Ephialtes (Ephialtes Trilogy Book 1) (16 page)

White dabbed
his mouth with a napkin and stood up.  “Thanks again, Rodney,” he
said.  “I’ll be in touch soon.  This thing is moving way too fast and
I appreciate all the help I get.”

“No problem,”
said Sherman.  He lifted a hand in gesture of salute at White, who was
already heading for the exit.

Twenty-third
century media communications were chaotic.  Every business, organisation,
group and individual had their own media stream.  They streamed video,
audio and text, as much and as often as they wanted.  Almost any
information required was freely available.  The issue for media consumers
was finding a way to wade through the deluge of information to find that which
was pertinent to them.  Most people had an aggregator on their comdev or
terminal.  Via deliberately programmed preferences and highly tuned
heuristic algorithms the aggregators would sift through vast oceans of information
to provide individuals with news and information tailored to their
interests.  The newsgathering behemoths of old had become redundant two
centuries earlier.  Newsgathering now was scattered amongst the entire
population.  Every person was a potential journalist.  Every person
had a camera, a connection and a point of view.  Whenever anything
happened, from a war to a minor celebrity inadvertently exposing some
underwear, there were plenty of ‘journalists’ there to record the event,
comment on it, and send it around the world before it had even finished
happening.

In a world
where everyone was a journalist it didn’t follow that everyone was a
good
journalist.  A certain type of person loved the celebrity and attention
they got from reporting and posting on events happening in the digital sphere
around them.  They would learn to develop sharp digital elbows to try to
force their way to the top of the pack.  They didn’t even necessarily need
to be where the action was.  It was possible to follow the right feeds,
have aggregators looking in the right places and have databases on hand to look
up everything and anything necessary to embellish a story.  When an event
happened it could be quickly republished with additional comments and a sheen
of the journalist’s signature brand of zaniness, or seriousness, or sarcasm, or
cynicism, in the hope that people would view the event through their feed
rather than anyone else’s.  In this way it was possible become a minor
celebrity in one’s own right.  Followers would bring in advertising
revenue, so with a big enough audience it was possible to make a living from
it.  It wasn’t journalism in the traditional sense.  It was more like
being the town gossip, but it was called journalism and it appealed to a
certain type of person.

Elspeth J
Ross was not that type of person.  She was eighteen years old and had, she
was often told, a very sensible head on her shoulders.  Unlike the
majority of her peers she wasn’t particularly interested in the video, music
and sports celebrities that were the bread-and-butter of most
budding journalists.  She was more interested in actual things.  The
way the world worked fascinated her.  She could see the video, music and
sports stars gliding across the surface of the world, having no actual impact
on it.  It seemed to Elspeth that the world was shaped by occult forces
working far beneath the visible surface.  That fascinated her and
intrigued her.  She wanted everyone else to find it as interesting as she
did, and it was that that attracted her to the world of journalism.

She had
studied economics, politics and the sciences at school.  She had been one
of the outsider kids.  It made her slightly sad that the packs of kids at
her school had rejected her simply because she had not been as shallow and foolish
as they were.  On one hand she wouldn’t have wanted to hang out with such
vacuous people.  On the other, the rejection stung.

Happily, that
period of her life was over now.  She had finished school six months
earlier and her plan, as far as she had one, was to become a successful
journalist.  Her streams had a few hundred followers, next to nothing she
knew, but she was determined to battle on and build on that number.

Elspeth had
been brought up by her mother.  She was an only child.  Her father
had died before she ever knew him.  Her mother worked for
Hjälp
Teknik
in one of their
production plants.  They had lived in one of
Venkdt’s
housing projects in Eastside.  It had been a happy childhood, apart from
the difficulties at school, and her mother had always been supportive. 
Elspeth was a shy child, but always inquisitive.  She found it difficult
to talk to people and she felt uncomfortable in unfamiliar situations. 
But she had a gritty determination that, tied to her inquisitiveness, drove her
to overcome her inhibitions.  She didn’t like speaking to strangers but
she knew that if she wanted to find out that little titbit of information she
wanted to know she would have to ask.

Her proudest
moment at school had been a journalistic presentation about
Hjälp
Teknik
.  She had interviewed her mother, some of
her mother’s co-workers and a media relations person at
Hjälp
Teknik
and had made a
potted history of the company.  The presentation was fluid and
polished.  It held the attention of the viewer and also imparted some
useful and interesting information.  Her classmates had laughed at it but
the teacher was full of effusive praise, and Elspeth knew it was good. 
That feeling touched something in her and she knew then that that was what she
wanted to do.

In a game
where your competition is more or less the entire world (strictly speaking, the
entire
worlds
) it makes sense to have an angle, something unique to make
you stand out from the pack.  Elspeth thought she had it.  She would
make
news.  She wasn’t going to throw old ladies under the bus and post
videos of it - nothing as crude as that, though there was
probably someone somewhere who was mulling over such a scheme.  Elspeth’s
idea was far more subtle and sophisticated.  She’d noticed it in the
Hjälp
Teknik
presentation she did
at school.  The
Hjälp
Teknik
PR person presented the company in a different light to the workers who worked
there.  By juxtaposing these two points of view Elspeth had created
something new, interesting and worth hearing.  She had created news by
combining two separate elements.  It was almost like chemistry. 
That, she thought, would be her angle.  She would study the streams and
make the connections that other people missed.  She could dig out
information, combine two apparently disparate elements and create a third
thing, unique to her and worthwhile.

