John Golden: Freelance Debugger (2 page)

Falmer breezed in and offered me a fourth cup of coffee from a little single-cup machine in the corner.
While that brewed, I found a socket and plugged Sarah into it, leaving her leaning against the wall
[12]
.

—
[12]
Seattle power: fruity and piquant, with the hint of citrus that comes from a dash of hydroelectricity. Not as subtle as San Francisco, but quite palatable.—

“Can I assume we can speak freely here?” I said, as Falmer settled back in his chair, which clicked and buzzed ominously as it accepted him. “Your contract indicated a strong need for confidentiality.”

“Of course. And it's all just a just in case, if you take my meaning. I trust my people, but better safe than sorry. You shouldn't discuss anything important with anyone but me and Deli.”

“Deli?”

“Head of our IT department. In fact at the moment she
is
our IT department, but we're hoping to change that, just as soon as we get this little trouble sorted out.”

I nodded. “On our side, there's a form I need you to sign. It just says that you understand the kind of thing that goes on during a debugging, and talks a bit about our limits of liability.”

“Oh! I got it this morning. Hang on.” He tapped at his computer until it woke up, then punched a few keys. “That should do it.”

“Got it,” Sarah said in my ear. “We're clear.”

But Falmer seemed determined to be helpful. A nice change of pace. Hands poised over the keyboard, he looked up at me. “Is there anything else you need before getting started?”

“I'll need access to your network, and the run of the facility. You should inform your security we'll be poking around.”

I was surprised that he'd acquiesced so easily, to be honest. My waiver clears me from any responsibility for anything I do in the course of a debugging, with enough clauses and including-but-not-limited-to's that I could set fire to the building
[13]
or drive a tank through the front doors
[14]
without owing them a dime. Most new clients have lawyers who start yowling like cats in heat as soon as they catch sight of it.

—
[13]
He has.—

—
[14]
Technically he hasn't done this one; it was the loading dock.—

Falmer frowned for the first time. “You'll have the access you need, of course. But why would you want to physically investigate the building? Faerie burrows are a network phenomenon, surely.”

“Usually, but not always,” I said. “Some breeds can manifest physically for limited periods. At a run-of-the-mill installation, I'd say it was unlikely, but I'm assuming you have a well-maintained security setup?”

He laughed. “I like to think so. It's our business.”

“In which case, what we're dealing with is by definition unusual, so I don't want to rule anything out.”

He was smiling again, but now it was strained. “Nevertheless, John, you know that we have to keep secrets in this business. I'm legally obligated to keep them, in fact, by my agreements with our investors. You can wander around the operations floor all you like, but if I let you into research and someone found out...”

“I'm already bound by six different confidentiality agreements, not to mention my personal standards and code of professional ethics
[15]
.”

—
[15]
Said code could be written in a matchbox without taking out very many matches.—

“I assure you that your secrets are safe with me.”

“Still.
In the pre-IPO phase, we have to play Caesar's wife.” He threw up his hands.

“How about this? In the unlikely event that you need to access our research office, come and ask me, and I'll consider the matter. If I'm forced to say no, you'll get the balance of your fee regardless.”

Maybe Falmer wouldn't win the perfect client award after all. I shrugged.
“As long as you're willing to put that in writing.”

“Absolutely.”
He pushed his chair back. “Now let's get you down to IT to see Deli. She can set you up with network access and give you all the gory details of our problem.”

~

IT turned out to be in the basement. It had the two basic components of every small IT shop: a machine room, made unfit for human habitation by the constant arctic blast of the air conditioners, and an office/storeroom/junkyard.

A good tech knows never to throw anything away that might conceivably be of use to someone, since he or she will inevitably be the first one people ask when they need an extra monitor, spill diet soda on their keyboard, or discover a weird burning smell coming from the back of their machine.

When the head of the company wanders in looking for 'one of those little green dealies, you know, about this long, you use them to make a square plug into a round one', being able to produce the required part in a few seconds goes a long way towards assuring one's job security
[16]
.

—
[16]
John worked as an IT drone in what he refers to as the “bad old days”, and he retains a strong sympathy for those still in the trenches. One of his (few) redeeming features.—

This office was typical, which means it looked like an apartment from which the police have just extracted a four-month-old corpse, except full of bits and pieces of tech instead of old newspapers and cat litter.

A small desk and chair were pressed into a corner to occupy the absolute minimum possible space, leaving the rest for stacks of keyboards, tangles of cables, and piles of anonymous brown cardboard boxes.

Behind the desk was a young woman, banging away at a keyboard with evident frustration. I put her in her late twenties, with nut-brown skin and straight black hair drawn back in a no-nonsense queue.

She wore the techno-geek uniform of jeans and black t-shirt, and wire-rim glasses framed a face that was quite pretty, in a mousy sort of way
[17]
.

—
[17]
Here we go. I'm hardly a fit judge in such matters, but I'm not sure that 'quite pretty, in a mousy sort of way' justifies the number of surreptitious observations that John felt obliged to make over the next few minutes. (Though I suppose it wasn't her face he was looking at.)—

As we entered, she cut loose with a string of profanity that would have blistered the ears off a Bangkok sailor. Falmer's smile didn't even flicker.

“Nice to see you too, Deli.”

