Authors: ed. Simon Petrie
Yes. At lunch, she could pop in at a trendy store in the mall near the Panoptitech office, and take a look at the bags. He worked so hard, he deserved something nice. She’d miss looking at the worn canvas bumping against his thighs as he hustled to make his eight o’clock Non-Euclidean lecture, though. She picked up her phone and took a quick video, a little souvenir to add to her collection. The memory on her phone was starting to get pretty full.
* * *
She wasn’t ordinarily a weeper, but when she walked into the cafe she nearly burst into tears. He wasn’t there. How could this be? The schedule clearly showed that he was supposed to be working the afternoon shift. Then her eyes caught sight of his familiar messenger bag on the coat rack and Marian began to breathe again. She ordered a latte from the red-haired girl behind the bar and took it to her usual seat. She sighed as she saw Graeme emerge from the men’s washroom.
Under her chair was a wrapped parcel from Cooper’s, containing an outrageously expensive bag. Marian couldn’t remember the last time she’d spent as much on something for herself, but that didn’t matter. Graeme was worth it, and as a student he’d hardly be able to afford something like that for himself. It made her happy to be able to give him something nice. Besides, she’d be getting a nice bonus for the extra overtime she’d be putting in. That morning she’d offered to take on one her of colleague’s overtime shifts once she saw where the job was going to be.
She sipped her latte and smiled. She knew that Panoptitech held the maintenance contracts for most of the CCTV cameras in the city, but it still seemed like some kind of a sign that they had a job in Graeme’s apartment complex coming up. It had been easy to convince her cube mate Simon to give her the shift; she’d told him that she needed the extra cash, but she knew he hated overtime anyway and would always be happy to get someone else to take his turn.
She stole a glance at Graeme as he squirted whipped cream on a hot cocoa. Would she leave the bag here for him to find at the end of his shift, or would she find a way to get into his apartment and leave the gift there? She was no locksmith, but you could learn almost anything online these days. If she put her mind to it, it wouldn’t be that hard. She looked out the window, but the sun was going down earlier every day now and she only saw her own reflection. And the reflection of Graeme’s face from behind the bar. She was sure she saw something there, something in his eyes that told her that what she felt was real. And that was enough.
* * *
He watched the woman, Marian, as she sipped her latte. He was polishing the milk frother, and could see that she was looking at him, too, using the window and the darkening sky as a mirror. She didn’t see him watching her, but he looked away anyway.
Graeme knew her name from going through the electronic receipts on the till. She always paid with her bankcard and her name and address were logged by the system. Employees weren’t supposed to have access to that level of detail, but it wasn’t well hidden. And coffee shop baristas often have a lot of time on their hands.
So, Graeme knew her name and where she lived and that she’d been leaving larger and larger tips for him in the past weeks. He smiled at that, though the money didn’t mean much to him. It wasn’t her cash that he wanted.
It had taken a long time for him to get the data he’d needed, but he’d finally swiped a Kleenex she’d used about a month before when she’d had a bit of a cold. It was gross, but loaded with the DNA that the lab had needed to concoct the serum. He didn’t really understand how it worked, but they needed samples of his DNA and hers in order to tailor the drug for her and to code it for him. Something about pheromones, he thought he remembered the website saying. He didn’t care abut the details so long as it worked.
He’d spent a month’s worth of his coffee shop salary on the stuff, but he had a decent stipend from school and on top of that he was a ‘watcher’, a paid informant. He never had anything to tell the cops, but he’d spend the few hundred bucks that showed up in his account without worrying about it. They’d cut him off eventually, he knew, but until then he could afford a dose of a designer drug to get what he wanted. What he needed.
His hands had been shaking when he’d broken open the ampoule over the cup for her latte. What if he screwed up the order and it got thrown out? What if someone else took the drink by mistake? What if she spilled it, what if … Of course, he worried for nothing, and he managed to sneak a look at her eyes as he handed her the large bowl-shaped cup she preferred. She hadn’t looked at him then, hadn’t even said thank you. But none of that mattered now.
