Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (32 page)

I'd not figured out exactly what I wanted to say, and with Water Avenue fresh in my mind, the
nowhere particular
response wasn't really all that accurate. "Actually," I said. "I've got a problem."

Bobby snapped shut the lid on his computer and shoved it aside—a simple gesture saying I had his full attention for as long as I needed it. "Fire away," he said. His billing rate is so high that the simple act of saying "hello" probably nets him more money than I spend on lunch, but with me he always behaves as though he has all the time in the world—just as, even in the intensity of our youths, there were plenty of days when the two of us would take to the woods behind his home to throw stones in Longmeadow Creek, listen to summer crickets, and try to figure out the world. What Officer Tina saw in me was simply a reflection of Bobby, rubbed off by years of proximity.

I started to sit in his visitor's chair but was too agitated to stay in one place. Bobby's office might not be in the trendiest part of town, but it's large and has big, corner windows in one of the taller buildings outside the financial district. Standing close enough to the view that I could feel the visceral drop sweeping away in two directions, I told him about the spamjackers, then for good measure mentioned Hal, my no-longer super-secret phone number, and the dancing images on yesterday's news feed.

To my surprise, he was more intrigued by the hack on Hal than the assault on my autodrive. "I always thought those car things were vulnerable," he said. "That's why I drive a brain-dead Civic. If I crash into something, by golly, I'll be the one who smacks it, not some screwed-up computer."

With difficulty, I suppressed a grin. Bobby loves electronic toys as much as I do. He just knows too much about their vulnerabilities.

"The clock is different. The strength of those limited-purpose gadgets is supposed to lie in their simplicity. They're hardwired to accept information only from the Web sites you choose on the first day, and only under safeguarded protocols. Reprogramming them is supposed to require buying a whole new chip. Anyone who can beat that can hack just about anything. By the way, did you say the clock was connected to your memo calendar?"

I'd been watching the street people in their endless quest for quarters, twenty-five stories below, but now I turned to Bobby and nodded.

"Careless," he chided. "They probably got your password while they were spamming you."

"Damn, I never thought of that." Yesterday morning I'd been haughtily wondering whether Sis had stored my phone number in her autodial when, of all stupid things, I'd programmed Hal with a
password
. Someday, my love of gadgets would be my undoing. Maybe it had already happened.

Bobby shrugged. "What's done is done. But change that password. That was one sophisticated hack."

The familiar phrase pulled me out of what was setting up to be an extended bout of self-recrimination. "That's exactly what Officer Ti—I mean Nakamura, said about the car hackers." Windows forgotten, I paced the office, trying to remember what she'd told me about NASA and the weather channel.

"Sounds like someone's testing new products," Bobby said. "This could get interesting."

Problems Bobby finds "interesting" have been known to shake up entire industries. "How ‘interesting'?" I was starting to ask when Jill appeared in the doorway.

"I'm off to lunch," she called to Bobby. "Want to join me?" She leaned far enough into the room to spot me in the corner where my prowling had most recently landed me. "Oh, hi David. I didn't know you were here."

Jill is the business half of the team. In college, when Bobby was delivering pizzas to feed his computer habit, she'd been pursuing an MBA. The year after graduation, they'd founded their own business and never looked back. Her genius had been the realization that in the obsolete-before-it's-in-production computer world, it was safest for a start-up company to distance itself from the end user. From the outset, her goal had been to be everybody's favorite subcontractor. That had worked so well that one business school text now contained a sidebar lauding the "Pipsqueak theory" of small business, a good laugh to those of us who knew the real story behind the name.

"David's been telling me about a really slick hack," Bobby said. He may have gone straight long ago, but he still feels the outlaw's glee at beating the system. It's part of what makes him so good at what he does. He glanced my way. "By the way, I take it—"

A shallow nod was all the confirmation he needed. It was one of those "I know that you know that I know" type of things. Yes, I was giving Bobby a head start in what could be an important spamware race, and no, I wouldn't take a piece of the action, and there was no sense arguing about it. Chalk it up to all those days playing hooky down by the creek.

