Ah, Lydia, says Madison as Lydia walks past the study door.
The problem with talking to Logi is you can’t claim not to have heard them. When Lydia lived at home, if Mum asked where she was going and she didn’t want to say—for instance, if she was on her way to go driving with Gil—she’d just pretend to be wearing her buds and walk out of the door. But Logi know when you’ve heard them. It’s like a pingback, they feel the thought as it lands in your mind.
Lydia pauses, adjusts her messenger bag so it’s more or less hidden behind her body and moves back into the doorway. I was about to go out, she replies.
Where? Madison says, looking up from a folder of Fitz’s paperwork. She’s sitting in the exact spot where he died. Lydia wonders whether or not to point this out.
To get something to eat.
You can’t get something delivered?
I want a walk. I’ve been cooped up all day.
I need to know about this, says Madison, jabbing a finger at the folder. There’s some reference in this correspondence to a partnership with the Chicago Institute of Art, but it doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere.
Oh, it turned out it wasn’t really them.
Madison flicks a finger across the top of one eye, a gesture analogous to a double take. Someone was posing as the Chicago Institute of Art?
Yeah. They were pretty convincing. Spoofed their contacts, intercepted all our comms, mocapped the director of exhibitions and wore her skin whenever we called them. But it was all a con.
Madison looks back down at the paperwork. Good grief. She’s momentarily distracted so Lydia chooses to assume that’s all, and she quietly moves away and out of the front door.
A cop is stationed on the porch along with a police drone: Arthur and Martha have been requisitioned as evidence, and in any case need to be given a full overhaul before they can be trusted in service again. The porch cop nods and makes no move to stop Lydia or check her messenger bag. Even if he did, would he think there was anything odd about her carrying a couple of dusty old books? He surely wouldn’t realize that, being a first edition of Thackeray’s two-volume novel The Newcomes liberated from the shelves in the dining room, they were actually worth stealing. But then that’s the kind of assumption Lydia hates when other people make it about her.
Lydia assumes she’s being watched everywhere. Her face is on the NYPD’s reclist and their sweepers will be looking for suspicious activity, so she needs to act very normal, make sure the sweepers don’t raise any flags and alert any actual humans to analyze what she’s up to. She’s got plenty of time, so she goes into a few stores before heading to the cathouse to make it look like she’s not going anywhere in particular.
She was surprised how readily Fitz’s associate agreed to be paid in rare books, but maybe she shouldn’t have been. The authorities can trace money easily. Tracing an old book is much more effort. As currency goes, it’s cleaner than the dark crypto the dealers in Halifax used to use.
Fitz allowed Lydia to contact her on an anonymous Chapp account she didn’t know he had. As she logged in using the password he’d given her, she promised him she wouldn’t look at any of the other messages. He said there was nothing to see: he always deleted everything.
Lydia feels like she’s seeing another side of him, and is starting to wonder if he was, in fact, more than just a cultural attaché. But she spent so much time with him, and he couldn’t lie to her—surely she, of all people, would’ve noticed if he was hiding anything?
Lydia arrives at the cathouse on Rockefeller Plaza and is greeted by a very clean-looking young host with very straight white teeth and unsettlingly realistic cat ears on his head (they twitch as he speaks, and the band that fixes them in place is very well hidden). “Welcome!” he says. “This your first time here?”
This immediately messes with Lydia’s strategy, which is to act like she comes here all the time and this is totally normal behavior for her. “Er…,” she says.
There’s a pause while the host reads something from his glasses. “Our records suggest you haven’t—is that correct?”
It’s no good, she’s going to have to say yes, so she does.
“No problem at all,” the host reassures her redundantly: What kind of problem might there be? Perhaps they search to make sure you’re not on some kind of animal cruelty register? Imagine being blacklisted from every petting establishment in the tri-state area.
The host tells her the rules and regs should be flashing up on her glasses right now (they are) and he draws her attention to the rate card. Lydia pays for one hour with one cat—this is how long she was told to pay for, and one cat is the cheapest option—and the host beams, says “Great!” and guides her to her pen. There are dozens of pens on the cathouse floor, all of them circular with padded, quilted floors and walls. Lydia is shown into one of the smaller ones, which contains a low seat, a scratching post, some toys and feeding bowls. One of the bowls contains water, the other a sachet of food. The host leaves, closing the door behind himself, and a message flashes across Lydia’s glasses instructing her to sit on the seat.
A hatch opens at the opposite end of the pen and a short-haired silver tabby cat pads in, looking around. It doesn’t seem nervous of Lydia. She’s instructed to open the sachet of food and tip it into the bowl, which she does. The cat gratefully hurries over to the bowl and guzzles the food. While it does this Lydia is informed the cat’s name is Kaylee, she is six years old and is available to buy. Lydia pokes at the now-locked hatch, wondering where it leads and how they make the cats come inside on demand.
When Kaylee has finished eating, Lydia picks her up and places her on her lap. Kaylee makes no objection, but after less than a minute standing there without settling, she hops off and curls up inside a cardboard box on the floor by the scratching post. This is a less interactive experience than Lydia hoped for but at least it confirms they’re not genetically engineering the cats to do whatever the patrons want. That would just be depressing.
