Alice opens her eyes and lets out an involuntary gasp. It takes her mind a while to remember why but her body recalls instantly, reacting with shock. Her memories fall into place quicker than in recent awakenings, but there’s still something sluggish about the time her brain takes to come online.
There is light: that is the first improvement upon her previous situation. And she is stationary, which is the second. This proves less clement when she discovers that it extends to her own ability to move.
“Hey there,” says a friendly male voice, noticing that she is back among the living. “You’re okay. Don’t try to move just yet, though. There’s a scan running to check you haven’t damaged anything. And the restraints are to make sure you don’t hurt yourself until we’re sure whatever you got drugged with has worn off.”
She is lying on a table, her hands, ankles and neck secured by insulated loops, reminding her of her journey to Heinlein Station. Unlike on the elevator, there is no emergency override option visible in her lens. In fact, there is no information appearing there whatsoever.
She turns her head and takes in her surroundings. It doesn’t look like any kind of infirmary or first-aid station. She is in a cluttered, low-ceilinged room strewn with tech in various states of disrepair. If this is any kind of hospital, it’s one for machinery.
There is a man seated at a workbench, looking back at her. She had a momentary fear that it would turn out to be the man she saw in the crowd on Central Plaza, but he was white. This guy has dark skin and grey dreadlocks running half the way down his back, tied in a band presumably to keep them from getting in the way. She can vividly imagine them dragging circuitry and components off the edge of a workbench. His expression is relaxed, which seems at odds with the chaos of the room, and with the fact that he has a prisoner strapped to a table.
Alice can feel her heart thump as she becomes conscious enough to appreciate the gravity of her situation.
“Where am I?” she asks anxiously. “Who are you?”
Once again, there is no information appearing on her lens. She goes to reach for her wrist disc to run a systems check, but not only are both her arms locked in place, a glance reveals that the disc itself is missing.
“The far more interesting question here would appear to be: Who are you?”
He spins around on a revolving stool, enough to reveal that he has her wrist disc clamped in a brace attached to several devices, one of which is a micro-projector making a screen of the wall in front of him.
Alice’s familiar lens overlay readout is scrolling in front of him, displaying information that is supposed to have a biometric lock, visible literally to her eyes only. He has hacked into it to a degree that she has been explicitly assured is impossible.
“What are you doing?” she asks, her voice catching in her throat.
“I’m erasing your memory.”
He speaks with a calm that unnerves her.
She looks around at all the disassembled tech, her mind dredging up the worst crazy rumours she grew up hearing about CdC. Her wrists strain almost involuntarily against the loops as she wonders what kind of a nightmarish cyber chop-shop this might be.
He reads it, lets out a quiet laugh.
“No, don’t panic. I don’t mean your actual memory. Not even Prof G has designs on that shit. I’m talking about your grabs, your lens uploads. There are some people who are concerned that you were backstage without a pass, so to speak, snooping where you weren’t welcome and witness to what you had no right to see.”
“If you mean the orgy, please, I swear, I was only in there a second and I have no intention—”
“They didn’t tell me what specific content the problem was, and I didn’t ask. Best for my own protection and peace of mind. I was asked to wipe everything from today, so that’s what’s happening.”
“But you can only wipe what’s local,” she states, hoping to warn him that his actions here will have an indelible record. “You’re going to get in real trouble for this. My grabs are automatically uploaded to FNG.”
“Yeah, they were,” he says, hovering a finger over her wrist unit. He makes a gesture to execute a command. “And now they’re gone.”
She glances at the wall and sees what he was accessing suddenly vanish.
He seems very calm, but perhaps this is because he doesn’t know who he is really dealing with and how dire the consequences of abducting her. She doesn’t want to break cover, but she’s scared of where this might be going. To keep playing Jessica is looking like a risk she can’t afford to take.
“Whatever it is, I saw what I saw,” she insists. “As you said, you can’t wipe my real memories.”
“Nope. But witness testimony doesn’t have the same traction without grabacións backing it up. Things tend to be a lot less binding when it comes down to ‘he said, she said.’”
“The ‘she said’ may have a little more traction than you’re anticipating when ‘she’ happens to be the incoming Principal of the FNG Security Oversight Executive.”
He pauses a moment, fixing her with a stare. It’s long enough for her to think she has thrown a clog in his gears. Then he points a finger towards the projection of her lens readout.
“Yeah, um, I caught that pretty early. But too late for it to make a difference. See, ‘she’ was concealing that rather salient fact, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken this gig.”
“Let me out of here, right now,” Alice says. She tries to make it sound like a command, but she doesn’t pull it off, her pitch at outraged coming off more as desperate.
