Flight of the Vajra (24 page)

“Enid, look,” I said. “The bride’s Highend.”

“She is?” Enid flattened her nose against the
glass. “She
is
. Cosm alive, you’re right.” (Even she said “she”,
reflexively.)

“I saw that too.” Kallhander remained leaning back
in his seat. He’d probably used the cab’s outside observation surface to get a
better look—something neither of us had bothered to do, as we were out of the
habit. “I haven’t seen a biological attenuator in a very long time.”

“This is the first time I’ve seen such a thing,”
Ioné said. “In person, that is."

Enid’s voice was tiny. “I can’t believe she’s
doing that.”

But she was, I wanted to say out loud. She deliberately
shortened her lifespan and accelerated her aging process to match her partner.
Call it a compromise: she becomes that much less Highend; he enjoys that much
more time with her.

Was that kind of meeting-in-the-middle what
Angharad had in mind? I thought. Some kind of compromise for the Old Way; a
schism on her part—but even she’d admitted she wasn’t sure where this next step
would take her.

Something
like this wedding was far more than what most Highend would ever stoop to. At
best, they thought of the Old Way as amusements or pets; a bother to keep
around, but good fun. At worst, they felt no more for the Old Way than someone
would fret about their intestinal flora.

So what is he to you? I thought, looking at the
bride. Partner, pet, or parasite?

Do you even really know?

I released the pause on the cab, and watched the
wedding party out the rear window as we swung into traffic once more. I could
have followed their progress through the city’s public sensory surfaces, but
some part of me felt I’d intruded enough. This is probably the first and last
time I’ll ever seen them, I thought. Their journey’s going to be every bit as
much a jump into the unknown as Angharad’s. I only have this one opportunity to
wish them well; I’d better make it count.

I raised my hand like I was waving goodbye and
thought, Good luck, you two.

“What’re you doing?” Enid said.

“A little goodwill, for the dowry,” I replied, and
put my hand back down. I don’t think she’d expected that at all.

Back at the hotel
I parked myself in
the large easy chair in the corner of my room and contemplated the second set
of files Kallhander and Ioné had given me. This had been scraped from another
part of the Cytherian uprising, and it didn’t take long to find the
similarities: they were ostensibly from different protomic end products, but
they’d been built by the same hands. Same disguises, same encapsulation, same
internal machine state encryption . . .

“Kallhander,” I CLed him, “where did they pick
these pieces up from, exactly? Do we have any details about the environments
they were found in?”

“The first batch was found in what was left of the
city’s nerve-center office after it had been damaged by incendiary explosives.
Apparently the militia decided to do as much destruction as they could before
being put down. The second batch, the one you’re currently analyzing, was taken
from a room in the top floor of a building about a kilometer and a half away.
It’s a rooming-house, normally rented out to people by the month as a sort of
get-away-from-it-all rustic retreat. It was one of a number of buildings
damaged by explosives of the same type as the ones used in the main office.”

I
was
getting used to casual CL again. The
whole thing had been done as “full feed”—not just as disembodied voices in each
other’s heads, but with the very precisely-constructed illusion that each of us
was in the room with the other, chatting away.

“You looked into who was renting the place?” I
said.

“Records show it was currently unoccupied—but I’m
sure as you know, records can and do lie. We’re attempting to find the building
manager, who owns a number of similar properties across the planet. It’s not
clear that he’s still alive, but the planet is still in some disorder so it may
not be possible to know definitively for days or weeks.”

I waved a hand and put away the squirming,
undecodable innards of the protomic virtual machine. I wasn’t any closer to an
answer than I was the day before, and the last thing I needed was to give
myself a freshly minted headache. “What about the city office?” I said. “You’re
treating it as compromised, I hope.”

“Protocol for a compromise was declared yesterday.
They’ve already started issuing new keys for all protomic goods planetside.”

Protomic compromise was a common insurrectionist strategy—or
at least, it had been, once. Hijack an Old Way head of state and hold him for
ransom, or use some other variety of extortion. Whatever the method, the point
is to get the victim to surrender the master encryption keys for some line of
protomic goods—anything from a vehicle type to a construction material. Once
compromised, that material could then be reprogrammed at will by the attacker. Buildings
could be made to collapse or rebuild themselves in nasty ways; clothing could
be turned against its wearers. Many planets outright banned protomics for a few
years because of such things, but the ban never held up for more than a
generation. Plus, the tactic eventually lost its utility after key-invalidation
and replacement schemes became common. You could buy yourself maybe a few
minutes, an hour of time tops if you pulled something like that today. Maybe
even a day total if you did it planetwide.

Maybe a few minutes or an hour tops was all the
time they needed to get away with—what?

“To get away with? Sorry, I didn’t follow,”
Kallhander said.

I shook my head; I’d been think-leaking into my
CL. “Just speculating out loud.” Maybe best to keep any brilliant theories to
myself for now anyway.

I canned my CL connection entirely and continued
musing. One thing you could do with a compromised key set was
plant
something—you could inject hidden code, like all the code stashed in my clothes
or in the
Vajra
.

Or the code whizzing past me in this sample.

But that tactic also had its limits. In the wake
of a key compromise, planets typically dug into their emergency-management
budgets and paid for wide-scale recycling of personal protomic goods, and also
did security sweeps of buildings and public structures. Such sweeps had turned
up hidden code in the past, but again their occurrences had dwindled with time:
you were more likely to find rocking horse shit in a nursery than you were to
find code if it had been stashed like that. What’s more, such stashed code
would be rendered useless by a key change: it wouldn’t even run, and in more
recent iterations of protomics you wouldn’t even be able to
find
it
again after a key change. Hope that wasn’t your last will and testament in
there.

