Idempotency (30 page)

“I’ve already assigned your work to a new employee; you needn’t worry about it. The stuff sells itself anyhow.” It was a rare joke from the insipid Searle.

“And my role in all of this?” Dylan asked, genuinely curious.

“Once a salesman, always a salesman—right, Dylan? But your role will be to sell—nay—negotiate with governments. This role will be crucial to T-One-Fifteen’s success.” Korak was leafing through more documents now. Without looking up, he said, “Will there be anything else, Mr. Dansby?”

Dylan shook his head. “Guess not. I’m going to head home. There’s not much I can do here right now.”

Korak didn’t acknowledge this comment. After a moment of hesitation, Dylan rose and went home early for the day.

Since Dylan’s departure to NRS and Seattle, Kristina had taken to virtTripping with the SolipstiCorp headgear on a near-nightly basis. It had taken quite a bit of socializing, often with Lester’s connections, to procure access to her first darkVirt. And once she got ahold of her first invite, nabbing subsequent invites to other darkVirts became a cinch—all she had to do was prove her technical chops and she was in. Sure, she had to be careful about ensuring her identity didn’t get out, but so did everyone else in the darkVirts.

Her favorite darkVirt included ghostTripping to Mars. The Mars darkVirt had gained a level of infamy thanks to Garrett Hawpe’s decision to end his life there. A digital memorial had been erected in his honor, which consisted of a silhouette of Hawpe’s profile floating above the initials
GH
. The initials appeared as a vibrant red liquid that effervesced slowly into the Martian atmosphere. The image itself was becoming a symbol routinely associated with the cause of open, unregulated networks. Techies, when off corpSoil, had taken to wearing T-shirts with the dynamic symbol, with some of the shirts actually emitting bubbles floating off of their sleeves.

Those were the nights. The days—the days were trivial. And Kristina loathed trivialities. She was finding herself arriving to work late and leaving early. She took long lunches, and often left for an extended afternoon coffee at the off-corpSoil establishment that she had first visited with Dylan. For the first time in her illustrious but short career, Kristina had achieved an
exceeds
rating, rather than her typical
outstanding
rating during the recent SolipstiCorp review process. She was clearly struggling for motivation.

The only task at work that interested her had been the investigation of what had occurred with Dylan’s faulty deathTrip. The problem had become an obsession for her. She’d found incongruities in the code that looked suspicious, but nothing conclusive. And so, when remedial tasks were off her plate, she went back to hopelessly scanning code, logs, and holoVids of Dylan’s deathTrip, hoping to stumble on the silver byte.

This day found Kristina at Dylan’s nameless café off corpSoil, on government land. She sat at the counter facing the street, reading various tech feeds on her BUI. The holographic display bounced in front of her, shining a bright neon green. The open-air café was drafty, owing to a dank fog that had refused to burn off—and seeing how it was now late afternoon, the fog was likely to stick around through the evening. Kristina quite liked the fog, for it hid people and things, and was presently hiding occasional passersby slowly shuffling past the café. She had grown to like being around the lower class as well. It had taken some time, but her fear had subsided, and she realized they were just like her: struggling through the day, the same monotonous day, every day a slightly different shade than the last.

“It’s so damp today, it’s probably even damp inside the Nets,” said a man who had sat down abruptly beside her.

“Probably,” Kristina replied without looking up.

The man rolled his eyes, then cleared his throat. “Let me try that again: boy-howdy, it’s cold today.”

Kristina squinted in confusion, then glanced over to her new neighbor. Her eyes were immediately drawn to the man’s animated tattoo: a flame, flickering subtly up his arm. Kristina had heard more rumors of Simeon in the darkVirts. No one really believed he existed; but everyone agreed that if Simeon did exist, he would most certainly have an awesome animated flame tattoo on his arm.

Simeon was wearing a loose floral-print, button-down shirt with jeans. His long hair showed more blond today, but the red wasn’t hiding entirely; the mane began at two scraggly sideburns and continued on, flowing unkempt behind his large head. Two small earrings lacked a gleam owing to the fog. He smiled and nodded toward Kristina as if to say hello. She returned a silly grin, with her eyes wide open.