A ping invites Lydia to connect to a local pri:net, hosted by someone called Alison. This is not the contact’s real name but it’s the one she said she’d use. Lydia is surprised she doesn’t use a cooler alias, like Scorpio or Silverghost or something. But actually she finds this encouraging, that this woman doesn’t feel the need to sound cool. Lydia connects to the pri:net. Its range is deliberately tiny, which means “Alison” must be very close by. Lydia is about to stand up and look around for her, then realizes the contact chose this place precisely so they wouldn’t be looking at each other.
“Glad you could make it,” says Alison over the chat. She has a low, cultured East Coast voice. Lydia wants to save a recording for her collection, but figures this would be a bad idea.
“Thanks for meeting me,” Lydia replies. Another advantage of this place: if anyone sees you talking, it looks like you’re talking to your cat(s).
“Sorry to hear about Fitzwilliam.”
“Yeah. I mean, he was my boss, he wasn’t like a friend or—”
“You were inside each other’s heads all the time. It must be intense.”
Lydia shrugs. “I guess.” She doesn’t know how to feel about it, doesn’t know what’s appropriate. It doesn’t help that she’s gone on talking to him after his death.
“Sorry, it’s none of my business.”
“No, it’s fine, I just…,” Lydia wasn’t expecting there to be small talk. She’s not sure what she was expecting.
“So. What do you want me to look at?”
Lydia sends a scan of the inkout over to Alison.
“OK…,” says Alison, then there’s a few minutes’ silence while she reads it. Lydia shuffles across the floor on her knees until she reaches Kaylee, who seems to be happily dozing in her box. Lydia strokes the cat, who purrs.
“You realize it might just be a bot?” says Alison finally. For a moment Lydia thinks she’s talking about the cat, but she means the sender of the message.
“Yeah, but our sweeper is good and catches most of those, so nearly all of what we see is real. And also, it’s an explicit death threat that turned up days before he died, so—”
“Sure, yeah. Just wanted to warn you. OK, this won’t be quick—I’m gonna have to reverse engineer it—but we’ll be done within the hour.”
Lydia supposes she may as well enjoy herself while she’s here. She orders a pizza and a beer, reluctantly paying from her personal account: Fitz may have sent her on this errand, but he can’t exactly sign off her expense claims anymore.
Lydia convinces Kaylee to emerge from her box and settle on her lap as she sits cross-legged on the floor, eating her pizza. She’s practically forgotten why she’s even here—in fact she’s almost forgotten that everything connected to her life is presently a clusterfuck—when she hears Alison’s voice again.
“It’s not a bot.”
“Oh,” says Lydia, pulled unpleasantly out of her reverie. “Right.”
She’s expecting more, but after another minute or so realizes there isn’t any, yet. So she goes back to stroking the cat and idly wonders whether she could afford to buy it. She checks the prices and immediately learns she could not.
“They’re way overpriced here,” says Alison.
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry—I can see all your activity via this connection. Nothing personal, just like to know if people are talking to anyone else while they’re talking to me.”
“Right. No, that makes sense. And I wasn’t going to buy one, I was just curious.”
“People get suckered into taking these cats home because they think they have a special bond or whatever. Also, Manhattanites always think any creature from outside the city will be feral or diseased so they won’t get one from a shelter.”
“I’m not a Manhattanite. Not really.”
“Oh I didn’t mean you, just, you know … people. Anyway I’ve found him. Your sender, I mean.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. It was routed through a couple of CADs but I’ve got a definite idee. He’s used an off-the-shelf kit. I got you the location reference, the device it was sent from and who that device is registered to. It’s possible someone else sent it on their device, but I’ll give you ten-to-one he doesn’t even turn printrec off, so the device will remember if it was him or not, and anyway ninety-nine point nine percent of the time when someone says ‘I didn’t post that, someone else must’ve used my device,’ it’s bullshit. So yeah, basically this is your guy.”
“Thanks,” says Lydia. “So how do I—”
“Leave the books outside the door of your pen when you go.”
“Sure. I think I’ve got another ten minutes or so—”
“That’s OK. When you’re ready.”
Lydia strokes Kaylee, drains her beer and decides there’s something else she’d like to know. “Um. You don’t have to answer this—”
“All the best questions start like that.”
“Sorry.”
“No, go on.”
“What sort of stuff did you do for Fitz?”
“Stuff like this. Tracing correspondence.”
“Other threats?”
“Not all of them. A lot of the time he didn’t give me the content, just headers and tags, so I don’t know.”
“That’s weird.”
“Not really. Most people I trace for don’t want to share the content, or anything they don’t have to—and I’d prefer not to know.”
“It’s weird though. Doesn’t seem like Fitz at all. Why didn’t he just pass it on to the embassy, or the police?”
“Some people just prefer to deal with their own shit.”
And to be fair, that does seem like Fitz.
When the time’s up, Lydia says good-bye to Kaylee, the hatch opens and the cat goes into it. (How do they make them do that?) The door clicks open and on her way out of the pen Lydia places the books on the floor, as instructed. She glances back as she heads for the exit, worried the wrong person might pick them up—and sees a middle-aged woman with light brown hair tied up in a bun and bright yellow lipstick, wearing a dark gray zip-up tracksuit, collect the books. Can that be her? She looks like a soccer mom. But she catches Lydia’s eye, nods and smiles.
As Lydia walks out of the cathouse and onto the street she checks the data Alison has found, and is surprised that she not only knows who the sender is, she also remembers meeting him.