The Harmony Paradox

by Matthew S. Cox

  Damn. She eyed the front counter, where two women and a man in grey security armor with Sentinel Corporation logos sat at tables behind a man and woman in normal office attire. A handful of other security officers stood around by the hallway entrances and the inner end of an enormous scanning machine consisting of five square tunnels, no doubt packed with scanners of various type. The setup reminded her of the Berlin Starport, even down to the hint of coffee in the air.

  Acting too ‘lost and new’ would attract attention from the security team, but acting too ‘I’ve come here every day for years’ might bite her in the ass considering this being Rosalie Hernandez’s first day.

  With as natural a walk as she could summon, she crossed the lobby and entered one of the scanner tunnels. She hadn’t brought a firearm, and her specialty cybernetics had shielding to hide them from scans. Only the upper end of military equipment could pick up enough of an anomaly to raise suspicions. A distant buzz sounded when she reached the midway point, and thin strips of red light appeared in recessed grooves along both black walls.

  A spike of fear ran down her spine, as she scrambled to think what might’ve triggered an alarm. Before she reached the end of the tunnel, a woman in Sentinel Corporation armor stepped in front of her. A compact assault rifle hung on a strap at her side, a rig that would let her bring it to bear in under a second if needed.

  Katya put on her best ‘confused college student’ smile.

  “Miss Hernandez,” said the woman. “Please step to the side.”

  Facial recognition… at least the record held up. “Is something wrong?” Katya edged left once she exited the scanner, and stopped at the side of the faux-marble counter that surrounded the front station. The three other officers inside each had five holo-panel terminals on front of them, full of security camera feeds.

  “You have a NetMini.” The officer gave her an expectant look.

  Katya blinked. “Well, yeah. Duh. Doesn’t everyone?”

  “This is your first day, isn’t it?” asked the guard.

  “Yeah. I’m an intern.” Katya smiled. “First day.”

  The guard looked her up and down. “No badge?”

  Shit. Shit. Shit. Katya acted annoyed. “Umm. No one gave me one. I just got told to show up and go to Lab 11-B.”

  The female guard folded her arms and shook her head. “I swear, those people in HR get dumber every damn week. Look, kid. Laughlin-Reed takes security very seriously. We can’t allow any personal electronics out of the lobby. You can either leave it in your car or we can put it in a cubby until you check out.”

  “Cara, this girl’s file doesn’t say anything about cyberware.” One of the male guards looked over.

  Katya rolled her eyes. “I told the guy I didn’t have anything major. Port, wireless ’net, and a chip board. Like who doesn’t have the big three?”

  Cara, the Sentinel Corporation guard, gave her an unamused frown.

  This is what I get for rushing. I should’ve made a fake badge.

  “I swear.” Cara grumbled and walked around the counter to a small swinging door. She went up behind the man looking at her file. “Why do they even bother having an HR department at all? We wind up having to do everything.”

  Katya glanced at the main entrance, debating between her odds of fleeing without getting shot or going with the college dare story. When Cara grabbed a plastic card and stuck it into a machine, she couldn’t believe her eyes―or her luck. They’re making me an ID badge…

  Cara tapped a few holographic buttons, withdrew the card (which had a holographic still image of Katya’s face embedded within) and handed it to her. “NetMini, please.”

  Katya extricated the device from her front left pocket. “One sec. Gonna tell the girls not to try and vid me.”

  “No problem,” said Cara.

  After sending Eve a quick message that she wouldn’t have access to her ‘mini for a little while, she tapped a fake email app icon, which put the device into ‘secure’ mode. In a second and a half, the machine switched over to a sandbox OS, which simulated the NetMini environment, linked to the false PID she’d made for Rosalie. If the security people checked it out, the device would appear to belong to a very boring young woman with only a handful of friends and almost no money.

  She sent two more quick emails to nonexistent people warning them not to try and vid her, and locked the device. The guard gave her a plastic tag with ‘1752’ on it in exchange. She passed the ‘mini to the man behind her, and he took it across the station to a wall of tiny lockers.

