The Hollow Prince Page 8

  Her eyes twitched and a slight moue dimpled the right edge of her mouth. “One fraction,” she said again.

  Not a good sign.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Even with the haze of advertising, I could see the stopdrop from here. Every employee in Emporium 31 could. She should have multiple angles available. B-R SysAdmD shouldn’t have dropped that data set already; the ante-meridiem shift was still on. Even if they were crunching some serious t-flops to de-dupe it, there—

  “I’m sorry,” she said, drawing my attention back to her composed features. “That data is not available right now. Perhaps you’d like to inquire again later?”

  “Will my odds improve?”

  Her lips tugged into a thin smile. “I do not have that information.”

  “Of course not.” A thought struck me and I blinked, ghosting the Ring Coordinated Time on my retina. Thirteen twenty-seven. “What is the closest time stamp you can retrieve for me?”

  “Oh nine thirty—” She blinked. “—eight.”

  “That’s a four winding—” I stopped. A four winding retention window. What sort of baboon-brain was in charge of SysAdmD at Baskin-Robbins? “Ah, thank you,” I amended, keeping that question to myself.

  She hung all her sub-processes, directing her full attention at me for a fraction, and then gave me a nod that went, I thought, a touch beyond professional courtesy. I tried to think of something smart to say, but the kid’s screen went black. Eyes out.

  He scratched his nose. “So . . .” he started.

  “Yeah,” I said, clearing my throat. “Just give me a scoop of Rocky Road. In a dish.”

  Something to chew on while I considered this new wrinkle. Baseline paranoia—the kind I got paid to explore—suggested that the individual who used this station had known about B-R’s data retention window. They knew ICE timetables too. Covering their tracks like a professional.

  I wasn’t thinking about the Visual Monitor and that last bit of eye contact. Not at all.

  *

  Depot 12-B4 was a half-shell unit—an electro-bonded extrusion of ceramic with a pneumatic receptor and a battered 4ts-mon. Archaic, by any standard. I had d/l’ed their Lifecycle Management Protocol during the drop to Emporium 31. They had been EOLed shortly after the SI & R, but some middle manager down-chain had modded the LMP to only remove them as they broke down, a decision which failed to consider the high QA standard for this early generation of pre-fab. They made them to last counterclockwise.

  I could probably bit-sling responsibility of this mess over to Asset Management Directorate. My recommendation to retire all the stopdrops when the Corporate Influence Limitation Regulations had gone into effect was in the GPAR attached to the LMP, and with some serious butt-in-chair time, I could make the later amendment pop when someone queried the LMP. But that meant trusting the corporate chain to do the right thing and not panic.

  I had spent too many years thinking about what happened when the brain trust panicked. I had forgotten what a calm and rational response would look like.

  Holding my half-empty dish of ice cream in one hand, I swiped my ICID through the reader, and when asked for confirmation, I wiped off the grime on the screen and pressed my thumb against the glass. Like the iDeeBoy, the stopdrop promptly perked up and threw open its security panels to me.

  As I suspected, there was nothing on the internal surveillance from earlier ante-meridiem. Flicking back through the log, I had to go two cycles before I found a live image. The blurry motion of a flat object—on all three feeds at once, I noticed. Boom. Blackout.

  An alert in the log noted a security violation had been submitted to ICECORE. I didn’t even have to log on to the central ICE network to verify how much of a non-event that was to ICECORE. The vandalism would have just flipped the Need To Retire bit on this stopdrop. The AsManD sweeps got further and further apart every turn, and it would probably be a couple of rotations before their automats recycled this drop.

  Exactly what my message sender was counting on.

  This individual wasn’t just covering their tracks; they were also using our system to slow discovery of their malfeasance. The term paper wasn’t an isolated delivery. There were more coming. You didn’t need a Theorist to spec that.

  My phone icon bounced in my right peripheral. I glanced at it, noted it didn’t have any tags, and accepted the handshake request. “Max Semper Dimialos.”

