The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue (21 page)

“
We can measure sightings
over a time-line. Too big a jump, and it’s a giveaway.”

“
What do you
mean?”

Some guy named Rick’s hand shot
up.

“
They couldn’t have gotten
from point A to point B in the time allotted using available
means.”

She pointed at Rick.

He stood, taking a quick glance down at
his screen. He was a surreptitious reader, probably not realizing
she could monitor all the screens in the room from her own big
desk, sloping there, and up off the ground a good ways, like a big
drawing table. All of them were educated. This guy was a few pages
into the manual already.

Nice.

She put the chalk down and went to her
desk.

“
Well, Chief. There could
be a new ID but with no prior activity. A ghost citizen. The same
could be said for vehicles—a new fake number and yet no backup
history to go along with it.” He looked at the others for
reassurance. “A car appears on a road. It goes past a reader and
yet, where did it ah, emanate from?”

“
Very good. Go
on.”

“
Kids have been chipped
for years now. A kid, a bit too young, one with a new chip, one out
of sequence, might be an illegal immigrant, or it must have a
proper data trail to account for it.”

He looked uncertainly around at a
classmate to his right, who stared at her readout as if
mesmerized.

“…
I’m saying he’d have to
have a visa and some kind of status listed with other agencies to
account for the discrepancy.”

Letitia nodded, encouraging them with a
sweeping glance.

Without rising, the red-haired girl
spoke up. Arlene.

“
There would be obvious
frauds, those who had simply stolen ID. They would not match the
biometrics on the card, but in some circumstances the card is
enough to do a certain job…”

She was on thin ice and she knew it,
but she had the idea. The kid went on to talk about drones,
street-level surveillance, vehicular movements, store-front
cameras, Neighbourhood Watch cameras, money machines, access
points. The kid knew her stuff to some degree.

Letitia picked another face, another
name tag.

"Ed."

“
On an older vehicle, the
card might get you in and the motor started. What you do after that
is pretty chancy.” This young man, bearded and beaded and tattooed,
had the air of experience, like someone who knew what he was
talking about.

The corners of her mouth tugged
upwards.

He blushed at the first sign of
approval.

It struck Letitia that she might be a
kind of mother-figure, at least to some of them.

“
Very good.
Next.”

She pointed at the guy with the ring in
his nose.

At SimTech, employees were trained in
complementary pairs. They were ones and twos, rights and lefts.
She'd have them put the buds in with their study-partners and
head-jack each other next, and then they could go to full immersion
and the next part of the exercise.

Chapter
Fourteen

Thomas Da Busey Khan loved his little
cubbyhole, way downtown where there was constant amusement,
movement, and customers by the minute.

Chicago was his town and he loved her
so. It was also his fourth major city in as many years, but he had
a way of being familiar, blending in right from the start and
becoming a fixture with his grab-bags of dollar candies and three
smokes for a ten-spot.

There were three mega-high-schools
within a four-block radius.

Taking in shoes to be mended, reading
tea leaves, repairing digital scales and phones and wristwatches,
he did it all, including his three-minute tattoo-removal. The Tarot
card-reading machine just inside the vestibule was pure genius, and
if someone wanted moloko—a good old fashioned moloko, one needled
with a little something extra, Thomas was just your man. He
knew everybody and his phone list was extensive. The real money was
in what were euphemistically called life-hacks. Nothing too
serious, just getting people out of their pesky tele-communication
service contracts, (Thomas was also a paralegal and notary public,)
help in disappearing when the bailiff found you, and all that sort
of thing. A quick makeover on the ID when your teeth no longer
matched the photo-chip embedded in your BMs as people called them.
Even your shit had biometrics in it these days, a recent study
demonstrating an uncanny match-up between recent fast-food
purchases and any number of trace elements in the typical
sample.

To say that Mister Khan was good with
the SEO would be an understatement and he wasn’t too particular
with his methods either. One of his little companies did a fair bit
of consulting. All off-shore stuff. The whole IT thing fit in a
briefcase, as Thomas was wont to say and you could always build a
few websites for people and then leave town.

The whole place was four hundred fifty
square feet in area. He had just enough space to hang out on a bar
stool, and sit in behind a glass case, displaying every
scratch-and-sniff lottery ticket under the flag. Behind Thomas was
a pop cooler, and a few gum-pushers were kind enough to rent a
square foot of display space on the end.

All of this had been enough for a down
payment on Gerta. Unfortunately not enough to keep up the payments
on her, but that was just a minor everyday challenge for one such
as he, and not unanticipated right from the start. To be honest. It
was all in the plan, and a clever and nefarious one it was, even if
he did say so himself.

More than anything, he loved Gerta, and
when a buzzing alarm went off on his pocket-device, his heart beat
a little faster. Gerta was the love of his pathetic little life,
and he knew it.

It was with a slathering of excuses
that he pushed a customer out the door, reaching for his pork-pie
hat and locking and bolting his stainless steel shutters. He shoved
his hat in the packsack. He mounted his bike with the orange flag
on an old CB-antenna whip, made sure his bicycle clips were in
place, gave his cone-shaped orange and white-checkered helmet a
rakish push slightly up on his forehead, and entered midday traffic
nervously.

But changes in Gerta’s system were
troubling indeed. It could only mean one thing, and while his
firewalls and detectors were very good, there was always the
possibility of somebody better—much better, somewhere out there in
the real world.

