The Harmony Paradox

by Matthew S. Cox

  LRI’s GlobeNet presence took the form of a 102-story tower in regal silicon grey surrounded by a small park-like area with a handful of trees, an artificial lake, and a biking/jogging trail snaking in and around the miniature nature preserve. Whoever designed it had kept it professional; rather than some outlandish physically-impossible shape, the building would have been a perfect, rectangular bar if not for the northwestern top corner appearing sheared off. A flat corner spanned five stories, with the letters LRI at the center of the inverted triangle. The forty-eighth through fifty-fourth floor contained parking decks for hovercars, and a ground-level ramp on the south facing side hinted at an underground space for land vehicles.

  Normally, Katya would spend a week or so checking a place out in the real world before a job, but with Alex wanting this done tomorrow… and Katya wanting it done before any legal backblast could find her, she’d have to settle for exploring via cyberspace. That brought with it another element of risk―she would be relying on their virtual office building mirroring reality. While most companies did that, some went off the deep end in a world where physics didn’t apply.

  She circled the building in a downward spiral, her left wingtip only a few feet from the corners. When she reached the fifth floor, she diverted away and headed for a section of park with decent tree cover. Leaves rustled and scuffed as she descended amid the branches; the oddity of ‘feeling’ them touch her wings blanked her mind for a second or two after she landed. They offered an easy means out of virtual buildings, and unlike a vehicle-based travel soft, the system didn’t force them to remain persistent in the world. She didn’t need to ‘leave the car outside’ so to speak.

  Never before had anything touched them.

  Katya curled her wings around herself and wasted a minute or five stroking the soft feathers. She shivered at the inhuman sensation of having feeling in limbs that shouldn’t exist. How a human mind coped with such input went beyond her rather limited understanding of psychology or physiology.

  Get on with it.

  Solidity faded from the wings, reducing them to a wireframe drawing of feathers, which retracted into her back. She rolled her shoulders to adjust her bearings to normal and walked along the path to the front door. Being Sunday, the campus had little in the way of activity.

  LRI had its hand in biomedical products, research, diagnostic technology, and related software development, nothing the average consumer purchased directly. It seemed unlikely they would have much of a greeter application waiting in the lobby, though she didn’t want to attract the attention of a hopeful sales construct mistaking her for a representative of some hospital or private practice.

  Stealth in the GlobeNet worked in two ways. A physical barrier such as a tree or wall could prevent a program construct or living user from seeing someone, though only at a casual level. Anti-intrusion systems and defense operators ran programs that effectively let them see through walls. The second order of stealth involved the ghost electronics in her deck. They allowed the interface to disregard background detection, which could―depending on the skill and hardware of the other person―leave her unseen.

  For this portion of her mission, Katya needed to avoid detection. She went around the building, ignoring the main lobby, and sprinted across perfect green grass to the access ramp leading to the subterranean parking deck. Pink, red, and yellow splat marks on the walls of the tunnel leading down suggested the employees used the virtual garage as an arena for paintball. Since most ’net gamers used ‘real’ guns with simulated gore, she assumed HR had a problem with ‘violence’ and insisted on the use of paintballs.

  Fortunately, the designers recreated the real building enough for there to be an access elevator. According to the sign by the door, the parking deck extended five stories down into the city plate, and warned employees that the company would not be responsible for any injury or legal issues that resulted if anyone left the company property while below the surface.

  She activated the ghost mode of her NinTek before stepping around the concrete column at the end of the ramp and crossing the open area to the elevators. Instead of parked cars, the space contained an arrangement of obstacles, fortifications, and sniper’s nests, all awash with colorful splats.

  Hmm. This might be a fun place to work. She crept to the elevator and went in. A message appeared in text at the top of her vision, informing her that she had left the public GlobeNet and had entered a private network owned by Laughlin-Reed Innovation. A basic smiley face icon indicated the region as flagged ‘public.’ Many companies maintained public areas, so prospective customers could visit.