“Dylan—oh God—is something wrong? Are you still working with him?” Kristina asked, suddenly nervous.

“He’s fine,” Simeon assured her. “And I’d prefer to think that he’s working with
me
.”

“Wow. Wow! Ha! You’re—uh, here!” Her tall, thin frame was now sitting upright as if she’d stepped on a rake that promptly smacked her in the face. She clasped her hands in front her.

“Yep, I am here. We’ve been keeping a close eye on you, Kristina. You seem to be questioning your lot in life. Fair?”

“Fair.” Kristina was suddenly sullen, her frame sagged, and just as suddenly she snapped upright and her eyes turned bright. “What can I do? How can I help? Just say the word. Want me to go undercover? I can share my SolipstiCorp headgear tech with you.”

“Whoa, slow down.” Simeon began to chuckle. The warmth of his bass-filled
uh-huh
s instantly put Kristina at ease. “I wouldn’t be here if we didn’t want your help. Let me rephrase that: if we didn’t
need
your help.”

“Okay then, what can I do?”

“Two things right now. First . . .” Simeon reached into the pocket of his floral-print, button-down shirt and pulled out a piece of paper that appeared to be a fortune-cookie fortune. He handed it to her underneath the counter, and she immediately read it, mouthing the words as she read:
Being aware of your fears will improve your life.

She looked up at him questioningly. Simeon looked back without saying anything.

“It’s a key. Why not use an encryptChip?”

He nodded slowly. “There’s nothing more secure than the brain. Memorize the key, and then toss it. You won’t need it anytime soon. When you do . . . you’re a smart girl, you’ll figure it out.”

She began to tear the fortune into small pieces.

He continued, “Now, more pertinent. I know that you’ve been researching Dylan’s deathTrip. I need to know everything you know. What can you tell me about it?”

“Not much, unfortunately. I’ve scoured the code. I retested the simulation a thousand times. I just . . . I don’t know. The doctors are convinced it has some something to do with Dylan’s specific neurophysiology, like he’s some kind of outlier, but they haven’t found any specific outliers yet. I’m not a neuroscientist, but I did major in biology. I’ve studied his neuromapping for hours and saw something odd. I met up with an expert in a darkVirt and he targeted the same marker I had seen. I’d love to get the records for Dylan’s great-uncle Randy and see if it matches. Still, there has to be something in the code to take advantage of the marker. ”

“So, what do you think then?” Simeon prodded.

“Well. I don’t like to speculate . . .”

“Speculate.”

“Well, okay, well . . . hmm—personally, I really think there was something strange with the code that ran the simulation. Like, maybe it was altered to react a specific way given a specific scenario, a specific deathTrip. Like, in the change-control software, I—” She paused. “Oh, it doesn’t really matter. I’m just grasping at straws.”

“No, go on, this is what we believe as well.” Simeon lowered his voice as a pair of security contractors walked through the slum’s alley.  The pair, bantering about the football game the night before, passed by Simeon quickly asked, “Why do you feel this way?”

“I have no proof, but I’ve found a few odd things. Like I was saying, there were some blank code check-ins in our revision-control system. Just blank time stamps, at least a half a dozen of them made on the night before Dylan’s deathTrip. But there’s nothing else related to the time stamps. No code, no comments, no nothing. I’ve asked IT about it—because the system we use is some system licensed from NRS, so there’s no documentation about it on the Nets. Anyhow, IT said that transient time stamps can happen during code reviews of related packages, but that just sounded like bullshit to me—”

“It’s bullshit, all right,” Simeon grunted. “Anything else?”

“Well, I found something in the code itself. A code path that would never get executed given the way our current deathTrip simulations are engineered. But, with a few subtle changes to the simulation, this code path could get run.”

“And if it did?”

“Well, it’s nothing, really. It just adds a subtle variance to the amount the deathTrip is allowed to operate with the limbic system. The thing is, I couldn’t find who added this code—there’s no revision history of it. IT was again, predictably, unhelpful.”

“Limbic system. Interesting . . . that controls emotions, depression.” Simeon put his hand to his chin and reiterated, “Interesting.”