He’d worked with some of them over the
years. The thought that one of them might have finally caught up to
him was deathly frightening.

The physical exertion of just making it
home was enough to contain him for the moment.

***

Betty was blocking a new threat. She
had been for some time. She told Scott, but he barely nodded, still
half in shock. He didn’t understand that the persistence of the
threat was annoying and took up valuable system
resources. 

Scott had his own concerns.

It had been a long week and he was
flagging, even just sitting there on the passenger seat, just going
down the road. They’d had this vehicle something like thirteen
hours, which seemed like a long time. If the talkative GPS system
was any real indication, they were making very good time, even
though they were avoiding anything that looked like a proper
highway.

Judging by the thumps, the bums and the
tilting back and forth of the vehicle, the roads they were using
must be very rough indeed.

He kept taking a long slow breath, and
then blasting it out in a forceful and yet despairing manner. It
helped a bit. It was like he needed more oxygen than he was
getting.

Scott was absolutely fucking
beat.

The two of them needed rest more than
anything.

“
Honey. Can we slow down a
bit now?”

The big vehicle jounced up, down, and
from side to side.

“
In a bit,
Honey.”

She seemed very tense, very focused.
Scott had no idea that they were cutting through a state forest in
Illinois, or what had once been one. This once-popular state park
was reverting, and not in a good way judging by sagging house
trailers and shanties tucked in small clearings under the
trees.

All the roads were rutted clay, and not
a name or number marked anywhere…she was going strictly on her own
reckoning, but while a compass bearing was one thing, none of the
roads was being very cooperative. 

She didn’t even answer him.

Scott shut up for a while. The car
skidded to a halt when she was confronted by an unfamiliar
sight.

“
Turn…left.” The GPS was
adamant, but she wasn’t buying it at first.

She checked all other sources before
deciding, but there were still no road signs. Finally she went,
accelerating slowly as if suspecting a trap. She kept it at about
fifty kilometres an hour.

This road seemed to be maintained, and
she relaxed somewhat.

There were increasing signs of a big
city ahead, even on this obscure two-lane black-top running through
regenerating forest-like scrub and small, subsistence farm plots.
Her mouth opened and she grabbed his arm beside her as a pale,
attenuated form, a household robot bringing out the trash paused by
the side of the road.

Straightening up, it met her eyes in a
silent flash of infrared communication. She kept her head straight
ahead but in the mirror the unit turned and followed the receding
car with its gaze.

“
Okay, Scott. It looks
like we might have a problem.”

***

Mister Boyd entered the room, pleased
by their industry. The form tied on the plywood board writhed
weakly against his bonds. The décor was a testament to their
honorable trade.

“
Hello.”

The pair, a small, bird-like man and an
incredibly fat woman, both clad in 1920s bathing attire, nodded
politely.

“
Is there gonna be many
more?” She had been looking forward to Rio.

They had plane tickets and everything.
It was their wedding anniversary, their twentieth.

Boyd shook his head.

“
One maybe later tonight.
After that, we have two or three possibilities. One or two of them
might work out.”

“
Nothing we can’t
handle.”

He inclined his head
politely.

“
There’s no art any more.”
The lady didn’t seem particularly incensed, although her eye roved
over the rack, the tongs and the pokers most longingly.

The fire wasn’t even lit, and the room
was deliciously cool after being outside. What she wouldn’t give to
pull a fingernail or a couple of teeth. He nodded and grinned,
raising his eyebrows.

Without bidding, they unbound the head
for him. They made a good team.

Grabbing the man’s wet forelock, he
pulled the face up to have a look. White-rimmed, staring eyes
begged his mercy.

“
Hey—aren’t you the guy
who invented the double-click virus…?” He laughed harshly, dropped
the head, and then lovingly restored the muslin around the face as
the wet round ‘O’ of a mouth sucked and gasped like a wounded carp
against the thin fabric. “I still have that on my personal machine,
at home, you bastard.”

The wheezing, sucking sound was music.
Real music. The boy-hacker whimpered.

Boyd stood on a patch of concrete that
was drier than the rest of the room, harsh shadows dancing in the
glare of a single, powerful overhead spotlight. That painful light
would be all their prisoner would be able to see through the thin
and soaking muslin. He wiped his fingers dry on his pant
legs.

The prisoner shivered and
moaned.

“
Mister Khan.”

“
I—I don’t know anything.
Please, oh, please. Oh, God. Please.”

“
Ah, but you do, Mister
Khan. You were found in unauthorized possession of one of our
products. You can’t make the payments, you return the item, Mister
Khan. It’s not such a difficult concept, eh? This is a very serious
offense, Mister Khan. How did you break our security
protocols?”

“
I've already told
you—”

“
You’ve been inside and
around, all around inside of our systems. You know all about our
systems, Mister Khan.”

You’re a little too good at what you
do, Mister Khan.

Cooperation was not ideal, for how
could you ever trust the information if it wasn’t wrung out of
them? At best, you would get just enough to satisfy you—and then a
lot of bullshit about how somebody else made them do it…but SimTech
wanted the truth.

And he had been truthful, too, only
they needed to be thorough. Mister Khan had been engaged in a
little sexual role-playing, of a distinctly anti-social nature, but
he must have had the software package all written and ready to be
loaded. The time-frame was too short. He made two bi-weekly
payments, and then hey, presto!