  A few mental pokes triggered a scanning routine on the NinTek, and by the time the elevator let her out in a first-floor hallway off the lobby, a small map of the building existed in midair ahead and to the right. She grasped the wireframe tower and turned it about, searching for the human resources department. It took under a minute to find it on the second floor. Another mapping soft sprang to life as she picked at the red square denoting the room as ‘nonpublic.’ The software analyzed network buffer memory, looking for the route path and destination of the majority of data packets sent out by terminals in HR.

  Where are the servers?

  Pulsing red extended in a thread from that room, snaking down along the second story to a vertical channel in the center of the building, dropped to the first floor, and headed into a large room in the northeast corner.

  Perfect, already on the first.

  She went left, away from the lobby, following the map to an employees-only door with a badge swipe panel. The act of pulling ‘lockpicks’ out of her pocket triggered a suite of intrusion software. Katya took a knee and stuck her tools into the solid plastic box intended to read RFID badges. Wiggling them around as a gesture of intent set the programs loose on the network. This portion of the network read as a Grade 4, reasonably secure. As much contempt as she had for Joey, she had to acknowledge his skill in the electronic reality. Where she relied mostly on pre-written hack softs that wound up being useless on networks over Grade 5 (and even then proved iffy), he talked about sneaking into Grade 7 networks like he’d been bored. Katya narrowed her eyes as her program ran. Being king of the GlobeNet didn’t mean anything when he seemed useless in the physical world.

  Lazy… pampered… fool.

  The thought he’d had the sort of upbringing that offered him the luxury to loaf about got under her skin. She couldn’t blame him for what happened to her, but she could hold him in contempt for scoffing at the ease he’d been gifted.

  The door chimed and opened along with a digitized voice saying, “Good morning,” followed by a distorted buzz where a name should’ve been.

  Katya ducked inside and followed the hallway past a series of small meeting rooms and offices until she could head to the right in the general direction of the data room. According to her map, the corridor sat behind the lobby by a good twenty meters, and crossed into the eastern portion of the building. Two hallways and a left turn later, she approached a small chamber bearing a desk and ‘security guard’ next to the passageway into the data storage array.

  Another soft, Haunt, changed her avatar into a faint transparent version of its usual appearance. While the visual effect did little other than cosmetics, it added another layer of interference to detection protocols, a software backup for the hardware keeping her ‘invisible.’

  The guard, in actuality a defense program, sat stone-faced, staring into nowhere as she crept past him. Five doors down a narrow, grey hallway, she ducked into the room housing the data nodes the HR terminals always talked to. She sighed at dozens of rows of constructs that took the form of ancient filing cabinets. She knew from her time with Joey that each ‘drawer’ opened forty or so feet long, laden with innumerable data tiles, silver squares four inches per side and one inch thick. The back and edges looked like mirror chrome, while the face contained a snapshot of the contents.

  It took about six minutes of tracing the red
trails from the HR workstations to the cabinets before she found the personnel records. She picked a random data tile bearing the face of a man in a lab coat and lifted the tile from the drawer. A gesture like opening a book caused the contents to appear in a floating virtual holo-panel. Katya generated a new blank file by mental command, which appeared as a glass box in her hand. She copied the structure of the employee record over, which animated as pouring a stream of various colored liquid into the empty tile. No longer needing the template, she returned Dr. Emil Shabaz to the drawer, and proceeded to edit in the information about Miss Rosalie Hernandez.

  Had she any intention to spend more than an hour in the building for real, she’d probably have gone to West City Biotech University and created a student record too, lest someone cross check, but if anyone suspected her of anything unusual, she’d be out of the building before they could even log in to verify her story. Posing as an intern with little security clearance didn’t put her high on the scrutiny list.

  She opened Alex’s information again to get the location code for the lab in which Dr. Crowley worked, and gave herself security access that would let her walk right in to the secure room. As far as anyone at LRI would know, Miss Hernandez worked as a lab assistant for that team, a college intern doing it for extra credit rather than pay. After embedding an ID photo based on her current net avatar’s appearance, she tucked the data tile into the drawer with the rest and closed it.

