducting a piezoelectric—”
“Save the science lesson, Branagan,” H6 said. “Response code ELBOW SKYHOOK. Comms on alfa-2-6. Transmit.”
LAD passed the code to the secure hardware processor, and 30 milliseconds later received a valid authentication token with a passphrase payload. LAD used the token to unlock all system logs from the past twenty-four hours, used the passphrase to encrypt the data, and posted the entire archive on the recovery team’s communications channel.
“I’ve got a sonar map,” Branagan said. “One hostile downstairs with the target.”
“Ward, you’re in front. Anderson, cover. Team Two, right behind them,” H6 said. “Branagan and I will stay with the girl.”
Febby sat up. “What are you going to do?”
“They’re just going to go downstairs and have a talk with the man,” H6 said.
“No!” Febby started moving forward, then was jerked backward. “Don’t hurt my Pa!”
“Febby, it’s okay,” LAD said. “They’re using non-lethal rounds.”
LAD kept talking, but she wasn’t listening. Something rustled at H6’s side. A metal object—based on conductivity profile, likely a hypodermic syringe—touched Febby’s left shoulder, and LAD went to sleep.
***
LAD woke from standby in an unknown location (searching, please wait). GPS lock occurred 30 milliseconds later, identifying LAD’s current location as Depok (city, West Java province, south-southeast of Jakarta). LAD’s internal battery reported 99 percent power (charging), and LAD’s network panel automatically connected to Willam Mundine’s bodyNet and the public Internet. A network time sync confirmed that 11:04:38 elapsed time had passed since Febby lost consciousness.
“Good morning, Mr. Mundine,” LAD said. “How are you feeling?”
Mundine groaned. “I’ve been better.” He opened his eyes and looked around. LAD saw a hospital bed with a translucent white curtain drawn around it.
LAD lowered the priority on the wake-up script. The entire routine had to run to completion unless Mundine overrode it, but LAD could multitask. While giving Mundine the local weather forecast, LAD simultaneously ran a web search for news about a kidnapping in or around Jakarta and also started a VPN tunnel to Bantipor Commercial’s private intranet.
LAD found Mundine’s K&R insurance claim quickly, but there was nothing in the file about the family of the suspect, Arman (no surname given). LAD’s web search returned several brief news items about a disturbance in Depok late last night, but none of the reports mentioned a girl named Febby.
LAD continued searching while a doctor came to talk to Mundine. After the wake-up script finished, LAD started scanning Depok local school enrollment records for a 13- to 15-year-old student named Febby, or Feby, or February, who had a brother named Jaya, or Jay, or Jayan, in the same or a nearby school. But much of the data was not public, and LAD could not obtain research authorization using Bantipor Commercial’s trade certificate.
Fifteen minutes later, a Bantipor Commercial representative named Steigleder arrived at the hospital to debrief Mundine. LAD suspended the grey-hat password-cracking program which was running against the Depok city records site and waited until Steigleder finished talking.
“Mr. Mundine, this is your admin speaking,” LAD said.
“Excuse me,” Mundine said to Steigleder, then turned away slightly. “What’s up, Laddie?”
“Apologies for the interruption, but I would like to ask a question,” LAD said.
“Absolutely,” Mundine said. “Steigleder tells me I’ve you to thank for surviving my hostage experience. Didn’t know you were programmed to be a hero, Laddie.”
“Febby helped me, Mr. Mundine.”
“The girl?” Mundine scratched his head. “Good Lord. Is she the one who caused that—what did you call it, Steigleder? The web problem?”
“A DoS attack on Bantipor’s public web site,” Steigleder said. “Wait a minute. Are you telling me a thirteen-year-old kid made us scramble an entire tech team?”
“She was only helping me,” LAD said.
Mundine chuckled. “Come on, Steigleder. Didn’t you tell me this web problem helped security services pinpoint my location? I really should thank Febby in person. She wasn’t harmed in the raid, was she? Or the others?”