She had tried
this a number of times so far, but with little success.  She followed the
streams diligently and had made some interesting connections, spinning new
stories from them, but these had failed to set the world alight.  The
trouble was, so it seemed to Elspeth, that though the stories were interesting
and of some minor import, they would never reach a large audience because what
the large audience wanted to see was a cat falling off a hammock or a minor
celebrity leaving another minor celebrity’s apartment in the middle of the
night.  Elspeth wanted to do serious news.  She also wanted a serious
sized audience.  The two things seemed exclusive until one day she hit on
a big idea.

Bobby
Karjalainen.

It was a
perfect plan.  If she could interview Bobby Karjalainen she would have a
major news story.  Not only that but she could use her alchemy to spin it
even bigger.  Bobby Karjalainen would be the perfect interview
subject.  He was a very minor celebrity in his own right, what with his
book and war hero status.  He looked good, so just a picture of him would
attract interest.  And unlike most minor celebrities he had actually done
something interesting and significant.  Elspeth thought she could sell the
interview like this: come for the beefcake, stay for the harrowing war
stories.  There was another bit of magic she could add to the mix; Elspeth
knew that Jack Karjalainen was dying.  None of the celeb journalists would
have given this a moment’s thought.  As an old man, a captain of industry
and not in the least bit photogenic, who cared about Jack Karjalainen? 
Elspeth did.  She followed the business streams.  She had read
Bobby’s book and she knew that Bobby had a very strained relationship with his
father.  His father was now dying and Bobby had returned to Mars.

Why?

It seemed
very likely to her that Bobby was seeking reconciliation with his father and
that could be human interest dynamite.  The celeb-junkie audience
might not give a stuff who Jack Karjalainen was, but a story about a good-looking,
semi-famous war hero tearfully reuniting with his dying father could be a
blockbuster.  It even had that sheen of seriousness that appealed so much
to the shallow-minded.  All she needed to do now was track Bobby
down and arrange an interview.

There were
two possible stumbling blocks.  She might not be able to get hold of him,
and if she did he might decline the offer of an interview with an eighteen-year-old
girl who had no track record whatsoever.  Elspeth figured if she was going
to let things like that put her off she was in the wrong game.  And she
knew
she wasn’t in the wrong game.

Elspeth J
Ross, journalist, was going to interview Bobby Karjalainen.

Elspeth
thought that Bobby Karjalainen, the semi-famous war hero and one-time
author, would be an easy person to track down, but it was not so.  In the
twenty-third century even minor celebrity was big enough that those
afflicted with it took measures to avoid contact with the people who took such
a prurient interest in their lives.

Elspeth
thought she could reach Bobby directly through his mini-feed.  It
turned out his mini-feed was run by a pool of PR managers at his
publishers on Earth.  Even when she managed to contact an actual person
they refused to divulge any of Bobby’s personal details.  They wouldn’t
even pass on a message.

Next Elspeth
tried
Hjälp
Teknik
. 
Hjälp
Teknik
told her that they
couldn’t discuss any details of their personnel without the express consent of
the person involved.  Elspeth suspected that Bobby had no official link to
Hjälp
Teknik
anyway. 
They wouldn’t even confirm that.

Elspeth
didn’t even try the military.  She knew that would be a non-starter. 
All she knew for sure was that Bobby Karjalainen had recently returned to Mars
and that his father was gravely ill in St Joseph’s Hospital.

She trawled
the streams for everything she could find about
Hjälp
Teknik
and the Karjalainens.  She found out
where the Karjalainens’ house was.  That was useful.  She guessed
Bobby might be staying there, but she couldn’t know for sure.  In his book
he’d spoken about his relationship with his family, which had broken down
almost completely before he went off to war.  If Bobby had come back to
make peace, as she suspected, he may or may not be at the house.  Maybe
relations remained cold and Bobby was somewhere in the city.  The only
thing Elspeth had to go on was her hunch that Bobby had come back to see Jack
Karjalainen.  She knew where Jack was, so maybe she could find Bobby
there.  Reluctantly, she realised that she might have to do some old-fashioned
journalistic legwork.  She might have to physically leave the house, pound
the streets and tell half-truths to strangers in order to elicit the
information she needed.  Half of her felt like this was going to be a huge
pain.  The other half was vaguely excited.

Elspeth got
up early and took a cab to St Joseph’s.  She went to the refectory and had
breakfast there while she thought about what her plan might be.  It might
be useful to know exactly where Jack Karjalainen’s room was.  It would be
very useful to know who had visited him.  She didn’t know if the hospital
kept such records.  It probably did.  Most large public buildings
automatically scanned
comdevs
on the way in and
out.  If Bobby had been here recently it was almost certainly in a
database somewhere.  Accessing the database would be nearly impossible.

Elspeth
thought.

She didn’t
have the first clue about electronic espionage but maybe she could have a crack
at social engineering.  One of the many obscure facts she knew from hour
up on hour of voracious reading was that the weakest point in any security
system was the human beings who operated it.  Maybe there was a way she
could fool a nurse or an administrator into divulging information from the
hospital’s database.  It sounded like an exciting prospect.  Elspeth
smiled.  It sounded, too, like it might be illegal.  Elspeth
frowned.  As an eighteen-year-old girl who looked, if
anything, younger than her age, Elspeth was often frustrated when people didn’t
take her seriously.  But she was smart enough to play the hand she had
been dealt.  If she got caught she would play the ingénue.  She would
act gauche, young, dumb and innocent.  “Oh
my gosh
,”
she would say, “I didn’t accidentally crack your database and steal privileged
information, did I?  I’m
such
a ditz!  I’m
so
sorry!”

Elspeth
thought it over as she was finishing her croissant.  It wasn’t much of a
plan, but she thought she’d give it a go.  Steeling herself, she stood up
and made her way to the reception desk.