At our next Galatea meeting—which we’ve moved into Veracity’s conference room given that the Nest is, in Becks’s words, unfit for human occupancy—we discuss who could have taken the hard drive and why.
Squirrel reports that he’s been staking out the hacker forums, and no queries on Reflect, .alt files, Pygmalion, or anything related have been posted. “There’s no way a third party figured it out on their own. Even I needed an assist. Tiny one.”
“That points to Let’s Meet being behind this,” says Becks. “Either they knew Matthew was leaking information, or they suspected.”
I say, “Wouldn’t they just have fired him, like the other person?”
“If I were them, I would want to see who Matthew was meeting up with first. They had him followed. The opportunity came up and they grabbed the bag.” An entire mountaineering crew could vanish into the crevasse between her eyebrows; I know she’s still upset about the backpack being taken on her watch. She says, “I kept track of everyone in the vicinity. Two…I’ll be kind and call them ‘runners.’ They went past the pier, one heading north and the other south. A third person walking her dog. Also going south. That was it. None of them was anywhere in sight. Even if they’d doubled back while we were looking out at the water—which couldn’t have been for more than five minutes, at most—we should have seen them when we turned around. The place was empty.”
“The answer,” says Squirrel, “is always teleportation.”
I’ve tried to keep from thinking too much about what happened on the pier. My memory of those events feels all sharded up now, like a sheet of glass I smashed on the ground. The wetness of the rain on my face, a clinging coldness, the backpack slamming into my hands. Matthew’s expression as he fell. Becks’s arms cinched around me. The sharpness of sirens, the garbage bin’s wheels rumbling over concrete—
“The shoeshine boy,” I say.
Becks says, “Are the three of us even in the same fucking time period right now?”
“It’s from the Somnang Files, the film series that…Anyway, there’s a shoeshine boy who’s a spy for the Khmer Rouge. No one notices him because he’s just in the background, doing his job, exactly as he’s supposed to be.”
She frowns at me.
“The park wasn’t empty. Do you remember—we passed a janitor. He was pushing one of those big bins. That was when you were, uh—”
“Carrying you,” she says. “Fuck. We did.”
“All he would have had to do was drop the bag in the bin and walk away.”
Squirrel says, “Could still have been teleportation.”
I’m impressed with both the creativity of the setup and myself for figuring it out. Time to propose my alternative theory, while I have some cred. “There is one other group that might have been interested in what Matthew was doing.”
Becks’s mouth is pretzeled like she already knows what’s coming next and has to actively restrain herself from objecting.
“We heard what Matthew said about the Romantick,” I say. “He was in touch with someone high up there. And he thought they were responsible for a data breach at Let’s Meet. Maybe the Romantick has been looking into the digital twins as well. They had Matthew on their radar, they tailed him that day, they took the bag. Depending on how far along they are, they might already know about the .alt files, which would explain why they haven’t had to ask anything on the hacker forums.”
“Fine,” she says.
“Fine what?”
“You can go look into the Romantick, see if you can find anything that points to them possibly not being insane.”
I say, carefully, “You know, technically I don’t need your permission to do that.”
“Whoa,” Squirrel whispers, like a particularly doltish foot soldier just informed Attila that the level of violence in his campaigns was excessive.
Becks hoists one eyebrow. We look at each other across the table. She says, “That is technically correct.”
“Just saying.”
“You’ve already started, haven’t you.”
I did reach out to the Romantick ages ago, while investigating Sarah Reaves’s death—I couldn’t find a contact email address, so I posted a comment on their blog; no one ever responded. That was back when I would have needed Becks’s permission, which I didn’t seek because she’d already told me to drop everything related to Sarah. I decide that’s not what she’s referring to. “I’ve signed up for the mailing list,” I say. “I’ll keep an eye out for any events they have in New York.”