  “Hello, Max,” she said. I was a little surprised that it was her. I mean, I realized a split fraction after I took the call that I was hoping it was going to be, and the thrill of hoping and receiving took me a little by surprise. “Would you meet me for a coffee?” B-R’s EyeSpy asked.

  “Ah,” I said, involuntarily glancing back at the rounded hump of the Baskin-Robbins Emporium, even though I knew she wasn’t onsite. Visual Monitoring was done out of B-R HQ in Chrysalis. “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m sort of busy right now.” Mentally kicking myself as I said it, even though it was true.

  “So am I.”

  “Ah,” I repeated. I was presenting quite the erudite image of the ICE Security Directorate. “I’ve got a bit of a red flag at the moment. I don’t really—”

  “The Bliss Canopy Rotunda,” she cut me off. “Verdigris Level. One winding?” She paused, but not long enough for me to gurgle out a response. “It’s not that sort of meeting.” And then the call terminated.

  I shoveled the rest of the ice cream in my mouth to cool down the flush rising in my cheeks. I hadn’t thought—

  Okay, I had. I mean, it’s not like anyone went to Starbucks for just coffee any more.

  *

  She hadn’t gotten a room; she sat in plain sight, on the stool closest to the coffee bar. Taking advantage of our need for nostalgia, Starbucks interior design hadn’t changed. They even still made their coffee by hand, using anachronistic steam-driven espresso machines. My heart skipped a beat when I saw her sitting there, in the noisiest spot in the room. Such security consciousness. A small demitasse cup sat on the green counter, and on a nearby plate was a half-eaten Starbucks bar.

  She was wearing a long white coat with white feather trim, and a solar flare head wrap that matched her shoes. She still wore her glasses and, when I got a good look at them from the side, I realized they weren’t the sort that one took off casually, even for bed.

  I ordered tea, generating some confusion with the barista, and sat down next to the Eyes of Baskin-Robbins Emporium 31.

  “You should be a bit more discreet,” she said.

  “Coffee makes me twitchy,” I explained. “And if I had ordered coffee, it’d just sit there on the table. And no one would notice that in a place like this.”

  “You could have said something.”

  “You didn’t give me a chance.”

  “I—” she stopped. Her glasses darkened several shades as she glanced around, reading heat patterns, microwave signals, and who knew what other manner of electromagnetic waveform. “I’m sorry. I don’t do this very often.”

  “This?” I asked.

  “Meeting people,” she said. The corner of her mouth twitched, an unconscious emotional tell. “I . . . spend a lot of my time logged in. My UVEI is less than 8.”

  I had noticed. But it wasn’t an unhealthy color. Not like the grid lizards you find nesting next to the heat vents down in the UPS farms.

  “I’ve gotten off to a bad start, I see,” she continued. “Let’s try this again.”

  “Okay.” I held out my hand. “Max.”

  She took it. Firm, but not demanding. Supple, but not too soft. A working hand that was well cared for. “Sophie.” Her fingers twitched as she let go, tickling my palm.

  “Nice to meet you.” I swiveled around on my stool so we were both facing the same direction, as if we were watching the parade of ads on the wall of jumbo v-mons. “So, Sophie,” I continued, trying my best to appear completely at ease, though truth be told, I was just as badly out of practice. “
What can I do for you?”

  “Earlier, when you asked me to retrieve the visual feeds from the lines at that Emporium 31 . . . ”

  I sipped my tea and nodded.

  “. . . I told you the closest time stamp match I had was four windings prior. Exactly four.”

  “Right. Your security policy was written either by an overzealous LegD or you had a bunch of baboons as consultants.”

  “It’s not,” she said. “It’s actually sixty-four windings. Or, at least it was. A new policy went active at cycle change, precipitating a systemic data purge.” She gave me one of those smiles. Hinting at a wellspring of laughter, one that hadn’t quite breached. “I need to thank you, actually. If you hadn’t asked to see the data, I wouldn’t have had a need to access the archives. It may have been a full rotation before I noticed the change in policy. That would have been . . . ”

  “Catastrophic?”