  On the far end of the same room, she found the database that managed the physical security of the building. She wouldn’t be able to get into the place in meatspace without a badge, though she could probably make do without a physical one. For the limited time she expected to be there, she only needed to fool doors, not people. If a guard did challenge her, she could play the panicky college student on her first day. They’d probably believe―with a little pheromone help―that someone screwed up and she hadn’t been given one yet. Unless that happened, she could use a burner NetMini to fake out the doors.

  After copying a few data tiles from the security system, enough to cobble together a ‘software badge’ that would let her NetMini replicate an access pass, she made her way back out to the elevator hallway. In the solitude of the empty parking deck, a holographic keyboard/terminal window opened in which lines of computer code formed as fast as she could think them. Katya programmed a virtual ID badge, which appeared as soon as she hit the ‘compile’ button, and hovered before her eyes. She plucked it out of the air and clipped it to her shirt. The identity token should allow her to roam around the building in cyberspace without an issue, provided she kept to areas appropriate for her ‘job.’ She’d spend a few hours learning the layout of the place, and then pop over to a nearby Citycam repeater for a little trick Joey showed her.

  Creating a new PID, or personal identity, generally required a fair amount of skill to do without official access. However, Joey had figured out a way to backdoor it in. The Citycam network shared information with the Department of Official Records. By creating an identity file with specific header information, the Citycam system would treat it as though the DOR sent a records update. That, in turn, would propagate the file across the surveillance grid and ultimately cause it to get ‘updated’ back into the DOR database. The downsides in the method included taking anywhere from two to four hours for the identity to respond to searches, and it would lack an official creation date. Any live operator at the DOR could tell the entry had been spoofed, but evidently they still hadn’t figured out how records entered the system without the create date, a hard-coded requirement. Given that Katya needed Rosalie Hernandez to exist for only one day on the off chance someone at Laughlin-Reed cross checked her, it would suffice.

  Katya patted the badge. “Now, let’s find that lab.”

  Bleary eyes stared back at Katya from the bathroom mirror. Despite her four-ish hours of exploring the LRI campus in cyberspace occurring while her real body lay inert on her sofa, her muscles ached as though she’d walked herself sore. Or perhaps her brain simply rejected having to obey an alarm clock like the rest of the workaday world after two years of waking up whenever she wanted. Steam drifted in a cloud behind her, seeping out of the autoshower tube.

  She tapped her NetMini, which projected the ID photo she’d generated of ‘Rosalie Hernandez.’ While her CamNano cyberware couldn’t alter the physical shape of her face, highlight and shade created illusory contours that could fool the eye in the absence of close scrutiny. Millions of nanobots darkened her skin to match the rich hue of the photo. Bit by bit, mental command added adjustments to her face that made the years peel away. Not that going from twenty-eight to nineteen required a lot of effort. Besides, people kept telling her she looked young for her age. Granted, her former owners had probably done something to her at a genetic level to keep her pretty longer.

  Eve traipsed in, threw off the t-shirt she’d slept in, and hopped on the toilet.

  Katya, still naked from her shower, glanced back at her with a ‘do you mind’ look.

  “Nice disguise,” said Eve. “No need to run screaming, I’m just peeing. Not gonna bomb you out of the room.”

  Katya blinked. “Umm… I’m not wearing anything. I just got out of the shower.”

  “Neither am I.” Eve’s eyebrows scrunched together. “And? Oh… right. Guess I got used to military barracks. No privacy. Open showers.” She shrugged. “At least there weren’t any boys at the facility.”

  The irony of that made Katya chuckle. As clinical as her ‘owners’ had been with her and the other kids they trained up as ghost operators, they provided them with tiny apartments that included private bathrooms. More like being small adults not allowed to leave their place of employment than prisoners or even soldiers.

