Frankie had replied: No problems on my end. Be safe.
It was time for the question and answer portion of Frankie’s presentation, which soon turned into a debate over Adder, the language she’d used to write the tool that error-checked phosphorylation pathways. Three developers sitting together at one end of the bench were extremely taken with a new language called Ammolite that had been written last year by some researchers at a free lab in the AU. They took turns pointing out how Ammolite would solve some of the problems with data structures in her tool.
“Oh, for shit’s sake,” groaned Mecha, who had settled next to Paladin. “I can’t believe this is going to turn into another Adder versus Ammolite debate.” Then she raised her voice, aiming her irritation at the group of Ammolite enthusiasts. “She wrote the damn tool in Adder—get over it. Can we please talk about fucking phosphorylation?”
“Yeah, I think we’re getting off topic at this point,” Frankie agreed.
This seemed to be the signal for general talk to break out, and for several people to stand up and pour more of last night’s beer into cups.
Paladin shared her intel with Eliasz’ perimeter, while he did his best to ingratiate himself with Frankie and WTF, who had just come down from the loft.
“I could really have used your tool in my last job,” Eliasz said to Frankie. “What do you call it? I want to find it on the net.” She ignored him, conferring in a low voice with WTF. Eliasz feigned casual disinterest, checking messages on his wrist. He shot a look at Paladin when he saw the data. Good work, his expression said.
Finally Frankie turned back to Eliasz. “I haven’t released it yet, kid. But I might throw what I have up on the Hox server tonight.” She walked upstairs without a second glance.
Mecha, however, was eager to talk. “Frankie’s very perfectionist about her tools. Don’t feel bad that she doesn’t want to let you see it. That’s just Frankie.”
Eliasz watched Frankie’s tuft of pink hair and WTF’s lumpy skull as they entered the loft together. “So does she live here with Hox2 or something?” he asked casually, toying with his beer cup.
“No, she lives in the medina, sort of close to that teahouse where we met.”
“I like that area,” Eliasz continued conversationally. “I was thinking of getting a flat there, too.”
“A bunch of us live there because it’s cheaper than downtown.”
“Is it cheap enough that you don’t need roommates to afford a place?”
“Oh, yeah,” Mecha said enthusiastically. “Frankie lives by herself and has a great place. I have a roommate, but the flat is so big we barely see each other.”
They continued to talk while Paladin listened, wondering why it was that Mecha would give away dangerously personal information about herself and her friends in the middle of a casual conversation with someone she’d only met the day before. She supposed that everyone had their vulnerabilities, and Mecha’s was talking. She couldn’t resist giving away what she knew. And that meant Frankie was vulnerable, too, especially if you added in the poor state of her network security.
There was one way Frankie was very secure, however. Eliasz kept trying to engage Frankie in conversation, and he kept failing. She looked increasingly harassed, and finally grabbed his arm and steered him to the edge of the bar/lab. Paladin trained her audio sensors on them.
“Look pal, I’m not going to kick you out of this lab because it’s open to everybody, including covert IPC agents.” Frankie’s syllables were clipped. “But I’m not your friend, and I’m not going to help you get whatever you’re here for. So leave me the fuck alone.”
Eliasz chuckled and threw up his arms while backing off a few inches. “Hey, that’s cool. Not sure what you mean by that, but I’m sorry to bother you.” He returned to the bench with Paladin and Mecha, staying for another fifteen minutes of Adder versus Ammolite debate. Then he and Paladin left by the same path they had the night before, crossing from the dance floor to the elevators. But this time, both were on high alert.
When they reached the street, Eliasz took stock of their surroundings. The triangular shape of the Twin Center’s entrance was formed by two angled staircases that started on the sidewalk and led to an elevated park nestled between the towers that gave the place its name. Now the mall sheltered pirates, and the park hosted an informal night market with stalls offering everything from fresh fruit to pirated software.
“The good news is that we have solid evidence that she’s linked to our terrorist,” Eliasz said. “I now have authorization from the Federation to interrogate her.”