  “Bad, for my PIPe. I have a mid-turn review next rotation.”

  “Good luck.” I raised my cup.

  “Thank you.” She put her hands in her lap. “But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.”

  “No?” My voice rose on the second letter, a rather awkward squeak as if I was attempting to impersonate one of those autonomous miPets.

  She shook her head. “The change was executed via a shell script. From a root login. On a system within our network that had been zombied by a terminal with a GTAC of ‘1E78/BF001.’”

  “A what?”

  “A GoogleTube Access Cipher key.”

  “I know what it is, it’s—”

  “The key belongs to ICE, Max.” She spelled it out for me, as I appeared to not be getting it. “One of your systems hacked my network last night.”

  “Ah,” I said. There I went, reverting to monosyllabic responses again. “Well,” I tried, but my head was filled with too many options, Theorist paranoia overflowing my buffers.

  She stood up, and pushed her half-eaten snack closer to me. “Please, finish this for me, will you?” She put her hand on my shoulder. “And please pull the plug on whomever is accessing my dataform.”

  She left, and I realized, as the aroma faded in her wake, that she smelled like flowers.

  When I touched her plate, I noticed it wasn’t quite flat on the table. I lifted it slightly and felt underneath. Stuck to the bottom was a tiny lozenge, a mag-strip candy—a tasty treat that came with a data payload. As casually as I could, I tugged the tiny lozenge off the plate and popped it in my mouth. As it dissolved on my tongue, my iView registered two numbers. One was the full GTAC/GMAC of the ICE terminal that had zombied her system. The other was a directory access number.

  I scrolled back through my call log.

  Different than before. This one must be her direct line.

  *

  I didn’t want to call right away. Subtle signals aside, she appeared to be focused on the business at hand, and I wanted to have something useful to tell her when I did call. As a result, it was late—nearly cycle change—before I did.

  “Hello, Max,” she said without preamble before my iView had even registered that the handshake protocol had been completed. As much as my paranoia resisted, I found that I liked having her voice in my head.

  “Hello, Sophie.” I remembered why I called her in the first place. “I found the zombie maker.”

  “But . . . ”

  “How do you know there’s a ‘but’?”

  “There always is with men.”

  “Hey, that’s . . . ” Probably true. “Okay. So, yeah, there is a ‘but’—” I stopped and took a deep breath before continuing. EyeSpies always charted on the SocDis spectrum; it went hand-in-hand with their ability to focus and multi-task. There was no point in getting angry with her. She probably wouldn’t understand why I was upset.

  “But,” I said, moving on, “the terminal was EOLed a half-turn ago, and removed from our routing tables three rotations later. I have a priority request for documentation of its recycle tab, but it’ll be post-meridiem before I hear anything.”

  “This news does not comfort me, Max.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Every ‘tube-ready object has a unique GTAC/GMAC key,” she said as if I didn’t already know this. “It won’t accept power without one. You can’t reuse a key.”

  “I know, Sophie,” I interrupted. “But—” It was like I was stuck in a bad code loop—but, but, but . . .

  “So, if this machine has been recycled, how did its GTAC/GMAC end up in my iNetMom dashboard yesterday?”

  “I’m still working on that,” I said. “That’s why I’ve got the Query registered.”

  She was quiet for a fraction. “This isn’t useful information,” she said.

  “It’s progress,” I tried. “You know, forward movement on the situation.”

  “What if the tag is present? What data does that give us?”

  “Well, I don’t know if the tag is there or not. That’s why I’m asking.” I was raising my voice again. Theory-brain was defaulting to my SOP with internal SysAdmD communications. Everyone thought they knew something about Theoretics.

  “If the recycle tab is available, then you have a spoofer.”

  “Yes, Sophie, I suppose that is possible.” I sighed. Somehow this conversation hadn’t gone like I had hoped.