Real criminals didn’t even hack protomics anymore.
They saved themselves a step and used extortion or blackmail to do that job by
proxy. Or they did what I’d done: they’d obtained raw, unlocked substrate and
programmed
that
. Protomics of that kind couldn’t be cross-hacked or
key-changed by the manufacturer; they could only be slagged, disabled for
keeps. Ask the riot police who tried to put down the block-by-block uprisings
in Ulan Nordol the week they were arguing in that very city over the treaty to
restrict raw protomic manufacture. The protesters turned sidewalks into glue,
turned their clothing into honey-bombs a la the lining of my jacket,
transformed entire (thankfully unoccupied) buildings into tarpits. The police
fought back with shock grenades and inhibitor foam and good old flamethrowers (that
is when burning the whole neighborhood down or roasting people alive wasn’t an
issue), all the various brute-force ways to disable protomics. All tactics
adopted, in turn, by undergrounds and resistances across the board—but any such
fight, over a long enough span, becomes first an arms race and then finally a
stalemate.

The Ulan Nordol Declaration for protomics
restriction passed with a mere single dissenting vote. The violence abated on
that planet, but seethed all the more fiercely everywhere else for another
generation. This was the end of an era, went the outcry. Protomics were freedom
of invention incarnate; without unlocked protomics society would become stratified
and innovation would wither away . . .

Such howling went on like that for some time,
until people found that most every single one of the things that could be done
with fully-unlocked protomics could still be done with their locked
counterparts . . . and often with less hassle. Of course, one man’s
hassle was another man’s learning experience—but in this case, it was more like
one man’s learning experience was a billion other men’s hassles.

Not that any of this stopped people from longing
for more. The black market in unlocked substrate flourished quietly, in pockets
and corners. Never for very long, either: the minute any one manifestation of
it became
too
successful, in came the IPS to close everything down. The
few that bent the law to get the latest dress designs or surgical microsystems
were handled as mere civil issues, like the jaywalkers and casual drug-takers of
old, and seen as being in the end no more dangerous. The ones responsible for
distribution and creation, though—they were the ones who got their fingers bent
back hard.

The demand for raw, unlocked protomics dwindled to
a marginal few. Convenience had succeeded where force and ingenuity had both failed.

I’d been above ground for enough of my life to only
lament the loss of the unlocked a little bit. Once upon a time, protomics were
fraught with the kinds of risks that people associated with unsanitary surgery,
manual driving, non-irradiated food. Now it was a social and technological
paving stone, one not even many Old Way worlds chose to do without. It was too
useful to ignore, too powerful to live without, and too thoroughly vetted to be
afraid of. It wasn’t immune to problems, but we’d come to a point where those
problems weren’t more than a case of the hiccups. And if you wanted an easier
life—and who in their right mind didn’t?—you had to give a few little things
up.

For some people, those few little things were
everything. For most, they were a sneeze in the wind.

Now, all these years later, protomic hacking was
so far underground it had just became easier for real criminals to go and steal
the raw material. Criminals like me.

I hadn’t
stolen
anything, though. It had
been a gift to me from Cavafy, someone who wanted me to make good on the
promises and dreams that had germinated in the space between us. And whether or
not I was a criminal rested entirely with the likes of Kallhander.

At least now I had some idea of what to do with Cavafy’s
gift other than flit around looking for answers that weren’t there.

“Kallhander?” I CLed
after giving up on
getting anything more done
.
“When do I get to see the data from
the
Kyritan
?”

Even the slightest pause from him was bad news now.
“I’ve been asked to withhold that until—”

Cosm take this, I thought. I stood up,
walked
into the next room where Kallhander was sitting by the window doing a great
deal of nothing, and stepped into his field of vision.

“Hi,” I said. “Let’s have this conversation out
loud.”

“My superiors are evaluating the report I returned
to them.” Out loud he didn’t sound any less disappointed than he had a moment
ago. “They’re impressed with the quality of your insights, but they have
ordered me not to share any other data with you until you’ve provided them with
at least one other element they can use to narrow the search for whoever
created this.”

“Are you still
not
going to call this
blackmail?”

“Henré, if it were up to me I’d give you the whole
file right now. But I’m not allowed to dictate the parameters of this
operation. One word from them and I would be obliged to have you both put into
custody, diplomatic attaché or not.”

I did a deep breathing exercise which to the
uninitiated sounds like exasperated sighing. “What kind of additional detail
are they looking for?”

“Anything that might lead us back to, for
instance, a previous project by the same individual or team that created this.
If we have some idea, however tentative, of whatever else they might have
worked on, it will narrow down the search.”

I tapped at the adjoining wall and extruded the
mini-bar. There was a small bottle of double malt in there which looked like it
would do nicely. “I’m going to need this as research material,” I said. “I hope
you don’t mind me adding it to the room tab.”

One shotglass later I re-opened the file they’d
given me, set it to one side, and began free-associating.

Over-engineering, I thought. Protomics were by
default a little over-engineered, for the same reason spaceships were: when you
had that many people relying on them constantly and intimately, you wanted some
a five-sigma guarantee that things weren’t going to break. Possibly six-sigma,
if you could get that far.

This was five- to six-sigma grade work. This wasn’t
something created for consumer or even domestic applications. This was
military, or scientific. It would have been easier to tell if there was more of
an idea of what it was part of, but the only way to do something like that
would be to get a much larger scrap. All I had here was code that looked like
it drove some computational nodes, a couple of PRNs (power-regulation nacelles)
from today’s batch, and a few other bits and blobs.

Context, I told myself. Look at it in context.

I didn’t have a context. But with a couple shots
of whiskey in me, I felt bold enough to cheat.