Upload

by McClelland, Mark

  So, so stupid.

  He slowly maneuvered around the weight bench, his eyes still adjusting to the dim light. He knelt down on one knee and set his hand on the box. It was the box he had loaded into his cargo bot the night before—a sturdy cardboard box, about two-feet-square.

  "What a price I paid for you," he said. He shook his head and blew a little snort of disgust.

  He wrapped his arms around the box and stood up with it. It was light for its size, maybe fifteen pounds. He carried it to the door of the motor home, lifting it up over his head to get it past the weight bench, then set it down. He unlocked the metallic door with a fingerprint check and a 9-digit code, and it slid open. He grabbed the box and stepped up into his kitchenette, where he set the box down again and heaved another anxious sigh.

  The interior of his motor home was more robotics lab than home. The space was cluttered with robot limbs and sensors, hundreds of pieces of hardware. Every surface was pristine, cleaned daily by small hovering cleaner bots—it was a very clean mess. Raymond looked around. Typically, he didn't mind it. But in his present state, it added palpably to the stress.

  Panic betrays guilt. I can't afford to panic.

  He knew he had to remain balanced and circumspect. The FBI was all over the lab, and his work computers, including his mini-v, would be subject to search and seizure. His meticulous management of sensitive data was about to be put to the test—all he could do was worry, and he didn't have time for that. He had only a few hours in which to get his affairs in order and leave the motor home. Murray would be stopping by his apartment soon.

  "If I can just get my shit together and upload, they'll see my suicide and close the case."

  He checked the time on his wrist relay. It was 6:10 AM. The first thing to take care of was to finish Molly's upload, to make sure his whole plan could work. But first, a shower to clear his head.

  His gaze fell on the hand-written plans that sat on his dinette table. "Well, I won't be needing those." He glanced over them. There were so many steps he would have to skip. In a little subsection of the plan, he had listed three items he wanted to scan into Nurania: the shirt Anya tore off him in the flower garden; a monkey-headed plastic stir-stick from a bar they'd gone to; a hummingbird robot he built when he was eighteen.

  "Oh well."

  Off to one side was a note, "surveillance install," a reminder to install surveillance eyes at Anya's and at the lab, in case he needed to monitor activities back in reality prime. Toward the end of the plan was his motor home ride to the bunker. He shook his head. With the FBI on-site, there was no way he could take this NBC to the lab, upload into it, cart it to Minnesota in the motor home, and expect to get away with it.

  He looked at the piece of paper, aware that his exhaustion was cluttering his thoughts, obscuring the right course of action. If the FBI were to find his notes, they would have no problem piecing together his whole plan. Of course, if the FBI found the piece of paper, that would mean they had also found the motor home. Which would mean they knew he lived in a secure motor home registered under a false ID, on property officially owned by that same false ID. This alone was crime enough to put him away for years. Never mind possession of the NBC itself.

  He found himself suddenly awash with fear again. His anonymity was gone, leaving him utterly exposed. At present, he was fairly certain nobody knew of the motor home, and nobody knew how to contact him except through his university network account. It was critical that nobody know of the motor home. Once he uploaded, the false identity of Ivar Svensson was his ticket back to anonymity. The link from Raymond to Ivar had to remain unknown. He needed to finish the few remaining steps that demanded the secrecy of his motor home, then avoid it as much as possible. He couldn't afford to be tailed to this location.

  Raymond looked at his plans again. They were useless now. He took them into the pole barn and burned them, grinding the blackened flakes of ash into the concrete.

  He climbed back into the motor home and locked up. He headed to the back, starting to take off his clothes as he went. In his bedroom, he stripped naked, tossing his clothes on the bed. With a vocal command, he started the shower in the bathroom. A winged cleaner robot dropped from the ceiling of the bedroom, hovered for a moment, then descended to the bed to collect his clothes and carry them to the laundry.

  In the shower, Raymond found himself scheming again, trying to figure out how to perform the scan and sneak his mental data out under the noses of the FBI. It was then that he realized another tool at the disposal of the FBI: satellite surveillance.

  "Oh my god—how bleeding stupid can I be? I'm so screwed."

