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Site content may offend. Content includes horror, murder, torture, lawlessness, military carnage, Anglo Saxon crudities, occasional adult incidents and George Bush |
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Jason did not wait. He headed straight for the colonel's office, without bothering to send an electronic query first - the colonel was not a fan of instant messaging. The door to the colonel's office was open, as mandated by the new federal regulations on intrahierarchical access and communications (which were currently under review, as they had already contributed to the deaths of five supervisors who had been gunned down by disgruntled subordinates) but there was no sign of the colonel. In compliance with the colonel's policies, Jason wrote a note on a message slip and added it to the small heap that was already starting to grow on the colonel's blotter. Then he went back to work. Max's file would have to wait until after the colonel had given approval. Meantime, Jason had plenty of work to go on with. A long time later, Jason was zapped out of robot mode by the shock of seeing a second name he recognized. Electrified, he put down the piece of lukewarm pizza he had been chewing on - he always took a lunch break, but later in the day he tended to refuel while working, without really thinking about it - and studied what was on his screen with more care. Yes, the application was definitely from someone he knew. This happened now and then. It was the journalist guy who had lived next door, the one who had done an investigative series into how the Emergency Committee had exported a series of recalcitrant uninformers to selected foreign jails for six-month stretches. When the prisoners returned, psychologically broken and usually HIV-positive, they were more than ready to trade medical prioritization for cooperation. "Randal Hutherslod," murmered Jason, scrolling through the file. Kind of sad. The guy got a Pulitzer, and his newspaper was getting ready to send him to Saudi Arabia to investigate the Mecca Incident, otherwise known as the Marine Corps Massacre. Then the investigators descended on the guy's house with a General Search Warrant, one of those let's-go-fishing documents that were sometimes used against dissidents, and they caught him. They caught him with, on his computer, three unlicensed games, five and a half gigabytes of breach-of-copyright music and a bootleg copy of a do-your-own-taxes program which was the intellectual property of a large software company located in the Seattle area. Randal Hutherslod was given a choice. Hand over his list of informants or do serious jail time. At first, he tried to plead innocence. Then his teenage daughter ratted him out on prime time TV. Dad had given her a bootleg CD for her seventh birthday and another for her thirteenth, and she had kept them both. In a deal with the prosecutor, Randal had handed over his list of informants - all of them, or so he said. Under the deal, he was supposed to get off with five years' probation for the crimes of cyber abuse, breach of copyright, and "commercial sabotage contrary to the best interests of the nation." But what the prosecutor alleged in front of the tribunal was that some names were missing from the list, and the tribunal agreed with the prosecutor, and Randal was deemed to be tainted with suspicion of incomplete confession, which could not get you sent to jail but which could get you sent to the camps, which was were Randal had spent the last twelve years ... rather longer than the statistical average. "I think I've suffered enough," wrote Randal. Jason rubbed his eyes and blinked. These really long computer sessions were not healthy. A recipe for eyestrain, in fact. He wondered what it must have been like. Twelve years in the camps ... twelve years without a hot shower or a sugared donut. As Jason was trying to get an imaginative grip on the life and times of Randal Hutherslod, advertisements started wandering across his screen. First one for a leading softdrink then one for a hamburger chain. His screensaver, one of the new contributive funding ones (selling advertizing space was the latest gimmick as the federal government tried to make ends meet) had come to life. He was burning daylight, and for no purpose. "Realism is the essence of patriotism," said Jason to himself, rewarding Randal's pleas for compensation, rehabilitation and an apology with a negative, a negative and a negative. Okay, he felt sorry for the guy. But saying no was the only way to get on top of the backlog. Besides, he had already used up his quota of positives for the month, and exceeding it would make the Trotter office look bad. "You can't start," muttered Jason, speaking aloud as if walls did not have ears. Then he caught himself, and completed the thought in his head: you can't start handing out rewards to people just because you feel sorry for them. After all, apart from anything else, incarceration is one of the nation's leading industries, right up there with home security and online gambling. If compensation for camp time were to get out of hand, it would undermine the economic rationale of the entire machine. "A patriot serves the machine," said Jason to himself. It was one of the colonel's favorite sayings. And, little as Jason liked the colonel, he could see the sense of the saying. The machine is the source of our communal wealth, our communal power. By locking up a substantial proportion of the workforce, the incarceration system - jails, prisons, laboratories and camps - soaks up unemployment and keeps the system stable. "You've worked late enough, son." It was the colonel, standing in the doorway, looking oddly lazy, oddly relaxed. Grinning a little. Jason didn't get it. What was so amusing Colonel Cassius Clay? It was almost eleven at