The Scarab

by Rhine, Scott

  She sighed gently and said “Oui,” followed by a stream of erotic-sounding high school French. She translated with an accented, “As you say, Messieur.

  The cap went well with the reddish-orange jumpsuit she had on. It still lacked one thing, however, to make the effect complete. I unzipped the front two inches, and said “Perfect.”

  She growled affectionately and replied “Come back over here and say that.”

  “No time. There’s a diner across the street offering free eggs for the losers. Pretend to be a groupie and they’ll tell you anything. I need you to poke the dead to find out who’s willing to help us and who is trying to buy us out. If you can find any other inside information about the course or the competition, great. I’m going to check out the vehicle.” Mary Ann glared at me as she headed toward the door. “Meet you at the ESPN booth just before nine.”

  This morning’s login would be charged to my repair account, something I had a lot of compared to other survivors. Nonetheless, I hit record and made a copy of the session to my removable drive. When I pay by the second, I want to act fast and do my thinking later, off-line. I had brought a back-up drive for every day of the contest, plus two filled with film clips, music, and sound-effects. I kept these handy in a box beside the driving chair in case I ever needed a flashy reply or any of my old tricks. Never underestimate the importance of style in a world-class event. Losing with class can mean more than winning without.

  Snooping my damage board, I noticed that overnight repairs had returned the grids to 92 percent of their normal efficiency. Sweet.

  While the idea was fresh in my head, I wrote a quick program that enabled me to touch a point on my virtual overhead display and adjust hull speed to automatically send a satellite collision shadow that direction. With built-in math and interface libraries, it took four minutes to create a new, unlabelled blue button on my dash board. Sometimes computers could be wonderful.

  Next I emptied the ballast hold and started cataloging the salvage. Most of the stuff was too specialized or damaged for me to use. The generic equipment I stowed and tagged, while jettisoning everything else for recycling at eight cents on the dollar. With the lowered efficiency, I could improve speed by reducing the weight.

  I found three unusual items which took extra time to examine. The first was a mark twenty-three sower mine normally used in strings across a bridge or a narrow street. Mare was lucky she hadn’t triggered it picking it up. They were tricky to handle, according to Jane’s on-line guide. Not a great ace, but it was better than nothing.

  The second salvage item of interest was a Duratech portable vault, a cylinder the size of a medium toolbox with enough armor plating to allow it to survive the chain reaction. I didn’t have the combination to open it yet, but it made a nice design accessory. A safe was essential for a courier craft, and I felt silly now for not including one. I planned to weld it under the I-beams behind the pilot’s seat as soon as I could learn how to open it.

  The third unusual item was a simple black-box flight-recorder from one of the wrecked vehicles. It was really just a handle to a phone line, where every game action the player made was audited for examination by the judges or designer at a later date. Technically, only members of the owning team should pick it up, but Mare had no way to know about gaming etiquette. The question was, what should I do with it? I could find out a lot about a competitor by examining his recorder, but it wasn’t ethical.

  Playing with the flight log icon, I hit INFO, hoping I could find a familiar brand name and be able return it.

  “Error: line already open for read by 262-4375,” flashed a pop-up message. The 262 meant that the call came out of the hotel phone switch, and the forty-three (base 1000, and 200 per floor) put it on the seventeenth floor. I checked my formula against my own room extension and the hospitality suite. I admit I’m weird, I figure out numbering schemes like that. For example, my home town numbers addresses every five meters starting at the intersection of Main and Broad. It helps to know how far I’ll be walking when someone gives me a house number.

  Since the log was open, the number would probably be busy. I grabbed the phone and dialed the front desk. “Excuse me, I’m supposed to provide consolation gifts for people who have been eliminated from the race, and I believe we have everyone except the company staying in... gosh, it’s hard to read this writing... room 1775?”

  “Sir, we have no convention guests on that floor.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely, sir. It’s for our air-conditioning and electrical units. A building this size needs units about every eight floors. Perhaps he meant room 775, but the guests staying there have already left.”

  “Thanks, that must have been it,” I said quickly, and hung up. Curiouser. I double-checked my own log number—4319. Why would somebody take the trouble to route all of our computer connections through the seventeenth floor? It might explain why my response time lost a few fractions of a second before the Crash.

  I couldn’t read the log itself without leaving electronic evidence. However, the send buffers were backed up at the time of the crash, and the commands and messages being sent had never cleared. The buffer contents were signed by the owner and could be read by anyone with the proper public key. I decided to put on some low-profile clothes as a disguise—a red-and-orange Hawaiian shirt and my Ron-Jon surf shop jacket. While I changed clothes, my workstation ran through a search program trying to match the signature on the buffers to the one of the victims.

  Just as I finished my coffee, the station chimed. The sound reminded me how much my head still hurt. The key for the Exotech Viper attack craft (one of the heavies) almost matched, but had generated a data corruption error. Maybe the file was incomplete, or blocks had gone bad in the crash. As I scrolled the buffers to my screen for an eye-check, I could hear my removable drive whir.