“Exactly. Honestly, if that piece of code was something nefarious, it’s not enough to cause what occurred with Dylan. I think . . .” She hesitated. “I think maybe they forgot to remove that piece of code.” She leaned in toward Simeon and quietly added, “After I asked IT about it, the code was gone the next day. The only history of its removal was a blank time stamp.”

Simeon chuckled. “That’s proof enough for me.”

“But what are they trying to do to him? Why are they . . . reprogramming him?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out, Kristina. We have some hunches, but nothing concrete.” Simeon stood up abruptly. “I have to leave. You’ve been extremely helpful. Fight the malaise of the everyday, Kristina, and you will hear from us soon. Good?”

She smiled. “Good.”

Appearing briefly confused, he added, “Look, be careful. Don’t talk to anyone. SolipstiCorp’s CEO will do anything to make Coglin happy; he wants the sale to NRS to go through. He’s a trillionaire the moment that sale is complete. So no talking.”

She nodded. He returned her nod slowly and added, “I have to get out of here. Take care, Kristina.” Simeon turned and walked through the back of the café—to where, Kristina had no idea. She sat motionless on her counter stool, adrenaline pulsing through her nervous system. She watched the passersby shuffle through the fog, blissfully ignorant of the goings-on of the rich, yet entirely affected by them.

And she waited anxiously for her next encounter with Simeon.

Her boundless dark hair had once touched the deepest cavity of her long and slender lower back. It had been one of Sindhu’s defining features, requiring years to cultivate. Even now, as she stood in line with over a hundred other new Titus recruits, Sindhu had a fleeting desire to cry at the recent loss of her flowing locks. And while there were advantages to her now ear-length short hair—especially in the sweltering spring heat of the Mexican inland—Sindhu couldn’t help but feel as though she had lost an appendage; even going so far as to wonder if the occasional headache was merely ghost pain over her lost hair.

The line she now stood in was moving painstakingly slow. The group was waiting in an industrial loading area, and the large canopy that rose above them provided little respite from the sun’s oppressive heat. The recruits had arrived at the south end of the Titus facility by way of a new magRail rail system, installed for the sole purpose of travel and shipping to the Titus facility. The ride was uneventful, lasting about ninety minutes. The railway began in Guadalajara and traveled northwest, just shy of Jalisco’s state border with Nayarit, deep within the thirsting mountains of the Sierra Madre.

The only noteworthy observations that Sindhu had made thus far concerned the security surrounding the train ride to the facility. The checkpoints were subtle to the unsuspecting, but Sindhu was neither fooled nor unsuspecting. She noted the treelike protected watchtowers dotting the hills, which, as the train drew closer to the facility, grew more numerous and began forming perimeters. She detected through her upgraded ocular implants a strong wireless diffusion field, blocking all incoming and outgoing data. This train ride had marked the first time she had been unconnected in over five years. Finally, just before they entered the facility’s grounds, the magTrain traversed a mammoth thirty-meter high concrete wall, and then went over a deep ravine that formed an effectively impenetrable geographical boundary. On the other side of the river hundreds of metal towers rose up like thorns, creating a digital fence that continuously decrypted and analyzed over-the-air signals, filtering all incoming and outgoing network traffic, tracking movements on the ground in the immediate area, and overlaying all of it with digital satellite imagery from the heavens above. Titus was a technological fortress, a digital castle.

Sindhu had been in awe upon initial arrival, for about five minutes, then quickly soured on the experience once the group had left the confines of the train and began waiting to clear the final security hurdle. Even the butterflies she felt had been sweated out of her pores. All Sindhu could do now was pine for her lost hair.

Just twenty-four hours earlier, SOP had been tipped off about a new batch of recruits heading to Titus. Simeon had a contact within the Mexican government sympathetic to SOP and the plight of the lower class. NRS had applied for a bulk amount of Mexican work visas for employees with Indian citizenship. Simeon and team discerned that NRS was hiring outside of Mexico to further obfuscate their intentions, but this was just a guess—yet another unanswered question to add to the greater riddle. They all agreed the turn of events was serendipitous, as it allowed SOP the perfect opportunity to implant their secret weapon within Titus: Sindhu.

Sindhu, on the other hand, was justifiably frightened.

“Simeon, I have doubts. I very well could get caught! How will they not know it is me?” she had asked him.