Because now he was wanted. Now, her eyes lingered over his body with an intensity that he could feel burning on his skin. Now, she watched him, with a hunger that even she couldn’t understand. And, finally, in her eyes he felt alive.
He set down the silver milk frother and let his eyes meet hers in the reflection on the window for the briefest moment. He saw her cheeks flush and he allowed himself a small smile, then turned away as he very softly, reverently, whispered her name. Marian.
…Alter S Reiss
The last thing Raahi did before entering US airspace was to check his bounty. $451.28, three dollars higher than it was last week. There was the Dar Al Islam Foundation’s $50 for any Hindu, TANetwork’s $25 for anyone who wasn’t white killed in the US or Northern Europe, and the usual minor additions that living in the modern world entailed. Those last three dollars, for instance, probably came from the guy he had cut off trying to get to Heathrow. If he was murdered, the person convicted would get four hundred and fifty one anonymous dollars, courtesy of the information brokers in revolutionary Nepal, Former Tuvalu, and the other data havens which hosted personal bounty servers.
It wasn’t enough to make it worth anyone’s while, and that it hadn’t gone up meant that whoever it was that had stolen the Cydec’s servers either hadn’t figured out that he was coming after them, or didn’t care that he was. Whatever the reason, Raahi was grateful. The information that had been stolen was sufficient to own Cydec, which had a market capitalization of 4.8 billion dollars. Move thirty million into a price on his head, and anyone might decide to trade a half-dozen years in prison for a lifetime of luxury.
Of course, even without a bounty, the TSA did their cheerful best to keep him from getting anything done: 40% of air travelers, and 85% of brown skinned air travelers, had their palmtops and computers seized at the border. So he had to wipe his down to the operating systems as soon as they reached US airspace. The TSA knew he would do that, but someone connected to TANetwork had been caught at an airport with a laptop full of bomb-making information a few years prior, so they’d keep stealing people’s machines until Judgment Day. And while New York had ambient wireless, using the ambient for serious business was like drinking from a sewer pipe. It wasn’t until he got to Cydec’s Brooklyn offices, and logged in to the computer they had waiting for him that he could think again.
“Doctor Kapoor,” said the fellow who had given him the laptop. “A pleasure to meet you; I’m Martin Wainwright, director of operations here.”
“Mm,” said Raahi, flicking through the various top-level updates. A lot of information, nothing urgent. “Sorry,” he said, when he was done. “It’s been about four hours since I was connected.”
The other two in the conference room winced in response. “This is Al Tyler, who’s in charge of the physical plant,” said Martin, “and Dakota Hernandez, who handles data security.”
Hernandez was a shade darker than the other two, with glossy green hair. Before his arrival, Raahi had been through all their files, and if he wanted more, he could look through their files again. But it was conventional manners to pretend that he did not know that Tyler was going through a difficult breakup, or that Hernandez’s mother had died the previous year. Or that while the other two had bounties under three hundred, there were over seven thousand dollars on Wainwright’s head. Or, for that matter, their names.
“Pleased to meet you all,” said Raahi. “The official reports say that you have been having server issues. Now that we are not on record, the reports given to me said that thirty-seven high load servers were stolen from this facility. Was there anything on any of those servers to make them preferred targets?”
“It’s not any one thing,” replied Wainwright. “But those were two-petabyte systems. There’s client information, orders … there’s—”
“Ten thousand million ill advised downloads, foolishly preserved emails, and uncleared caches,” said Raahi. “Enough to hit us with fifty billion dollars in copyvio damages alone. These were facts in the reports I have already received. There was nothing in specific that someone would be looking for?”
Wainwright looked over at Dakota, who shrugged. “We don’t know everything on our drives,” she said. “If there is something, they know our servers better than we do.”
“That seems unlikely,” said Raahi. “Were all of the servers ours?”
“We owned 98% of the cycles, and 97% of the data,” said Dakota. “The other actors are our partners; none of the server spaces was rented or time-shared.”