  Most of what zipped by was appropriate crypto-babble, except one chunk in the middle which was in glaring plain text. The header was a game-description file for something called a Radio-Seeking missile. I’m not sure how it worked, but it sounded lethal, probably homing in on the spark plugs or other emissions of a hostile vehicle. I’d never be certain because the file was incomplete. For some reason they were sending the missile to one of their other team-mates at the time of death. I could understand them wanting to off-load a sinking ship, but if they were sending it to one of their light or middleweight vehicles, I could nail them on a price-range violation.

  Examining the destination header, the Viper craft appeared to be sending the missile file to team member five with the same key. But the user count only went up to four. “Couldn’t be.”

  I was burning repair cycles, but I had to try just one more experiment. I mailed the Duratech vault to the now-defunct key with user number five. The send succeeded, but when I listed my inventory, the vault was still there! The transfer count hadn’t gone up. This could be exploited as a major security hole. Exotech was cheating six ways from Sunday! My outrage cooled, turning to ways I could use this information to get my revenge. I’d have to contact Playfair with my evidence. Meanwhile, I’d get rid of the black box and play dumb.

  First, though, I deleted the plain text file fragment and changed the interface so that it would send a broadcast message “I cheat at solitaire” to all the players every time someone read the buffer. I labeled the log with an Exotech logo and dropped it in the common maintenance area where it was bound to get back to the snakes.

  Before logging off, I remembered Mare’s password. She had been using my login up till now, and it just occurred to me that she might mistake the password I chose as an insult. Thinking of her capture of the thief yesterday, I changed it to “Caught You!”

  I popped out my removable drive, and carefully labeled it with the word EVIDENCE. Stuffing it into my jacket pocket, I headed for the lobby.

  By the time I located Playfair, I had spent twenty minutes poring over the casualty lists, and couldn’t deduce the own
er of the safe. I wrote a note to the spook to meet me in the Men’s room in ten minutes, and dropped it next to him on the bench where he sat.

  Fifteen minutes later, we were alone in the rest room.

  “What’s this list for, Hayes?”

  “Call me Enrico,” I said looking around, furtively.

  “What the hell for?” asked agent Playfair.

  “There might be spies!” I hissed, worried about bugs.

  “Half the people here are spies of one sort or another. So what?”

  Three fans walked in to use the facilities. Quickly, I covered by saying “Do you mind, we’re having a lover’s quarrel!” All three promptly zipped up and left before Playfair’s jaw reached the floor. “As I was saying, this morning I caught Exotech cheating.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” he asked, still not believing what was happening. “I have a cover to keep.”

  “Those guys? They just think you’re gay, not a spy. If anything, they’ll think less about you since you have a label,” I explained. “The Viper tried to mail a plain-text copy of the radio-missile to one of his junior team members.”

  “Jesus, those things are classified. Do you have proof of any of this?”

  I didn’t want to tell him about the disc, or he’d know I cheated, too. “No. But I can get it. You do know that Exotech is already facing federal fraud charges.”

  “One has nothing to do with the other.”

  “Look. If I could get this file by accident, someone else could get it intentionally. I’m not doing this to annoy you; I’m doing it to defend my country.”

  He fumed a bit before relaxing. “You did the right thing. It could just be an NSA penetration team testing the security here. I’ll contact my superior, and you keep this to yourself. The last thing we need here is a bloody media leak. Sandia only agreed to this in the first place because it needed some decent public relations.”

  I thought Sandia was just a high-tech research division of the phone company. “What do they do there that they don’t want attention drawn to?”

  He looked disgusted. “Where do you think this nation designs and tests new nuclear devices?”

  “Bombs. These guys have access to atomic bomb plans? Great!” If possible, I was even more paranoid.

  “Oh, they have more than that—particle beams, satellites reflectors, X-ray lasers. They’re an all-purpose weapon factory.”

  This was way out of my league. I decided to concentrate on something simpler. Trying to sound casual, I asked “By the way, you wouldn’t happen to know which victim was carrying a Duratech minivault last night?”

  “Inventories are posted in the judges’ lounge at time of death. Any other problems?” I shook my head.

  He washed his hands, and over the air-drier, he said “I wouldn’t worry too much, they’ve taken the disks with the sensitive information off the machine altogether. Pretend like none of this ever happened and continue as normal until we contact you. Every person you leak to doubles the chance that the people we’re watching will find out that we’re on to them.”

  Chapter 11 – Charges

  After he left, I waited in the toilet stall for several minutes thinking. On my way to the judges’ lounge, I tried to get back into the racing frame of mind. I wandered around picking up scuttle-butt about the game. The biggest rumor was that the referees were trying to convene a tribunal to eject some poor sod from the convention. Someone else told me that ten hours ago, Paris had been in the middle of some major-league road construction. It seems that someone arranged the monkey-wrench last night while we were sleeping. Allegedly there had been several bomb threats, a protest, and a sewer collapse to complicate the detours. Several teams and the SimCon Consortium had one-upped each other till no-one had a good map of the maze.