She looked up and sighed. Lack of sleep was written on her face, and I recognized the way her fingers drummed on the desktop as symptomatic of someone in the last stages of a caffeine binge. I winced sympathetically.

“Hi, boss,” she said, slumping back in her chair.

“
No luck, I take it?”

“
This is not possible,” she said flatly. “I have checked, and re-checked, and double-super-secret checked. It can't be happening.”

I couldn't help myself. “Come on. I'm sure you're proud of your security system, but every system breaks down eventually. Everyone knows that.”

She gave me a withering stare. “Because I am not an idiot, I am aware of Oberon's Law
[18]
. I am referring not to the fact that something got in, but rather to the fact that it appears to have left no evidence of how it got in while doing so. That should be impossible.” She shifted her glare from me to Falmer. “Who is he supposed to be, anyway?”

—
[18]
The aforementioned homily about a system only being secure when it is turned off.—

“This is John Golden, the expert I told you about. Give him everything we've got on the problem and whatever system access he needs. Help h
im however you can, all right?”

“Ah.” She turned back to me, and I recognized her expression. It was the pained smile of the geek preparing to swallow her pride and kowtow to an idiot because he's higher up the org chart. I'd worn that smile almost continuously, back in the bad old days. “Good to meet you, Mr. Golden.”

We exchanged a tepid handshake. Falmer clapped his hands together and said, “All right. I've some things I should take care of upstairs. Deli, if anybody gets in your way and you need a word from me to sort it out, let me know. Mr. Golden, good luck! I look forward to your report.”

The words 'I look forward to your report' pushed a button deep in my soul labeled 'Panic', a leftover response from my years in the trenches. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw 'Deli' flinch. Falmer appeared not to notice, and gave us another dazzling smile. Then he left, and an awkward silence descended in his wake.

I cleared my throat. I'd gotten off to a bad start with the one person whose help I would genuinely need, but it wasn't too late to start making amends
[19]
.

—
[19]
Excellent justification. I'm sure he'd have been just as solicitous if she'd been some grizzled neck-beard.—

“Should I really call you 'Deli'?” I said. “I mean, I can if you want, but ...”

She stared at me blankly for a moment, then chuckled. “Only Mr. Falmer calls me that. Well, him and a few of the boys from the second floor. He has a thing for food nicknames, I think.”

“Can I ask your real name, then?”

"It's Delphi," she said, pronouncing it 'del-fai'. She had a faint trace of a British accent, though I couldn't place it precisely. "Call me Del, if you like."

"Much better.
I'm John. I'm sorry if we got off on the wrong foot."

"I'm sorry I snapped at you," she said, lifting her glasses with one hand and rubbing the heel of her palm into her eyes.
"It's been a long couple of days, and this has been driving me crazy."

"Believe me, I know how that goes."

"Let me show you what we've got." She started to turn her monitor so I could see, but I held up a hand.

“First Sarah needs a network account so she can poke around. She's logged on to your guest
network, you should be able to see her.”

“Sarah?”

“My assistant.” I put my hand on the laptop bag slung over my shoulder. “Also my sister, it's sort of a family firm. She's remote.”

Delphi nodded and switched her attention to her monitor for a moment. After a few clicks of the mouse, she frowned.

“I see her logged in, but...”

“Damn,” Sarah said in my ear. “I forgot to tell you, I can't spoof an outbound trail from here. E
verything's locked up too tight
[20]
.”

—
[20]
In my defense, he should have known that already!—

“She can't be remote,” Delphi said. “There's no traffic out to the net. But there's a lot of activity...” A few more taps, and she looked up at me, suspiciously. “Are you running some kind of network-mapper?”

I try not to explain about Sarah if I can help it, not because it's a secret, exactly, but because people tend to be a bit weirded out.

“In a way.”
I gave a little sigh.

Under the circumstances, though, there was nothing for it. I patted the laptop bag again.
“This is Sarah.”

“
You mean it's some kind of expert system?”

“
No,” I said, patiently. “She's my little sister.”

Delphi's eyes narrowed. I could see the wheels turning behind them, trying to decide what kind of lunatic she was dealing with.

“Your…sister.”

“There was an accident. I'd rather not go into the circumstances,
though
[21]
.

—
[21]
I will. He lost my body in a poker game against a transvestite minotaur. On a pair of nines! You can get details on the whole sorry episode in
John Golden and Portia's Solution
, but let me just add here for the record that I feel I behaved with exemplary courage and levelheadedness through the whole affair.—

T
he upshot was my sister's... soul
[22]
, for lack of a better word, ended up transferred into an old Dell Inspiron
[23]
.

—
[22]
This is a matter for debate. As an atheist, I believe that I am merely a computer program that happens to convincingly
simulate
Sarah Golden. John always replies that for all he knows, the same could be true of everybody he meets, with an aside to the effect that some of them are not even particularly good simulations. I proposed several experiments that could resolve the issue, but he refuses to 'muck about with my insides', so the issue is still unresolved in spite of the potential for significant advances in philosophical thought.—

—
[23]
Never inhabit an Inspiron 1720 if you can possibly avoid it. Something about the math co-processor makes everything smell like burning tin.—

We've upgraded her a bit since then, of course.” I could see this was not convincing enough. It rarely is, except to other debuggers who've spent time in burrows and know the sort of weird things that can happen in there. “Go ahead and give her access, she'll tell you herself.”