  A spoofer was, like a zombie maker, a system that hid behind other systems, though in the case of the spoofer, it falsified its GMAC to the ‘tubes. Both zombie making and spoofing were old hacks that had been bound out by the 23.r4 rev of iStructure. Of course, that was only true if SysAdmD was current on its iStructure revs.

  My confidence in ICE SysAdmD wasn’t that high, but I wasn’t about to share that with an outside agency.

  “What is your position on the presence of a spoofer, Max?” Sophie asked.

  “I—look, why are you breaking my balls?”

  “I’m . . . that’s rather odd syntax, Max. Rather aggressive.”

  “No, I—it’s an idiom. Late 20c. Sorry. That was inappropriate of me.”

  “Late 20c,” she replied, and for a few fractions, all I heard over the audio link was a micro-noise that seemed like the sound of her breathing. “You know much 20c?” she asked finally, in a different tone of voice. Much less brittle. Silkier, like this was an Avatar consultation.

  “A little,” I said. “It’s a hobby.”

  “A man does need a hobby.”

  “And how.”

  “Um . . . I . . . well, during your personal cycle time—”

  “Sorry, another idiom.”

  “Oh, yes.” She went silent again, and for the second time I wished this handshake had included a visual feed. I couldn’t get a read on what she was thinking, and the theory-brain was starting to wonder if I was talking to the same woman. Her voice had changed enough that—

  “I, yeah, I’ll know more about that tag in a few windings,” I said, shaking off the professional paranoia. “I’ll let you know.”

  “Please do,” she said, and then: “Max?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you for calling.” And then she was gone.

  Theory-brain was telling me she was a wethead who had VMed her brain, splitting personalities to take advantage of the unused processor cycles in her brain. I went and took a cold shower, trying to drown theory-brain.

  Theory-brain got back at me while I slept, filling my dreams with dozens of Sophies, each one with a different personality.

  I kept my sanity by holding tight to a loop of her last four words.

  *

  Ante-meridiem, another iDeeBoy was waiting outside my office. I iSigned and took the ICEpak into my office. Flipping the bits that made my three square a black box, I opened the envelope.

  Thirty fractions later, I dropped the security screens and made a handshake with Prescott Four’s XA. “I need thirty fractions,” I told him when the call connected.

  Micro-pause. “Next rotation. Four Cee—”

  “No, I ne
ed them right now.”

  “I’m sorry, Security Theorist Semper Dimialos, but your request is out of compliance with your EnforD Registration. I cannot, obviously, comply.” Prescott Four’s Executive Administrator was a rail named Equus Grimester, a man prone to fashion explosions and dismissive sniffing. I got one of those sniffs now, coming through loud and clear on my audio link.

  “Ask him about Giselle.”

  “I will not, ST Semper Dimialos, and I would like to remind you that you are in violation of i3Cee 7, part 11g, as well as i3Cee—”

  “But, i3Cee 12, part 7a,” I interrupted, “states that any employee may request—once a turn—a thirty fraction window of the CEO’s time, so as to—”

  “I know the i3Cee,” Grimester interrupted me, punctuating the sentence with an especially loud nasal inhalation.

  “Good. I want my allotted time with Prescott Four, and I’d like it now.” I gripped the edge of my desk tightly to stop my hands from shaking.

  Another pause, longer this time, and when Grimester came back, his tone had gone all obsequious and musical on me again. “One fraction please.”

  It was more like a hundred fractions later when Prescott Four’s voice rang in my head. “Salutations and variations, Security Theorist Semper Dimialos,” he said, with an air of restrained jocularity. “My XA tells me that you’ve requested a 30fPA communication. I haven’t had one of these in . . . I can’t remember the last—”

  “Giselle Akkwild Haussingterre,” I said, getting to the point. If I let him, Prescott Four would ramble on for most of my allotted time, and then Grimester would cut me off before I got more than a few words out.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Tell me about Giselle.”

  A long pause, one that lasted well beyond my thirty-fraction limit, which validated a few theories rolling around my head. When Prescott Four spoke again, his voice had lost its levity. “She doesn’t exist, Max.”