“Just as soon as I’m done here. And I wasn’t kidding about the lingering effects of the drug. You stand up now, you’re liable to fall right down again, and I don’t want you any more pissed at me than you already are.”
“There are ways to mitigate that. Who are you?”
“Way I see it, the fact you don’t know that is among the things I got going for me, and I’m not about to give it up.”
“Who are you working for? Who gave you this gig?”
“And I’m afraid that’s another question you can’t compel me to answer.”
“You’d be surprised. I could compel you on to the next free shuttle bound for Heinlein. It would be in your long-term interest to cooperate. Who are you working for? How did I get here?”
“Even if I was minded to, I could only answer one of those questions. You were sent here in a mag-line crate, but I don’t know how you ended up inside it. I was given payment and instructions separately.”
“Payment in advance? No proof required that you’re delivering on your end?”
“It’s a matter of trust. Mainly of me trusting them—whoever they might be—to wrap my legs around my neck and use my ass for flechette practice if I fail to deliver.”
“You’re really claiming you don’t know who they are?”
“That’s right. And it didn’t appear they knew who you really are, either. That particular revelation was my own special surprise to unwrap.”
“Have you heard of a man named Dev Korlakian? AKA Omega?”
He looks at her blankly, but she can tell it’s not a no. He’s stonewalling again.
“Remember what I said before, about mitigation? Toss me something here.”
He shrugs.
“Okay. Yes, I have heard of him.”
“Do you know who he was working for?”
“NutriGen,” he replies.
“I thought you were trying not to annoy me. Who else was he working for?”
“I’m not sure I’m minded to answer that, Alice. But I have to say I’m mighty curious that you’ve used the past tense twice when asking about him. Are you saying Omega reached the end of his alphabet?”
Alice realises she’s just screwed up. She doesn’t know who this guy is or who he’s connected to, and she’s just told him Korlakian is dead. From the current context, it’s unlikely he will assume that it was from a sudden illness or an accident at work.
“I’m merely trying to locate Mr. Korlakian and his known associates,” she says, closing the stable door as this horse gallops off towards the horizon. “And it’s ‘Dr. Blake.’”
“Oh, don’t I know it,” he replies, indicating the readout. “And most definitely not Jessica Cho.”
“Wait, can you just edit that stuff?” Alice asks.
FNG identity protocols prevent her from falsifying her ID information. She was able to get her tags amended to pretend she was a junior FNG staffer, but even that had to be carried out under official endorsement. Her problem here is that, as Nikki was so aware, nobody is going to talk to her while they know what she represents.
He holds up his hands, wiggling his fingers eagerly, like a magician onstage or a surgeon about to cut.
“That would be illegal,” he answers, smiling.
She knows that on Earth it’s the wrist unit that broadcasts whatever identifying information you wish to share, meaning that what appears on the viewer’s lens is no more reliable than asking someone their name. Government and corporate premises usually run a localised identity-verification database, tracking everyone who is on-site, but outside there are just too many people. Up here, however, it’s a closed and limited environment: like a single giant building.
“How is it done?” she asks.
“Your lens runs facial-recognition scans on everybody you look at. It then refers to the central database for the corresponding data. That’s when permissions come into play: who’s allowed to know what about whom.”
“I would refer you to my previous remarks about annoying me. I wasn’t asking how the system works. I’m asking how you can be editing it.”
He gives a knowing chuckle.
“My God. You can’t be telling me you’ve hacked the central database.”
The very notion makes her even more woozy than she already was, as this would mean CdC’s entire identity system is fatally compromised. If this joker could hack into it, then presumably the Quadriga could manipulate it too, meaning nothing on it is truly reliable.
He shakes his head, amused by the appalled expression on her face.
“What do you think I am, some kind of a god? Nobody can hack the central database.”
Alice breathes out again.
“What I can do is run a hack that fools the receiver into thinking it has got its information from the CDB, when actually it’s coming straight from your local device.”
“Could you do that for my wrist unit?”
“Sure. And I could trick it out so that you can edit that information yourself. But this would be a special service I only extend to those in a position to offer mitigation,” he adds.
“You got yourself a deal,” Alice tells him.
“Can I have that in writing?”
“I’m assuming you’ve already got my verbal agreement on a grab.”
“How do I know you’ll honour it?”
“This would have to be another matter of trust.”
He gives her a look acknowledging that granting her this is his only play.
A few seconds later he is calling up some arcane-looking code screen on her wrist unit, making changes too fast for her eyes to track.
“Out of interest,” she says, “what else can you unlock on this thing?”
As he turns to answer, his attention is rapidly diverted by the sound of someone smashing his door down.