Paladin had studied interrogations, but never witnessed one. “How will you do that? She’ll never talk. She already suspects you’re with the IPC.”
“I have a little something that I doubt she’s patched against.” Eliasz patted the side pocket in his pants. “I also know exactly what route Frankie’s going to take to get home. All we have to do is follow her. When we get there, you grab her and I’ll give her a taste of my medicine.”
* * *
Later that night, Eliasz and Paladin took advantage of the poor lighting on the path to the medina to merge with the shadows in a closed teahouse doorway. At last Frankie walked by, trailed by WTF and a few others from the lab. They followed at a distance, passing beneath old, arched gateways made of stone, and polymer awnings that flapped quietly in the wind off the ocean. A few people were on the street, emerging from yellow strips of light that edged the cracked-open doorways of teahouses.
Frankie’s friends began peeling off into courtyards or up stairways to their flats. At last she was alone, her rolling gait taking her several doorways past the hacker teahouse. Paladin pulled ahead of Eliasz, her body in full stealth mode, light bending around her carapace and her feet soundless on the stone street. As Frankie turned up a short flight of stairs, Paladin jumped on her, clearing several steps and grabbing the woman’s arms in one fluid motion. Before Frankie could cry out, the bot had covered her mouth with one hand.
For a few seconds they engaged in quiet combat on the stairs, Frankie kicking and trying to pull away from Paladin’s grip.
But then Eliasz arrived, a tiny injector gripped between his fingers, which he wrapped around Frankie’s throat, as if he meant to strangle her. Instead, he administered the drug, then moved his hand up slightly to grip her chin as it hit her. Her muscles had gone so slack that she was unable to hold her head up on her own.
Paladin kept a tight grip on the woman to keep her from sliding down the stairs as Eliasz whispered to her. “I think we’re going to have a nice talk now. Let’s start by going inside your flat. What is your key?”
Frankie looked at a point beyond Eliasz’ head, her eyes unfocused. “You bastard,” she replied, her mouth working slowly through each syllable. As the drug’s effect intensified, Frankie lost her footing, leaning heavily on Paladin as she tried to stand again.
“Frankie,” Eliasz said softly. “I want you to look at something very interesting.” He aimed her unsteady gaze in the direction of a tiny projector in the palm of his hand, which emitted what looked to Paladin like a simple light that pulsed more brightly every few seconds. Something about the drug Eliasz had given Frankie caused the pulses to occupy her full attention. It was some kind of multihypnotic, Paladin guessed, that would lower her inhibitions, magnify her desire to trust, and relax her muscles. Any sensory input would feel overwhelming. Distracting her already-saturated attention with something simple, like a light, would intensify the drug’s trust-blooming effect.
They stood for almost a minute with Frankie absorbed by the projection and Eliasz watching her pupils dilate. Then he returned to his question, which he asked even more gently. “What is the key?”
She held up an unsteady hand. “Biometric,” Frankie sighed, speaking to the light.
Frankie’s flat was sparsely furnished, with a bedroom in back and a front room occupied by a few chairs pulled up to a tabletop projector. She had a fabber and sequence
r in the kitchen, which also contained the flat’s biggest window. Eliasz pulled the blinds down in each room before turning on a single light, while Paladin settled the loose-limbed Frankie into a chair.
Frankie seemed to lapse into a state of near-unconsciousness. Then she straightened up, her muscles bunching and relaxing in an uncoordinated fashion. Paladin stood quietly behind her, hands on her shoulders. The bot was prepared to restrain her at any moment.
Eliasz pulled up a chair so that he sat knee-to-knee with Frankie. He looked into her eyes, black with pupil, and covered her knees with his warm hands. “Frankie, I’m your friend,” he said softly, leaning closer. He was working with the drug to establish an intense emotional bond. A bead of saliva formed at the corner of Frankie’s mouth. She couldn’t look away from Eliasz’ face.
“Fuck you,” she mumbled.
He ignored her. “We have proof you’re working with Judith Chen, the pirate and terrorist you know as Jack. You’re either going to be in prison for a short time, or the rest of your life. Tonight you make that choice. I can make things easier for you if you tell me where Jack is hiding.”