  “When you’re leaving, stop by and give us the tag.”

  Katya nodded and stuffed the tag in her pocket. “Okay. Gee, I’m glad you mentioned that. I guess I won’t bring my LimeTab. Ugh, they never told me. This is gonna suck without music.”

  “Sorry. No unauthorized electronics past this point. Surprised you’re not carrying a weapon.” Cara chuckled. “WCBU’s not exactly the safest place for a girl with your looks.”

  “I run fast.” Katya laughed nervously. “Really? Hmm. Maybe I should, but I’m kinda scared of guns.”

  “It’s just what I hear.” The woman shrugged. “Good luck on your first day.”

  “Thanks.” Katya attached the ID badge to her belt and walked over to the elevators.

  Never did she expect the security would actually help her infiltrate the place. So much for the virtual badge program. She grinned once no one could see her face. The panel emitted a pleasant chime when she swiped the badge past it.

  Being seen was bad enough… interacting with the guards created a five-pound lump of worry in her gut. Nothing for it but to go on. She far preferred ‘traditional’ sneak jobs. Thermal suit, black, in the middle of the night, no one laying eyes on her at all, hence the term ‘ghosts’ for people trained like her. When the doors opened, she stepped in and faced out.

  Tamara Crowley’s lab took up about one-fifth of the eleventh floor, along the middle of the western side of the building, nested in among other labs all around the outer edge of the floorplan. The central portion held break areas, bathrooms, an emergency medical station, storage, and a few conference rooms. As she had a hundred times in virtual reality, Katya headed straight for Lab 11-B. A handful of people, some in white lab coats, some in business attire, gave her odd looks.

  As soon as the door for Lab 11-B came into view, a tall blonde woman with a face like a holovid-star coming the other way stepped in her path. The woman looked to be in her late twenties, but something about the set of her jade-green eyes suggested her age was a Reinventions lie.

  “What on earth are you doing here?” asked the woman.

  Katya blinked, bit her lip, and pointed. “Uhh, I work here. This is my first day. I’m an intern from WCBU.” She showed off the badge on her left hip.

  The blonde folded her arms, shaking her head. “Did they forget to tell you about dress code? You look like you’re on the way to a sorority party. Who are you and who is your supervisor?”

  A mental command activated a series of small cybernetic components in her trachea. Nanobots assembled a stress-reducing pheromone, which she began exhaling within a second of wanting to. Katya shrank a little, looking apologetic. “Rosalie Hernandez… I’m supposed to report to Doctor Tamara Crowley.” She added a ‘kid caught doing something wrong’ huff at the end, puffing the air toward the woman’s face.

  “That’s Lab B. I should drag you straight to HR and have you sent home to change, but…” She blinked, seeming light-headed. “I suppose it’s not your fault no one told you anything. Make sure you dress appropriately tomorrow… and I will be sending a message to Doctor Crowley.” The woman took a breath, blinked again, and smiled with an overwhelming air of peace. Anyone looking at her would assume she’d taken a hit of Flowerbasket. “Go on then. Don’t be late.”

  “Thanks.” Katya nodded, and hurried up to the door, which opened at a swipe of her employee badge.

  A small area on the other side contained the expecte
d lockers, and she helped herself to the first plain white labcoat she found. An airlock of glass doors separated the changing room from the lab, which hadn’t been included in cyberspace. Hope that thing’s automatic.

  The inner door opened at her approach, and closed a few seconds after she’d gone in. Hissing filled the chamber, and a sense of a light mist washed over her. Her Tox filter didn’t pick up anything dangerous in the air, so she stayed calm. Forty seconds later, the interior door opened, and a blast of antiseptic smell hit her hard enough to make her eyes water.

  Five women and four men stood at various stations in a room with glowing walls composed of three-foot white tiles lit from behind; cobalt blue light shone from the narrow gaps between the squares. Some of the people had their arms elbow-deep in machines, working with substances inside of sealed chambers via robotic grips. Others ran theoretical models on computers. Two of the men flanked a short brown-skinned woman, all three of them engrossed in a conversation about improving the near-field scanning optics of a medical diagnostic device LRI manufactured.