night, and the colonel should be exhausted. But, no, not a bit of it. He was looking as happy as a pig in ... well, let's not think politically incorrect things about pigs. The colonel was looking as happy as a new carpet, to quote one of the new images from the Federally Approved Supplemental Verbalization Resource Pack. "You're looking good," said Jason. "Yeah, I had a nap," said the colonel. There was something odd about him, something ... a smell ... what smell? Jason couldn't quite identify it. Something associated with bathrooms, bedrooms, showers ... a trace of ... but, sniffing again, Jason could no longer detect the aroma. A half-recognized ... what? Soap, perfume, deodorant ... something like that. "Anyway," said the colonel. "Come through to my office. There's something I want to talk about." "Now?" said Jason. His head was wrecked with too much work, with too many hours of focused concentration, and he wanted to head home before he was too drunk with fatigue to drive safely. And he knew that what the colonel wanted to talk about was Max Shlam. "You say no to Max," said the Colonel. "Sir," said Jason, in neutral acknowledgement. "And," said the colonel, leaning forward, "you tell me what it is between you two." "There is nothing between us," said Jason. "That's not what Vindaletta says," said the colonel. "She let slip the fact that ...." The colonel let the pause linger. "Sir," said Jason, reaching for a line of remote formality, "I can only surmise that you have misconstrued something." Maybe Vindaletta had said something at the barbecue, when Jason had been in the car with Max. But the colonel had been so drunk .... Jason made his decision. He would give Max a yes. The colonel could not stop him: under the Open Window policy, designed to stamp out corruption in the federal service, the colonel could not reassign a file without court approval, and the colonel didn't know enough to get that approval. Colonel Clay was suspicious, but his suspicion was manageable. Max, on the other hand ... well, Max was desperate, and there is really no way to deter a desperate man. "You're going to say no to Max," said Vindaletta. "Why?" said Jason, looking around the restaurant. "You shouldn't look at everyone like that," said Vindaletta. "It makes you look guilty." "I'm not guilty," said Jason. "I'm being vigilant. Vigilance is a virtue - didn't you know that?" "I know the difference between guilt and virtue, and you're guilty," said Vindaletta. "You know, if you let Max gets what he wants, you'll do the zero dance on the colonel's chances of promotion." "What promotion?" said Jason. "The one he's aiming for," said Vindaletta. "I haven't heard about it," said Jason. "Oh, you wouldn't," said Vindaletta. "You live in your bubble, working ninety hours a day, what do you care what other people think? But I talk with other service wives, you know, the grapevine and all that, word gets around." "How does me giving Max his chance to get a trust okay undercut the colonel's promotion?" said Jason. "Well, it's all done on budgeting, isn't it?" said Vindaletta. "It's really expensive, even one, we'd both have to cooperate, you know, the whole tests and questionnaires thing, by the time it was done the colonel's scores would be in the, the ... you know where." "That's ridiculous," said Jason. "Oh, you think so?" said Vindaletta. "You really are out of the loop, aren't you? You know everything, right? But you're so ignorant." "If you say so," said Jason, stubbornly avoiding the invitation to argue, even though he knew that refusing to have a good shout-and-scream argument was one of the thing that was guaranteed to drive Vindaletta crazy. "You know," said Vindaletta, "if you don't help Max, what7s the worse that can happen? He says, you know ... what's the word? ... well, anyway, it can't be proved, right? I mean, whatever bad things he might, uh, say." "Rumors count toward demerit points," said Jason. "So, yeah, in the worse case, maybe you'd get dropped a grade, your promotion would be slowed ... it'd hit your pension," said Vindaletta. "But you'd still be okay with the colonel. Right? And, uh, if the colonel's happy, you could get him to help me with my name. Right? I mean, the months are going by, Jason, my life's on hold, and it's all because of this stinking weirdo name, I want to be normal, Jason. Are you listening? Are you hearing me?" That night, Jason lay awake, wretchedly tired from overwork and yet kept awake by his thoughts. He kept wondering about Vindaletta. He couldn't figure out why she was so unsupportive. She knew he was working hard, she knew he didn't want to owe one to Colonel Clay, so why did she keep on at him about the name thing? That would sort itself out in due course ... probably. And this nonsense about the colonel and the budget ... you didn't get promotion by economizing on justice, did you? Well ... okay, granted, the thought was not unthinkable ... but Vindaletta was out of the loop, just a wife on the margins, knew nothing about the secrets of the service. From her point of view it was all so, so simple. Don't help Max. Let Max denounce you, if he will. After all, it's just his word against yours. But Vindaletta didn't know what was at stake. On occasion, in the course of their marriage, Jason had been just a little more honest than he should have been. From the things he had let slip, Vindaletta undoubtedly knew that Max and Jason had misbehaved together. But she thought they had been into bootleg music, pirated videos and illegal copies of computer games. Which they had. And that was bad enough, now that crimes against intellectual property had been reclassified as crimes of economic subversion, and now that committing acts of economic subversion was technically equivalent to treason. But, on top of that - and this was the accusation that Jason would be unlikely to survive, even