Frankie seemed to nod out for a second, the drug no doubt making it more difficult for her to process this information. Neurochemically, she would be yearning to trust everything Eliasz said. It would be hard for her to stop herself from talking. But Frankie also knew exactly what was happening to her brain, how she was being manipulated, and would fight it.
“You don’t have anything on me,” she said finally.
Eliasz projected a file in front of Frankie’s vague eyes, showing her the thread between herself and Jack that Paladin had discovered via the projector. Frankie was obviously caught off guard. “Jack…” she murmured uncertainly.
“Where is Jack?” Eliasz asked. “She’s in trouble, but you don’t have to be.”
Paladin put her hands on Frankie’s head, reading the flickering electrical signals from her drug-altered brain. Her visual centers were extremely active: She must be using visualization to resist Eliasz’ questions. They needed to distract her, break her concentration, focus her brain activity elsewhere.
“Hit her,” Paladin said. It was the fastest way to get the job done.
Eliasz punched Frankie in the face, breaking her nose. Her head rocked back, and she began to gurgle and choke on the blood gushing down her face.
Paladin reached a finger into Frankie’s mouth to scoop out the stringy clots, then grabbed a fistful of the woman’s hair to push her head upright again. Now the spike in Frankie’s visual activity had tapered off. The drug’s powers would be peaking now, and would start to fade over the next fifteen minutes.
“Where is Jack?” Eliasz peered into Frankie’s ruined face. “It doesn’t have to hurt anymore. I’m your friend.”
Her words tumbled out, the chemically induced urge suddenly overcoming her will. “She’s got a lab in Vancouver. But I don’t know if that’s where she’s gone.” She paused, her parted lips slack and gory. Frankie would be feeling no pain for the moment; she had just placed her trust in Eliasz, and the multihypnotic would make that feel good, to encourage further bonding with her interrogator. “She’s with a runaway slave, though. Some boy named Threezed she found in the Arctic. He might have taken her somewhere else.”
After her confession, Frankie must have found another way to resist the hypnotic. That was the last useful information they got out of her, though they continued to beat and drug her for the next three hours. At last, when both her arms hung broken at her sides, Frankie passed out and would not wake up.
Eliasz alerted the Federation’s local IPC agents, who relayed their position to police. Fifteen minutes later, two bots arrived, their armored, bipedal bodies similar to Paladin’s own. One addressed Paladin: Hello. Let’s establish a secure session using AF protocol.
Paladin agreed, and they gave their session a number.
I am Talon. Please transmit interrogation file. That is the end of my data.
Paladin sent a series of compressed video files while Talon’s companion lifted the unconscious woman out of the chair, now stained with blotches of blood that were already drying into brown at their edges. Frankie moaned in pain as the bot gripped her upper arm where the jagged edge of a bone had pierced her skin.
“Here is additional information that will aid with a terrorist conviction,” Paladin vocalized. She sent the message thread between Jack and Frankie in a forensic wrapper intended to prove it had not been tampered with since its extraction from Frankie’s server.
“Thanks, guys,” Eliasz addressed the bots. “We’re heading out.”
“The Federation appreciates your work,” Talon vocalized formally, adding via microwave: Good luck to you, Paladin.
The bots clattered down Frankie’s front steps. They were official law enforcement, so there was no need to move stealthily. Perhaps they even wanted the neighbors to see that the notorious pirate had been captured.
“I’ve got the coordinates for an extraction point,” Eliasz told Paladin, who was closing Frankie’s door, locking it unnecessarily. “We move out in thirty minutes.” He beamed a map to Paladin, showing a helicopter pad at the port. They could reach it by walking.
At this hour, the winding streets of the medina were quiet and dark. The yellow glow of the Hassan II minaret divided the horizon over low roofs. For a moment, Paladin considered that, from a human perspective, the streets would look even murkier when contrasted with that perfectly architected shaft of light. Maybe that was the point.