“She’s fine, Mr. Mundine,” Steigleder said. “The recovery team used stun darts. The mother and the boy were knocked out. They’ll be a little bruised. The father has a fractured right arm from resisting arrest. And Bantipor is going to prosecute him to the full extent of the law.”
“As we should,” Mundine grumbled, “but the family shouldn’t have to suffer for the sins of the father. Couldn’t we offer them some sort of aid?”
“Sorry, Mr. Mundine,” Steigleder said, his voice’s stress patterns indicating indifference. “The Bantipor Foundation won’t be up and running locally for another couple of years. Until then, our charity packages will be extremely limited. Marketing could send them some t-shirts. Maybe a tote bag.”
“That seems rather insulting,” Mundine said. “Surely we can do more for the person who very likely saved my life.”
“Look, Mr. Mundine—”
“An internship,” LAD said.
“Excuse me,” Mundine said to Steigleder. “What was that, Laddie?”
“I’ve reviewed Bantipor Commercial’s company guidelines for student internships,” LAD said. “There’s no lower age limit specified. An intern only needs to be a full-time student, fluent in English, and eligible to work for the hours and employment period specified.”
“It’s a lovely idea, Laddie, but we can’t take her away from her family after all that’s happened.”
“She can work remotely. Bantipor already supports over five thousand international telepresence employees,” LAD said. “Indonesia’s Manpower Act allows children thirteen years of age or older to work up to three hours per day, with parental consent.”
"Won't the mother be suspicious of such an offer from the corporation which is also prosecuting her husband?"
"Bantipor Commercial owns three subsidiary companies on the island of Java." LAD was already drafting an inter-office memorandum.
“All right, fair enough,” Mundine said. His voice pattern suggested he was smiling. “And I suppose I already know what kind of work Febby can do for us.”
“Yes, Mr. Mundine.” LAD blinked the OLEDs on Mundine’s necklace: red, green, and blue. “Febby is a computer programmer.”
ZZ Claybourne
http://writeonrighton.com/index.html
Agents of Change(Short story)
by ZZ Claybourne
Originally published by Samuel Peralta for the alternate history issue of The Future Chronicles, Alt. History 101.
“Orwell never intended Nineteen Eighty-four to be an instruction manual,” said Claudette.
“Claudette, that doesn’t matter to us now.”
“I know, it just came to me.” She always tried her best to rip the piece of tape in a straight line. A lot to be said for duct tape. She never liked taping across hair. That just seemed wrong. She would tape the hands. If she had to, around the head to cover the mouth, but angled downward from the nape of the neck. A body shouldn’t be found with hair ripped out of its head from duct tape. She’d had to stick a copy of the book in her hip pocket since they’d had to rush to retrieve Senator Gabel. For an old man he ran quicker than he had a ri
ght, and went down hard.
Syndell hated to run. Hated it especially as a cop, but as a retriever, passionate, intense anger brought out something close to the worst in him. He treated the ducks without respect.
So he’d pulled out his gun.
They now rolled Senator Gabel over the edge of the cliffs of Dover. They cleaned up. Then they went to a pub.
This was their pub. The meeting hall of the gods. Full of their people. No guilt. No worries. There were drinks, and there was loneliness, and there was even reflection of a kind. Retrievers sat wondering, and often regretted everything. Behind it the taste of gin in metal tins. Oily. As though they were lubricating robot parts and not people.
Folks openly killed one another in this day and age. But things had to be clean. There had to be respect. Leaving Gabel there to be obviously found wouldn’t have done. The cliffs of Dover would recycle him. Bit by bit. Even something so wretched as an American politician could eventually serve some good. A family of mollusks could be fed.
“Daniel,” said the man behind the bar. He didn’t tend bar. He was Mr. Fabulous, named on account of how hideously inept he was at mechanical matters, and so named was all the explanation one needed for why he was behind the bar. He held a tin under a spigot for an extra few seconds, took a drink, then set a separate cup for Syndell.