  Doctor Crowley had her back turned to the entrance, stooped over the viewport of an enormous electron microscope, though her puffy hair made her recognizable. Katya crept across the room and walked over to her. After going unnoticed for a minute, she cleared her throat.

  The woman leaned back from the eyepiece and gave her an imperious look tinged with confusion. “Who are you?”

  “Hi, doctor… I’m Rosalie, your new lab assistant.”

  “What?” Doctor Crowley blinked. “I didn’t―”

  “You know. Lab assistant. In case you needed someone to clean stuff, or perhaps move stuff from one place to another.” Katya smiled.

  “I don’t remember putting in a request for an assistant.”

  “You must be so busy you forgot.” Katya’s ‘eager new girl’ expression sharpened to a pointed stare for two seconds. “Alex in HR said you really needed a hand in here.” She glanced around to make sure no one had gotten too close, and whispered, “Shame Dr. Anders is getting all the credit.”

  “Oh, now I remember.” Doctor Crowley laughed. “You’re right about that, girl. With everything going on lately, I’d forget my hair if it wasn’t attached.”

  “Awesome,” said Katya, adding a bit too much ‘teen.’ “What should I start with?”

  “Well, I’m not sure what you were told to expect. I understand you’re studying nanobiology?”

  Katya nodded.

  “There’s going to be mostly boring grunt work… but you’ll get some interesting hands on now and then. Come with me.”

  Doctor Crowley led her across the lab to the back corner, where she swiped her badge at the wall to open a door. Inside, ten rows of shelves held various items, mostly canisters or clear plastic boxes with groups of smaller canisters inside. “Each of these projects has an asset tag, and there’s been a lot of complaining that things aren’t where they belong. You can start by organizing the sample closet.” The doctor handed her a datapad after tapping at the screen for a moment. “This is the room map, asset tags indicated where they belong on the shelves.”

  Katya took the datapad, giving her an ‘are you serious?’ look.

  After nudging the door closed behind her, Doctor Crowley leaned close and whispered, “I need a few minutes to get things ready. I’m not walking around with it.”

  Of course. “Okay. I’ll do my best.” She put on a smile worthy of Eager Girl, and stared at the datapad.

  Sneaking into LRI as a fake employee and working as an intern wouldn’t get her in too much trouble, assuming she could come up with a believable answer as to why she did it. Hacker bet seemed like the best excuse, people doing stuff just to see if they could, with no interest in monetary gain or real harm to the company. Such things happened all the time. With that in mind, she set about organizing the shelves so the physical objects matched where the datapad said they should be.

  Tamara Crowley, Ph.D. returned after fifty-two mind-numbing minutes. She came down the row of shelves where Katya hunted for a sample but couldn’t seem to find it. “How’s it going, Miss Hernandez?”

  “Good. Umm. CN-185-C seems to be missing. I can’t find it anywhere.”

  Doctor Crowley sighed. “Of course. It’s always the cannabinoids that grow legs.” She folded her arms and edged closer. A dark, silvery-grey object poked out of her sleeve. It had a rounded nose, looked about four inches long, and an inch thick.

  Katya made a show of scratching at her hair in frustration. When her hand came down, she palmed the bizarre thing, and found it spongy. The foam had a sparkling quality, suggesting it contained tiny bits of metal or crystal. A short length of string dangled from the blunter of the two ends. What the fuck is this? Some kind of space tampon… for a giant?

  “Let me see the chart.” Doctor Crowley reached for the datapad.

  “I’ve been around the room twice. I can’t find that sample.” She handed the pad over.

  “Hmm.” Crowley made a show of looking annoyed as she brushed the room map aside and opened a note file.