The ancient port was filled with tugs and fishing boats, and the water was held still by a long, curling jetty made from enormous, interlocking cement jacks. Here and there on the docks, Paladin could see people sleeping under stained blankets of waterproof cotton, but if they noticed Eliasz and the bot, they showed no sign of it. At last a helicopter skimmed over the mosque toward them, its engines noise-cancelled to the point where all they could hear was the air being beaten with such regularity that it became a long, unending sigh.
The two settled into the cabin. Soon Casablanca was little more than a shining crescent at the edge of a vast continent. Eliasz finally spoke. “I’ve suggested to the project head that we split up to follow the two leads Frankie gave us. I’m going down to Vegas to see if I can dig up something on this escaped slave, and you can follow up on that Vancouver lab. Thanks to your research on The Bilious Pills, I think you’ll know where to start.” He paused, and took Paladin’s hand. The helicopter was unpiloted, and there would be no video capture here, either. “Vancouver also has a large community of autonomous bots, so that’s your cover: You’re a newly autonomous lab bot looking for work. When we get to base, your botadmin can set you up with a simulated autonomy key.”
“What is the difference between a simulated autonomy key and a real one?”
“A simulated key expires,” Eliasz said, his hand gripping hers as they dropped down over the jet field.
15
PIRATE YOUR BODY
JULY 13, 2144
Moose Jaw hadn’t changed much in the past thirty years. As Jack’s truck entered the tiny city, she passed the giant moose statue looming to the left of the highway and drove down narrow roads lined with refurbished wooden houses covered in the frills of another era’s architectural fashion.
Downtown were a few casinos and a mineral spa where Jack’s family had come for the Christmas holidays. Built over two centuries ago, the spa was a landmark, its ancient pools an attraction for the daring in winter, because you could swim under a low arch and find yourself in a steaming public bath out of doors. As a little girl, Jack had delighted endlessly in that outdoor pool. She would dip under to wet her whole head, then bob in the odd-tasting water up to her neck until her hair became a fine white net of frost around her face and crackled under her hands.
Aside from the casino, Moose Jaw’s main attraction was a series of tunnels that ran under the city. Local legend held that they had been home to the city’s
immigrant Chinese labor force in the early twentieth century. These anonymous men and women lived and worked in dark underground hovels doing laundry for the white prairie folk. After Jack went on a tour of the musty, underground rooms, she started telling the kids in elementary school that she had a great-great-great-grandparent who once lived below the city.
Her father was appalled when he found out. It was the first time he connected her mobile to the family server and let her explore on her own, showing her how to find the photographs proving the Chens had come from Hong Kong to Vancouver long after the tunnels had been abandoned, settling in Saskatchewan in the early 2000s.
Jack’s interest in the tunnels continued even after she reluctantly accepted her father’s version of the family history. She returned to Moose Jaw as an adult in the summer between her first and second year of college, tagging along with a group of friends who were volunteering with an archaeological dig. For months, they carefully excavated the area beneath a condemned warehouse off Main Street.
The principal investigator had a grant to investigate whether the tunnels had actually belonged to bootlegger Al Capone during the twentieth-century Prohibition era. Since most of the tunnels had been blocked off over two centuries ago, finding the answer involved a lot of careful digging, 3-D imaging of each layer, and stringing wire everywhere so that the site eventually looked like a massive grid.
It was ultimately never clear whether the additional tunnels they excavated actually belonged to Al Capone or just a random gangster. Large and ventilated, the space they found still contained bootlegger gear and a few antique guns. When the grant ran out, Jack helped seal up the entrance, which was now in the basement of a new apartment building. The archaeologists, ever hopeful that one day their grant might be renewed, left one entrance to the excavation open, accessible via a small trapdoor.
After her experiences with research grants, Jack knew that nobody would ever be visiting that tunnel again. Except her. She was keeping the tradition of the tunnels alive by using them for smuggling. Over the past two decades, she’d tricked them out with an air purification system, a covert hookup to the network and power grids, sleeping quarters, and a hidden safe where she could stash a secure mobile and several bags of drugs.
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