“Everything feel all right to you, Fab?” asked Syndell. The drink went down like it did every time: brush fire.
Fab nodded.
Daniel Syndell remembered growing up. Remembered being recruited. He gave the impression of slightly wincing whenever anyone used his first name. The two names were almost an insult, because he surely wasn’t Daniel Syndell, not in his soul anyway, not some boy grown poorish and unremarkable along Rhysham Way to be looked back on with vague discomfort. Syndell’s father had done the unremarkable thing that most fathers do: he’d gone away. It was the cataclysmic break in life that signals what was to run far away from what’s to be. Best that way.
“Praises to the Ages then,” said Syndell. Claudette hated that expression. He grinned a bit watching her peruse the day’s specials.
It felt odd to Syndell to have grown up in a time when industry ruled with an ironclad commercial fist and to actually remember it. Memories of it in this age felt antiquated.
Only a few clairvoyants even knew the timelines were being jimmied. They’d wake up vaguely remembering dreaming about someone named Hitler, whoever the hell that was. Or knowing that horses had been used for something else before the mounted police turned to neutered velociraptors.
This bar, by the consent of all agents inside, and, by extension, of the Difference Machine was effectively off-limits from time alteration. Mr. Fabulous kept watch on that.
“A new agent, Daniel,” said Mr. Fab. Every agent inside knew the others. A new face showed up, they knew that too. Fab, annoying as he could be with his questions about what had changed and what didn’t, felt out new minds and intentions to be sure they belonged. Agents weren’t beyond summary dispatch if need be. “The guy. Something wrong with the guy,” said Fab.
Of course there is, thought Daniel. I’m on tap duty this week. Bloody hell. “How many drinks has he had?”
“Two.”
“Give me another. Hard. Claudette?”
Claudette positioned herself at the bar in clear but inconspicuous view of the newcomers’ table, eyes practically peering through her ratty paperback.
Syndell went directly to their table, giving a nod to the retrievers sitting there but placing a drink beside only one. “Pleasantries,” said Syndell.
The female agent, whom he knew as a friend, pushed her seat out her own inconspicuous tad. Claudette caught her eye and gave a slight shake of her head.
“We won’t waste time. My job to feel you out, lad,” said Syndell sitting, hand on the butt of his gun under the table. “What’s your overriding theory on this circus?”
The man seemed prepared and eager for this. Syndell hated eager.
“So, Edison tries to screw Tesla, ends up electrocuting himself and winds up in an institution, Tesla gifts free power to the masses but wants nothing in return except for a houseful of books, and tea, and solitude. Maybe a cat.”
Daniel Syndell looked from the man to the woman, who was looking at the man as though acutely, albeit resigned by duty, aware he was made of snot.
“And you think one of us engineered that?” said Syndell.
The young man shrugged. “Dunno. Don’t much care.”
“We’ll never know how this started, will we?” said the young man’s partner, her clipped Somali accent about the most real thing in the entire exchange. “I mean, we’re the gods of history sitting in this one bar, right?”
“For the moment,” said Syndell. “Till somebody wipes us out. Enjoy your drink, lad,” he said and returned to his barstool beside Claudette. Two tiny brown women at a table nodded at him as he passed.
“Corrective measures?” Claudette said, still reading her paperback. It was a good book.
“The team from Sri Lanka signaled me that they’ll keep watch on him. He’ll behave. I’m off to sleep, luv. Big day tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow never comes, Syndell,” said Claudette, the official joke of the agency. She held her cheek out for his kiss. He obliged.
“Don’t see why you never date me in that case,” he said. “Good night, Claude.”
Sleep rarely came easily. The mind turned and turned. Possibilities were like compost in a barrel…which made the universe a huge dirt plot. About right. Agents were to remove problematic roots. Who made agents gods? The Machine. Orbiting, networked supercomputers the size of small countries calculating and recalculating a billion times a billion times a second courtesy a far future minus the greed of ninety-nine percent of human history. Perfection was not attainable. Neither was order. Trust, however, they could create that. The system worked. Time flowed. Constantly. No one atrocity was ever allowed to define the Earth, and for that the death of a homophobic senator intent on funneling financial backing to underground hate groups was a small thing, particularly as it prevented him ever becoming president of that backwater country U.S.A.