  The judge’s lounge was a-buzz with the sounds of a lynching. There were a dozen players standing around a conference table. I snuck around the perimeter of the crowd to look at the post-mortem sheets hanging on the back wall of the room. It took several minutes, but I found three vehicles carrying Duratech safes, one of which had been blown into pieces—a middleweight from the Dutch Pensatronics Corporation. While I was writing down the relevant information, I overheard one of the louder complainers in the crowd from TSM bellow, “He doesn’t respond to mail, phone messages, pages, or knocks on his door. I say we try this Hayes character in absentia.”

  “In spite of the irregularities in his paperwork, and the magnitude of your charges, I cannot bar a contestant until he or she is present,” said a female judge, around sixty years of age, who wore her gray hair in a bun and the name tag Gertrude. Her ruling met with strong rumbles of disapproval. Gertrude, who had obviously dealt with classrooms of school children before, was not intimidated. She was wearing a black dress, with tiny flowers hidden in the design that hinted at non-conformity and creativity I rarely found in people in authority.

  Since I wasn’t wearing my badge, I decided to have a little fun with the mob. I continued writing in my notebook and asked, “Don’t you mean that you cannot decide the case until you have heard the defendant’s side, your Honor?”

  “I suppose,” she admitted. “But his absence does speak rather strongly of his guilt. Vandalism and entering SimCon under false pretenses are both charges punishable by immediate eviction.”

  “Then they’ve proven the vandalism charge?”

  A lawyer from Exotech spoke up. “He’s not that stupid, but this Scarab character has a reputation for tricks like this.”

  “I see, so why wasn’t he accused at the meeting last night when his team was present?”

  “Because reputation alone is not sufficient to convict a man,” said a black engineer from the Porsche team waving a clip board. “The issue at hand is copyright infringement. The man had taken engines from our vehicles and attempted to copyright them as his own design.”

  I walked over to look at the evidence he was waving. “I admit, the form does have a picture of your engine on it, but the legend under it reads ‘docking clamp assembly—top view’.”

  “But he’s using our engines without our permission.”

  “An old model, second hand. That’s allowed, isn’t it?”

  Judge Gertrude fielded the question. “Yes, under proof-of-concept rules for prototypes, which DeClerk has registered this as.” She was glaring at me with suspicion, but no one else had picked up how thoroughly I was defending myself.

  “Then, what, he’s been selling it or advertising the engine without your permission?” I asked.

  “Not yet.”

  I handed his clipboard back. “When he does, I’ll testify against him myself. What has he done against the rules? You guys are loaded for bear.”

  The Exotech lawyer had a smug look on his bald-pated face. “Ethan Hayes designed his vehicle while employed by one of our subsidiaries. As such, his design is our intellectual property.”

  He made me so angry, I saw white. That must have been why I slipped up. “First of all, you didn’t own Sam’s Floater garage until after they hired me. Second of all, I never signed any intellectual property agreement with you leeches. Third, I did Ghedra after leaving work for your sweat shop. Fourth, the scope of my job had absolutely nothing to do with this competition. If you can produce one document proving otherwise, I will personally kiss your ass.”

  Everyone in the room stopped talking. Cover blown, I decided to go for style points. I glanced over the judge’s shoulder at her summary sheet and whistled. “Thirty-seven complaints. That’s got to be some kind of record. How many do we have left? The race starts in a few minutes.”

  The roar started again, louder than before. The judge used her best English teacher command tone and ordered “Quiet! One at a time. Porsche, you’re first.”

  “Uh, the only thing left was that we don’t think he’s adequately accounted for engine cooling at low speeds.”

  I shrugged. “We use standard air cooling. I make sure not to operate the sleds at u
nder fifty km/h for more than a minute. The simulator keeps me honest. Next.”

  Gertrude facilitated discussion by adding, “We can disregard the spelling mistakes and obvious typographical errors for now. TSM?”

  “You don’t even have a driver’s license. You shouldn’t be allowed in the game!” Several in the mob agreed.

  “I wasn’t told that it was a prerequisite. But since you ask, the mouthpiece from Exotech will confirm that I was head mechanic at Sam’s garage, a position which required me to hold a high-speed ground vehicle chauffeur’s license. Next.” The crowd was starting to break up a little, anger giving way to the need to return to their teams for today’s start.

  “What does approved by the FCC mean?” demanded one player.

  “Exactly what it says on the form. Next.”

  “But it doesn’t say,” he complained.

  “The FCC wrote it, not me,” I countered.

  “What he’s trying to say is what they were approving is classified, and if they told us, it wouldn’t be classified anymore,” said the Exotech lawyer. “We want full disclosure statements with all your employees, contract numbers, and design specifications. We want to see what you’ve stolen.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Then it’s true?” the lawyer pounced.

  “No, I just want to know who to sue for slander. You can want till you’re blue in the face, but I don’t have to give you anything the judge doesn’t order me to. It’s not like you’re a member of Congress.” A few audience members winced at my cheap shot at the federal fraud investigation. I looked to Gertrude for support.

  Her support was reluctant at best. “We are here to resolve written complaints under the auspices of this organization only. Exotech, as you seem to be the team left with the biggest objection, we will skip to you.”

  “First of all, he neglected to list any of the members of his design team on the entry form,” said the Exotech hired gun.