"Thought so," he said. He reached for his laptop and pulled it back toward him. "Francine and Raul did their usual great work on the Boeing project, but I need to spend a little more time reviewing it before we ship. I think I'd better do that ASAP, so I'll pass on lunch." He frowned slightly, reconsidering. Even after all these years, the allure of lunch with Jill wasn't something he'd easily pass up. Then he was back in executive mode. "Yeah. David's new one looks like something we're going to want to get on top of right away."

"Shall I bring you back a sandwich?" Unspoken was that Jill would also be eating at her desk, shuffling work assignments to clear the deck for "my" new project. That's how it is in an instant-turnaround business like spamware. If Bobby didn't beat this thing, somebody else would—or it would take over the world and trigger a micro-recession. In spamware, you're always playing for high stakes, although Bobby seemed content to leave the worries to Jill.

"Whatever," he said. Jill grinned at him and he beamed back. They both knew that without her mothering, he was a nutritional disaster area. When an "interesting" problem gripped him, he'd eat whatever you thrust in front of him and be unable to name it a moment later.

"Back in a jiff," she said. She gave me a cheery wag of the hand and walked out.

"Walked" is actually too bland a word for the type of locomotion Jill can turn on when she's in the mood. Usually, I think it's sweet. But this time, I found myself staring uncomfortably into the space she was in the process of vacating. It wasn't the sashaying gait that had my attention—it was the medium-cut hair bobbing on her shoulders. Over the years, she's worn it many ways—short, long, curled, straight—but she's never tampered with its color. Not that she needs to. She's the archetype of the California sunshine girl, even though she'd been born in Seattle.

You see, Jill is blonde.

Her hair color alone is enough to stir thoughts of beaches, and she's beautiful enough to have pursued a modeling career. All of this I'd known for years, but I'd never given it much thought because Jill is very much a one-man woman. When Bobby isn't around, she's friendly and pleasant—a good listener, a fun companion for a dinner group, someone who rated highly among my admittedly small circle of friends. It's only when he's present that she turns on the sexual energy, and then the wattage is directed only in one direction. I've never known whether it's conscious or unconscious on her part, but Bobby never fails to notice. So do his other friends. "I love to watch how he comes alive when she enters a room," one of them once confided to me.

Jill was gone, but I found myself staring after her several heartbeats later. My dream memory was sufficiently fragmentary that I'd never be sure, but if the woman on the beach hadn't been her, it was someone closely modeled on her.

Bobby broke his own trance to return to business. "I'll have this project done in a couple of hours," he said. "Would it be possible for me to talk sometime soon to that police officer of yours?"

"I'll check," I said, starting to make my own exit. Bobby raised a querying eyebrow—a gesture I'd once watched him spend hours perfecting. So far, this visit had been all business, and before getting back to work he was probably expecting at least a brief update on Sis and Mom. But I needed to get away, and do it soon. Except for the hours when he is truly in the throes of an interesting problem, Bobby is one of the most socially astute people I've ever met—and he knows me far too well for me to be able to hide anything from him for long. "I ought to at least make an appearance at work," I said, though it sounded lame. "I'll get back to you later." What I really needed was to do some serious thinking.
Was I secretly in love with my best friend's wife? And if so, what was I going to do about it?

Bobby stared at me for a long moment. Then he popped the lid on his laptop and waited for the machine to whir into wakefulness. "Suit yourself. Don't forget to change that password."

I'd like to say I started doing my serious thinking on the way back to the office, but all I did was walk in a daze that nearly got me hit by a bus. Even in the office, what I wanted were distractions so I could postpone the thinking I knew I needed to do. I found one right away in my electronic appointment calendar.

I'd not consulted it since yesterday afternoon. Now, the first thing it did was to tell me I was missing an appointment to buy tiny berries. As I watched, that switched to a notice offering discount car insurance. Scrolling ahead indicated that my entire life, as far ahead as I cared to peer, was booked in ads. Scrolling backward showed that the spam must have started coming in at about the time I was on Water Avenue waiting for Officer Tina.