Just another idiot rolled into the drink.
What do you get out of this, Syndell? the question posed as he stared upward, fingers laced behind his head. He knew why sleep rarely came easily. Time was a trap. Always ready to drop a body somewhere a body, no body, should have been. Wasn’t the devil people needed to fret over. Was never the devil.
Nothing. What do I get out of this? Focus your question, lad. It’s what I get to put into it. Syndell sighed deeply into the darkness of his bedroom.
I am a god.
He rolled over.
Nice work if you can get it.
Claudette woke him up early the next day.
“Hell’s all that pounding?” he bellowed. “I know it’s a big day but contain your enthusiasm.”
He opened the door. She said, “We got big troubles,” and moved inside. She was not alone. Two more agents were with her: the Somali, Arliyo Gaal, and one of the elders of the group, a redhead with more stories to tell than there was time in the sky, Fiona Carel.
“Existential or physical?” he asked. That’d be helpful in deciding which guns to pack.
Claudette held out a folded three-by-five card. “This was on the bar at breakfast.”
Someone had written HT on it.
“That guy was American,” said Syndell. The ladies watched him and waited for him to catch up.
“HT,” he said.
Claudette snatched the card back. “Harriet Tubman.”
“No frikking way.” Son of a bitch. “If they were going after Tubman, they were crazy. No way would the Difference Machine let them anywhere near her,” he said.
Clearly this gathering thought otherwise.
“The Machine does weird things sometimes,” said Claudette.
“But it never tries to commit suicide. Arliyo, Fiona: y
ou think this means Ms. Tubman?”
“I do,” said Aliyo. Fiona nodded.
“The Machine plants tests of our resolve,” said Arliyo.
Syndell hated cat and mouse. “All right. Let’s find the bloke.” He placed hands on Arliyo’s shoulders and touched forehead to forehead. She was an excellent person. “Li, I’m truly sorry for anything that happens then.”
***
Dorchester County, Maryland’s cold season was, wet, uncomfortable and loud. Industrialization, thought Syndell spitting out an errant splash from the constant bits kicked up by horse, carriage, and a high wind.
March, Eighteen twenty-two. Tubman’s birth date.
They’d protect her. Birth to death. It was what agents did. It was the worst thing and best thing about time travel. You’d live and age in the past or future but the moment Time returned you where it liked you best you were you again, full of heavy memories. There were no old Agents of Change. Just a lot of dead ones.
“This thing rides up a bit, dunnit,” said Syndell outfitted in the breeches of the time.
“Don’t be flip,” said Arliyo, stripped to the waist and unkempt. Her unblemished brown skin was entrancing. Claudette’s freckled pink skin was entrancing. Even the backs of Syndell’s pasty pale hands were entrancing.
He did not want to go.
“We’re about to enter hell,” said Arliyo.
There were rules to the game, deep-conditioned ones. None of this going-after-the-grandfather business. Even a supercomputer got bored with infinite permutations. It was direct or nothing.
This was the height of this particular country’s insane clamor for supremacy. Truths held self-evident. All created equal. Generations enslaved.
They had to sell Arliyo to the family enslaving Harriet’s family.
Syndell cried hard that night.
He and his new wife Claudette became fast and wealthy friends of the piggish, unthinking bastards in that large house. They had property adjacent. Unable to bear children they took interest even in the Negro children, particularly baby Harriet.
No one was better protected, no one more closely watched, than one quiet, genius child. Syndell often caught the little one watching his and Claudette’s interactions. It was as if she knew. Arliyo grew old over the years. Scarred and angry but always Arliyo. Scores of agents came through as needed, yet not a one was brave enough to attempt to alter the vision of what was clearly becoming madam Tubman’s plan.