  She forced aside her feelings of awkwardness and kept working on her appearance.

  “I could take up a position on the Robertson International building across the quad if you want sniper cover,” said Eve. “It’s got the best vantage of the front, and since you’re going in early in the day the sun will be behind me.”

  Katya shook her head. “I shouldn’t need it. And how are you going to work a sniper rifle? They’re taller than you.” She made eye contact via the mirror.

  “Modular.” Eve held her hands up about two feet apart. “The MSR-18 collapses down to a compact AR. It’s portable.” She shrugged. “’Course you’d have to go buy me one. I don’t think they’d sell me a firearm.”

  “No.” Katya laughed. “They most certainly would not.”

  Eve moved from the toilet (which flushed itself) to the autoshower, pausing at the door. “So… are you going to leave an eight-year-old girl home alone while you go break the law?”

  “You’re not the average little girl.”

  With one foot in the tube, Eve put her fists on her hips and struck a superhero pose. “No. I’m better than that.”

  Katya laughed again, tinged with guilt. If something went south, what would happen to her? Her only real choice would be not to get caught. “This isn’t going to be too complicated or dangerous. Walk in; walk out. Meet someone nearby and hand off a neuro-stick.”

  The autoshower hatch closed with a thunk. Eve’s voice took on an echoing quality inside the tube. “It’s the simple ops that always go to shit.”

  Katya leaned her weight on the sink, head bowed. “Thanks for the confidence.”

  “No problem.” Eve laughed. After a few beeps from the console, the autoshower kicked on. “Guess I’ll wait here.”

  Only an hour or two. “I suppose.”

  “Or you could drop me off at one of those child-sitting places. Naturahealth runs one with this badass climbing wall. But, if you wanna save the money, I’m totally fine being alone.”

  Katya glanced at the pale blur moving around within foggy plastic cylinder. If she left her here, and the social services people showed up for a ‘random check,’ the shit might hit the fan. Not like she could tell them Eve was twenty years old. They’d either
think Katya’d gone crazy, or if they did believe her, whisk the kid off to be poked and prodded. “Okay, you got the address of the place?”

  “You sure you don’t want sniper cover?” yelled Eve, over the shower.

  “Positive.”

  Katya went over and over the interior layout of the Laughlin-Reed building in her mind as the PubTran Hover brought her to Sector 13650. At Ͼ1277 compared to Ͼ248 to ride in a ground autocab, it felt like robbery―but she didn’t want to spend four hours on the road. Many accused the PubTran cars of being rattletraps, but they had nothing on the terror of the hovercar versions. A tiny ground car barely big enough for four adults with a top speed of about ninety could do only so much damage. Hurtling across the sky at the fiftieth-story level in a vehicle made as cheaply as possible, driven by an AI programed as cheaply as possible, redefined fear.

  At 8:51 a.m., the car landed within walking distance of the LRI campus. Katya, rather Rosalie Hernandez, stepped out on wobbly legs. The silver and teal hovercar emitted a pleasant jingle.

  “Thank you for using PubTran Prime! We hope your priority travel needs were met with flying colors. Have a great day.”

  With that, the PubTran car shot off into the sky. At the sight of one of its ion cowls visibly flapping, she put a hand over her mouth to keep from throwing up.

  I’ll take the maglev back. Never again.

  She allowed two minutes to set her nerves at ease, and walked across the parklike area around the building to the main entrance. Going for ‘college student,’ she’d worn a short-sleeved tee with the logo of the ‘Screaming Raspberries,’ an ‘alternative’ folksy thrash metal band that the GlobeNet indicated popular among the seventeen-to-twenty-year-old crowd. Plain blue jeans and a new pair of grey sneakers completed the outfit.

  The front doors opened as she approached, releasing a blast of sterile processed air. On Monday morning, the lobby buzzed with activity. Voices and the shuffle of footsteps emanated from five different hallways leading deeper into the building, all of which connected to an area behind a massive security station that also served as a reception desk.