  The university itself banned the use of public surveillance cameras, which is why Raymond hadn't been worried about there being exterior footage of his illicit delivery of the first NBC to Property Disposition. But the FBI probably had satellite coverage of the entire planet. How much of it could they store? All of it, probably, but for how long? Would they have records of recent satellite footage? If they did, they might be able to trace back to 11:00 PM of the night before, when his delivery robot carted the stolen goods across North Campus to Property Disposition, then to the motor home. Regardless of their ability to retain footage of the entire planet, they would certainly be able to watch him now, and they would see him ride his bike from the lab to the pole barn, thereby linking him with Ivar Svensson.

  "They've already had hours to review data. It could already be too late. Shit, they could have watched me ride here... unless, maybe it was too dark out." Could satellites "see" at night well enough to track him?

  He skipped the rest of his shower, hastily dried himself off, then pulled on a pair of boxers and entered the v-chamber in his bedroom. He said the word "workstation", and the interior of the chamber transformed itself into a dense array of displays and inputs. Raymond sat in the chair that appeared behind him and it slid forward into position. His hands fell into manuhaptic gloves modeled after his real ones. With a combination of speech and gesture commands, he created a list of agent IDs. These were software agents of his that resided on weakly-secured network nodes throughout the US and Canada. He would disperse his encrypted communications among these agents, making the origin very difficult to trace. He had memorized the credentials and network addresses of all his most secure agents; were his own systems ever compromised, no record of his most secure data could ever be found.

  Having set up his channels of communication, Raymond contacted an acquaintance he had successfully avoided for nearly three years, a man he knew as Manolo. Manolo doubtless had many other aliases, but this was the one he used among respected fellow hackers. Manolo in turn knew Raymond as Celia. Raymond had learned early that Manolo had a soft spot for shrewd, in-the-know women, and he had adopted the persona of a short-haired, all-business, all-in-black Hispanic woman. Raymond had only ever sought one real favor from Manolo, but had spent months establishing a rapport and offering small favors before making his request. In this time, Raymond learned just how dangerous Manolo could be. Once Raymond had what he wanted, he had made himself scarce. Happily, he had not heard from Manolo since.

  Raymond had also learned that Manolo had a soft spot for enemies of the FBI, and it was for this reason that Raymond turned to him now. To request a meeting with Manolo, Raymond posted an unremarkable image of a sunset on a Net site that purported to be a place to share vacation stories. Embedded within that image, spread out in a pattern known only to a few trusted friends of Manolo, was a message that named a v-world location and a time for the meeting. Raymond then fired off a watcher process to await a response, which would come in the form of a slight cropping of his sunset image. If more content were trimmed off the top of the image, it would indicate that Manolo had agreed to the meeting. If more were trimmed off the left or right edge, it would show how much earlier or later the meeting had to be, respectively—five minutes per pixel. And if more content were trimmed off the bottom, it was no go, and it would be up to Raymond to
attempt an alternative meeting.

  Having delivered his calling card, Raymond started doing some research into the capabilities of FBI surveillance. What he found gave him a glimmer of hope. There were privacy laws in place that prevented them from accessing detailed footage without prior cause. Furthermore, tracking movement at night was said to be problematic. However, they would definitely be able to track his movements during the day. And there was no telling what sorts of loopholes existed in those privacy laws. Agent Michaels' comment to Detective Brody about a naive understanding of policy came to mind.

  "So, how to get out of here," he said aloud. "I need to ditch this rig and sell this property. I'll ship the second NBC to Minnesota the same way I did the first, and I'll just have to upload into that one remotely. Which means I definitely need to know whether remote upload works. It's time to fire up that brain of yours, Molly."

  There was no way he would be able to sleep. His mind was spinning way too fast. He stayed in his v-chamber and reviewed the steps necessary to complete Molly's remote upload. First, he needed to inventory all of her mental data, stashed away in various accounts, and transfer it to the datastore at his bunker. Second, he needed to initiate the diagnostics suite on Molly's NBC, to make sure it was ready to receive her mental data. Third, he needed to instantiate her simulated physiology, which would run on a server connected to the NBC. He would give her new body a trial run, then put it on hold, awaiting its corresponding brain. Fourth and finally, he needed to start the flow of mental data into the NBC—the remote upload.