  ‹They scan for electronic devices leaving the building to prevent exactly what we’re about to do. I encased the neurostick in signal-absorbent foam from the EM lab. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to put that somewhere uncomfortable to get it out of the building. I don’t recommend swallowing it. The foam will react with stomach acid and become toxic. If you get caught with it, we’re both screwed. Once you’re clear, you can cut the foam away with any standard knife.›

  Katya leaned over and typed. ‹Can’t I just upload this into my headware?›

  “We’ve had a few things go missing,” said Crowley, before typing. ‹Do you have 2.7 petabytes of storage space? Besides, they will probably have you plug in on the way out to scan. If you hesitate, it won’t go well.›

  Oh yay. And I thought I finally took a job where I didn’t need to use my crotch. She shivered at the thought of the other option. Okay, small blessings. She grumbled. “Damn.” ‹No. That’s a shitload of data. Guess I feed it to kitty.›

  Doctor Crowley chuckled, and erased the text file’s contents before closing the app.

  Katya nodded and tucked the tampon from hell into her jean pocket. It created a rather noticeable swell that would surely get asked about. “I suppose you’ll need to investigate where that sample went. Oh, shit, it’s almost two… I’ve gotta get to class.”

  “All right. Not bad for a first day. Finding that sample is probably a lost cause. Whoever’s doing it keeps disabling the security cameras in here.”

  Katya raised both eyebrows.

  Doctor Crowley nodded. “Damn things haven’t worked for months.” She winked.

  “Some people.” Katya rolled her eyes.

  The itch to get the hell out of the building as fast as possible proved difficult to resist, but she kept herself at a calm walk across the lab to the airlock. Anxiety made the forty-five second decontamination spray seem more like twenty minutes before the door opened and released her into the outer room. She peeled off the labcoat and stuffed it into the nearest locker before heading out into the hallway and bee-lining for the ladies’ room.

  She walked to the rearmost stall, locked the door, and dropped her pants. After taking a seat, she fished the reason for the entire trip out of her pocket―thirteen million credits trapped in an elongated foam egg. Katya held it between her thumb and forefinger, staring at it. I wonder how much Alex is getting for this.

  “I’d make a joke about buying me dinner first, but I suppose you are going to technically buy me dinner.” And rent… and whatever else we need.

  To ease her nerves and relax, Katya spent a few minutes fantasizing about Arl Turing, an actor she favored from Our Final Hours, a drama series about the crew of an exploration starship stranded on a planet of hostile environments. The crew had been ‘hours from death’ for fourteen seasons. The magma cave scene came to mind; he’d spent the entire episode shirtless. Eventually, she bit her l
ip and inserted the Godzilla tampon. She suppressed the need to gasp, and seated it as naturally as one could such an object. So thoughtful of Crowley to add a string…

  After a flush to keep up the illusion, she fixed her jeans in place, washed her hands, and headed back to the elevator. Whenever she saw someone, she muttered about being late for a class. Hopefully, they would think it normal for an intern to leave in the middle of the work day.

  The weight inside her nether regions grew heavier with each floor down. By the time she reached the ground, it had become so ponderous, she expected the foam-encased neural memory stick would drop right out of her, jeans be damned, and hit the floor as a glaring mark of guilt.

  It took some effort to ignore the sensation of fullness and walk normally. With each step she took toward the scanning tunnel, the precious cargo grew heavier and more uncomfortable. Any second now, it would shock her, vibrate, beep, or do something to throw off her calm. No. Otto is dead. She had faith in the coating the Office of Operational Intelligence put on her cyberware, but who knows what type of foam Crowley found. Would the security people see a black void inside her, or would it diffuse and become invisible while surrounded by biomatter? Her jaw clenched, though she found it easy to look worried. She exited the sensor tunnel at a brisk walk.

  A man in Sentinel Armor beckoned her with a wave. “Hang on there, miss. Need to do a port scan.”

  Between nerves and not being able to think about anything other than carrying millions of credits between her legs, her brain took ‘port’ the wrong way, and her cheeks warmed. “Uhh… what?”

  “You’ve got an M3.” He tapped behind his ear. “Everyone with a port gets scanned on the way out. Company policy.”

  “Oh.” She slouched and approached the counter, grasping the edge with both hands. “Is it going to take long? I’m late for a class.”

  “Shouldn’t.” He handed her a standard interface wire. “Go on and connect that.”