As a test, I cleared out the junk on today's schedule, created an appointment to call Officer Tina in ten minutes, and sat back to see what happened. One by one, the open slots filled, but the "real" appointment wasn't overwritten by Tiny Berries or anything else. Good. That meant my schedule was salvageable, although I didn't have the energy to sort it out today.

My job is technically in the marketing department, but except for the Monday frenzy, I'm mostly a technical writer, serving as an interface between the design engineers and management. A lot of it's routine, and I pretty much set my own hours—something nobody complains about, because I work a lot of them. I'm one of the few people in the company who truly understands both the technical people and the marketing folks, and I could probably ask for a big raise if I wanted it. But being underpaid has its advantages, not the least of which is that it's easier to get away with dodging most of those boring project meetings that jumble up everyone else's schedule. Because they don't
really
need me until fairly late in the product development process, I can often get through two or three days in a row without having to talk face-to-face with anyone.

In fact, other than "call Officer Tina," now blinking at me from the screen, I had nothing important on today's schedule. I changed the password, cleared out everything but Officer Tina from the day's calendar, and reached for the phone.

I stopped with my hand hovering above the handset.
Oh, damn
. The appointment calendar was a modular system not connected to any of my other computerware, so I didn't have to change other passwords. But it was linked to the phone so I—or Hal—could dial it up remotely. If the calendar had been hacked…

I punched up my voice mail and found 164 messages. So much for that line. Lucky, my company could simply give me a new extension code, but I'd have to remember to give the number—again—to folks like Bobby, so they wouldn't be forced through the switchboard. Out of morbid curiosity, I dialed my home phone, finding that it had twenty-nine messages. I started a quick scan, sampling them one at a time, then paused when I heard Sis's voice. "Hi David," she began—a misstep that should have prepped me for what was to follow. "Don't hang up—I have a very important message for you. A friend recently told me about a tiny berry—"

In a panic, I hit the skip code before I had to listen to Sis talk about my penis, then summarily blanked all twenty-nine messages. This was a quantum leap in the invasiveness of phone spam. Not only were these guys progressing rapidly, but they had a phenomenal ability to link up information, such as my phone number and Sis's voiceprint. Bobby was going to have his work cut out for him on this one, and for the first time, I began having doubts. What if these guys couldn't be beaten?

My appointment calendar was continuing to urge me to call Officer Tina, so I decided it was a good time to take that advice. I phoned the Eastside Precinct, got routed to Downtown, then landed in the main switchboard. "I'm trying to reach Officer Tina Nakamura," I said for the third time.

There was a long hesitation. "Officer who?"

"Nakamura. In computer crimes," I added helpfully.

Eventually, I was routed to someone who identified himself as Sergeant McLusky. "Who?" he asked for the umpteenth time.

I could feel my exasperation growing by the moment. "
Nakamura
." When I was young, people used to complain about voice mails that switched you through phone systems without a chance for live, human guidance. Now, when nobody would dream of permitting automated access to extension codes, it's obvious that live humans were overrated. Sometimes, I long for the old, impersonal days, when you could just type someone's name into a phone and ring them up directly. "N-A-K-A-M-U-R-A," I said. "Officer Nakamura. I'm calling to talk to her about that natural Viagra scam from this morning." When that still drew a blank, I added, "I'm one of the people who was stranded over on Water Avenue."

"Oh! You're a computer vic. You need to talk to Tina."

Tina had been wrong. My patience is far from perfect. "Yes."

"She can't be reached through this switchboard. Can someone else help you?"

"It's kind of personal," I said, realizing a second too late that he'd think I was trying to get a date. But at least it would move me in the right direction.

"Okay," he said, although his tone said otherwise. "I'll pass on the message. But it might be a while before she calls you back. She'll probably need to use a public phone."