  All of Molly's mental data proved to be in order, and Raymond was successful in transferring it to the staging datastore in the bunker, from which it would be loaded into the NBC. He felt a weight lift away as he cleaned out all the hacked accounts he had used to store the data; it was one more traceable step covered over. He continued with his work. Just as he fired off the NBC diagnostics suite—the second step—he heard Scorpio's voice.

  "Mosby, the sunset image has been cropped. The left-side crop was greatest, by twelve pixels."

  "Twelve pixels—that's an hour early! Crap, that means he wants to meet me now."

  The v-chamber lifted Raymond out of his chair as it transitioned to a dark location in east Delta Nuevo, a city of about half-a-million on the Sea of Anxiety, in the public v-world of Telemesis. Several years before, when Raymond was more active in the underground, Delta Nuevo had been a favorite location for surreptitious dealings, and—to the best of Raymond's knowledge—it had never attracted the attention of government listeners.

  The scene transition put Raymond in a small, dark, unadorned room, lit only by a flickering violet light that emanated from the floor. Most often referred to as lobbies or static gateways, the room was an entry chamber, a known location through which one may enter a v-world. As lobbies went, this one was especially minimalist. There was a single door out of the room, with a retinal scanner beside it. Loose wires protruding from the top of the scanner sizzled and sparked—evidence of a novice attempt at bypassing identification. Raymond wondered whether the scene in Delta Nuevo might have turned newbie.

  Raymond naturally reached for his hip, finding Celia's trusty disruptor pistol holstered on a female hip that curved out rather wider than his own. He wasn't expecting trouble, but it was a necessary precaution. Violence on Telemesis had an element of realism unusual for v-worlds. Death was permanent—if the v-world deemed you mortally wounded, your avatar would be banned from reentering. It was possible to return to the world under a new guise, but Telemesis was tough on newcomers. Even for those with powerful allies, starting over was difficult. Weapons licenses, work permits, and currency were strictly controlled by the fascist government of Telemesis, and its all-bot police force was immune to bribery. But, because it was run by an off-shore consortium that closely guarded the privacy of its members, the payoff outweighed the risks for those seeking secrecy.

  Raymond looked down at himself and saw he was wearing a tight, high-gloss, black, zip-up one-piece—a latex cat suit. "Not exactly low-profile," he said to himself. He heard his own voice as that of a gruff Latina. He was quite used to alternate voices, but he hadn't had a female avatar in quite some time; it would take a bit of getting used to. "Clothing change: I want my gray mechanic's one-piece, from Fischer's." The clothing change was instantaneous. He was now wearing a beat-up mechanic's suit with a Fischer's badge high on the left arm. Fischer's was the maintenance shop where Celia had gotten her start on Telemesis, fixing used gliders, hovercycles, robots, generators, and whatever else came into the shop. The technology of Telemesis was mostly the same as that of reality, with the addition of more frequent space travel and more exotic weapons. The atmosphere, however, was grittier, more bleak. Especially in Delta Nuevo.

  "Scorpio, you there?" asked Raymond, tilting his head downward to speak into a voice receiver in his mechanic's suit.

  "Affirmative," came the response. It was a response that only Raymond would hear, for Celia owned a much-coveted aural implant. It could receive signals from real-world sources, to which he could respond via transmitters sewn into her clothing. In other v-worlds, a continuous private connection with the real world was standard. In order to enter Telemesis, it was necessary to give up certain basic v-chamber features; in order to connect with the real world, one had to advance far enough within Telemesis to obtain rare and expensive hardware. Celia had won hers in an illegal robot-combat gambling arena. At present, this was especially handy—Raymond wanted to record his conversation with Manolo, so that he wouldn't miss any of the details.

  He stepped up to the retinal scanner, which was really just a prop that triggered his v-chamber to provide login credentials; it would not scan Raymond's retina. Whoever pulled the wires clearly didn't realize this. He leaned forward, looked into the eyepiece, and saw a sweep of red light. The lobby door slid most of the way open, then stuck, then closed part way, stuck again, and started going back and forth. Raymond side-stepped through while the door was mostly open and stepped out into a dark alley. The door slid shut behind him.