Raahi exhaled. “Very good,” he said. “Very good indeed; that had not been clear in the reports I received. When working on the flight, it seemed to me as though our primary liability would be from people renting cycles. As things stand—”
“Renting cycles!” Wainwright was stunned. “Doctor Kapoor, they have Cydec in the palm of their hands. With the data they’ve stolen—”
“They don’t have the data,” said Raahi. Cydec was primarily an India-UK-Mali corporation. According to Wainwright’s file, he had risen through the ranks in US subsidiaries. It seemed that he hadn’t had as much training in technical matters as he should have.
“What?” he asked, baffled.
“I am certain that Dakota has explained this to you,” said Raahi. “The servers have Fivefish based data encryption. For them to get in, they’d either need to compromise the password server, which is in Bangalore, or have a valid password, or have hacked Fivefish.”
Wainwright looked over at Dakota, who shrugged again. “Miss Hernandez did make an explanation of that sort,” said Wainwright. “But it seemed likely that she was covering … that the thieves had found some way of accessing the information they had stolen.”
“That was a rational response, two days ago,” said Raahi. “Now, it is not. Monitoring of the password server showed no unusual activity in the past month; if they had access, they would have used it as soon as they possibly could, probably within minutes of securing the servers. The value of what they have stolen drops every minute. And if they hacked the Fivefish.” Raahi chuckled.
Both Al and Dakota laughed as well. Wainwright looked puzzled. Raahi made a note, recommending that the man get an intensive refresher, possibly to the level of a BA in computer science. Truth be told, most management could use that, but Wainwright was the man on the spot of a potentially dangerous break. If Raahi couldn’t send everyone back to school, he could get someone educated. “If they hacked the Fivefish,” said Raahi, “they could just empty the accounts of everyone in Former Tuvalu’s servers.”
“Or start a war in the Middle East,” added Dakota.
“A ham sandwich could start a war in the Middle East,” said Raahi. “But returning to our problem.”
“If they don’t have any way of accessing the data they’ve stolen,” asked Al, “why did they take our servers?”
“An excellent question,” said Raahi. His fingers danced across the keyboard, and he pulled up a server that Cydec still retained, the same model as the machines that had been stolen. He transferred everything it had to the network buffer, then randomized the access passwords. He had set his computer to echo on the others’ laptops, and they watched with varying degrees of comprehension.
Then he put his earbud on speaker, and called the manufacturer.
“DG computers, please hold,” replied the manufacturer, and for a few minutes, they listened to soft jazz.
“Low bidder?” asked Raahi.
“They make decent machines,” replied Dakota. “They don’t—”
“Hi, my name is Arja, how can I be of service to you today?” Raahi sighed. If this fellow was named Arja, Raahi was named Mister Pickles. The accent was clearly sub-Saharan. He was almost tempted to call the Hindi helpline instead, but Raahi’s Hindi wasn’t great, and it would leave the others completely in the dark. “There’s been some vandalism on one of our DG Elevation units, and we’re locked out. Can you—”
“Corporate account number, please?”
Raahi sent it over. There was another pause, and then Arja came back on. “We’re sorry, but the DG Elevation cannot be unlocked if the password is missing. It is possible to reformat the drive, if you’ll give control to the remote operator, please.”
Raahi transfered the call over to someone in Cydec’s technical pool, who would doubtless be irritated at having to do a complete re-install for no reason. Well, those were the consequences of having a job.
“So, it is trivially easy to get them wiped,” said Raahi.
“But we needed that account information,” said Wainwright.
“And they’d have records of wiping those machines,” added Dakota.
Raahi gave Dakota a look. “Unless,” she continued, “someone’s stolen the programs that DG uses for in-house work.” Then she banged away for a few minutes at her laptop, which she seemed to have built inside the case of an old IBM Thinkpad. “It’s up on the Iranian boards,” he said, after a while, “or at least, something that claims to be it is there—do you want me to—”
“No,” said Raahi. “No, we have security problems enough already. We have no current need for however many are hiding in that software package.”
“Why would they steal our servers?” asked Al. “It’d cost, what—three hundred dollars, tops, to get a system like that used. That’s nothing.”
“Three hundred multiplied by thirty seven does not produce nothing,” said Raahi. “But you are right; it is close enough to nothing so as not to matter. Perhaps I should take a look at the server room which they were stolen from before making any precipitous judgments.”