  He heard a glider above the alley, and a light swept over him. He looked up and saw a police cruiser, probably checking for lobby-killers—people who attack isolated avatars as they enter a v-world via a static gateway. This was a common tactic among gamers seeking money, weapons, or status, and the Telemesis law against it was occasionally enforced. Raymond's hand rested on his disruptor as he watched the light sweep down the alley. Seeing no one, he headed for the street.

  The alley let out on Escutcheon Street. It was essentially as Raymond remembered it, a narrow street dominated by small industry, with bars and cheap restaurants here and there, catering to the after-work crowd. There were no weekends in Telemesis—work schedules were tailored to the needs of the individual—so the laborers' bars were rarely crowded but never empty. The rendezvous point was a barbecue joint called Cookout, just a block south from the alley. Raymond checked his wrist relay and saw that he was nearly five minutes late. He started down the sidewalk with long strides. A few people walked in and out of bars, but the sidewalk was mostly empty. Street traffic was sparse, mostly crapped-out old hovercycles. Raymond was relieved; the street seemed essentially the same as when he was last in Delta Nuevo.

  He spotted the Cookout sign—a retro image of a man standing over a kettle grill—and started to get nervous. He wasn't entirely sure what it was that he wanted from Manolo. He wanted to know more than he already did about FBI surveillance capabilities, and he wanted the access necessary to alter recordings of his movements. More than anything, however, he wanted an ally. He was afraid, and he wanted to have someone he could turn to if things got bad—someone who could help him stall the FBI investigation long enough to pull off an emergency upload, if need be. He came to the glass front of Cookout, a deep, narrow restaurant, dimly lit, with tall booths along the right-hand side. Not surprisingly, Manolo was not visible from outside.

  He'll be in a booth at the back, facing the
door.

  The door slid open, and Raymond headed toward the back. He reached the last booth having seen no one he recognized. He checked his watch again. He was seven minutes late. Had Manolo come and gone in that time? It was unlikely. Raymond sat down in the booth at the very back, facing the door, where he had expected to find his contact. A waitress came back to serve him. He accepted a menu but told her he'd get her attention when he was ready to order.

  "Mosby." It was Scorpio's voice in his head. "The sunset's gone."

  Something had gone wrong. Manolo had withdrawn the sunset image, a courtesy that he didn't grant everyone. But Raymond wondered what was up. He wondered whether Manolo had found something about Raymond that worried him—whether he might already be tainted, a man to avoid.

  "I'm sure it's nothing," said Raymond to himself. "At least he pulled the sunset."

  Raymond considered leaving Telemesis immediately—jacking out right there in Cookout—but remembered that instant-outs were strongly discouraged in this v-world. If he were to leave without going through a proper exit, his avatar would become a bot for the next 24 hours, leaving Celia highly vulnerable. If she were killed in those 24 hours, he would find out the next time he tried to come in. He got up from where he sat and walked out of Cookout, headed for the gateway through which he had entered.

  When he turned the corner, back into the alley, he ran right into a tall, white, muscular thug wearing ripped denim pants and a dirty white tank top. After hardly a split second's hesitation, the man spun him around and put him into a choke hold. The brute's movements were strong, fast, and precise. Raymond tried to speak, but the choke hold was too firm. Not knowing his foe's intentions, Raymond could only assume the worst. With a twist of his foot, laser punch-blade knives slipped noiselessly out of Celia's sleeves, the handles falling naturally into his grasp. He brought both his arms over his head, reaching back for the man's ears; the laser blades shot out on impact, cutting through the man's skull with a crackling, popping sound. Raymond thrust the blades upward, cutting all the way through the top of the man's head. The arms around his throat went limp, and Raymond was pulled off balance as the man slumped to the street. He fell onto one elbow, then rolled away, retracting the blue blades that now shown in the night. He scrambled to his feet, his back against one wall of the alley, dropped the laser knives into tool pockets along Celia's thighs, and pulled out his disruptor. Overhead, he heard the sound of an approaching glider. Search lights hit the other end of the alley and started sweeping toward him.