if the investigators initially had nothing to go on but a bare accusation - they had also sold copies of a bug-building program stolen from an Ivy League university. At the time, that had been really cool free spirit stuff. The end users were typically struggling enterprises in really poor countries which, by and large, were locked out of the modern world. They just couldn't pony up the cash for an entry ticket. So why shouldn't they have what they needed to build anything from bacteria which excreted HIV suppressors to a better brand of yeast? However, after the loss of Houston - which could easily have been the loss of most of the United States, had it not been for the president's painful decision to exercise the sacrificial option - that kind of intellectual property crime was not pardonable. Jason knew that he would not survive if the investigators got hold of him. He knew exactly how the investigators would break him. First they would publicize the crime. Then they would incarcerate him. The inmates would know what to do next. Your average prisoner is also a patriot, and a good one, too. Yeah, he had no option. He was going to have to say yes to Max. But the problem was that Max had named Jason as his key interactor. In practice, that meant that for six months Max was going to have to board with Jason and Vindaletta. And Jason and Vindaletta would have to be comprehensively tested, again. Well, no problem. Apart from crimes of high treason and possible complicity in mass murder, Jason had nothing to hide. "Well," said the colonel. "It's going to take three days for the tests. I could make you do them over the long weekend, you know." "Sir," said Jason, neutrally. "But I'm going to be a nice guy," said the colonel. "Service regulations allow me to authorize you to do this in working time. You can have it next week ... Tuesday through Thursday." "Thank you, sir," said Jason. That was convenient. Vindaletta would be out of town, staying with her Aunt Vixen in the town of Bodycount, up in Maine. It was all working out very nicely. Teak was a friend, sort of. Even though Teak and Jason had drifted apart over the years, they got together on occasion so they could duel each other using whatever the latest and greatest computer game might be. Teak was a great gamer when he was sober but he liked to drink, and these occasional sessions usually ended with Teak drinking himself into a state of unconsciousness. "Good to see you, old buddy," said Teak unsteadily, opening the door. He had gone downhill markedly in the six months since Jason had seen him last. This time, he was drunk already, even before they had gotten started. Even so, it was midnight before Teak was out for the count. Jason connected to the Internet and connected to a server which was geographically located in the Federal Republic of Kurdistan. He opened a briefcase which he maintained under a false name ... free storage paid for by casino advertizing, since Kurdistan permitted Americans go gamble online, regardless of what American law might have to say about that. From the briefcase, Jason extracted the programs he needed. An hour later, he had subverted a weakly defended computer in an elementary school in Denmark. Two hours later, he was ready to begin. He had a thousand dollars in electronic cash lined up ... not much, but you'll always find someone who's desperate, and too much would look like a sting. "I'm in the Patriot Service. I am seeking to commit a curiosity crime. It is not my intent to implicate you in any criminal activity. I need an administrator password. One thousand dollars, cash." Jason did not need to take this route. He was good enough to hack into Federal One unaided. But doing it this way would make him look like your average purchaser. In New York, a cleaner named Driven Berther was using one of the Patriot Service's computers to play a round of Okurayama Interrogator, the game in which you were a CIA agent who has a one-hour window of opportunity in which to extract the disarm codes for the nuke which has been implanted in the president's submarine. (You had a choice of settings, including a kitchen and a toolshop. Driven had chosen the dental surgery setting - he had always fancied himself as a dentist.) A thousand bucks? Yeah ... sure. Driven already had an administrator password, which was how he had gotten access to the computer. (One night he had gone to clean the administrator's office only to find the administrator himself inside, snoring drunk, out for the count. Driven had taken the liberty of going through the administrator's wallet.) Five minutes later, Driven had a thousand dollars in his offshore casino account (he wasn't a gambling man, but the way casinos were set up these days, you could use them as free banks out of the reach of the IRS) and the technological marvels of modern computer science had been thwarted yet again. Federal One. The Emulator Project. Jason was not stupid enough to go look directly at his own records. That would have been like shouting "Hey, come and arrest me!" Logically, the person most likely to be interested in looking at the records of Jason Auxilva Babrette was Jason Auxilva Babrette. Instead, Jason downloaded the summary files and the result files of the entire Emulator Project. Reasonably compact, only twenty gigabytes of data. Encrypted, split up into unrecognizable packets, routed through half a dozen different computers and then reassembled, the data ended up stashed in the insecure computer which controlled the premises of the Sappy Sunflower Happy Home in Nevada, one of those for-profit warehousing operations which sometimes made Jason hope he never lived to see old age. Jason looked at his watch. Six o'clock! Six o'clock already! The night had vanished, vaporised. He had been lost in a daze of concentration, and time had melted. Risk another half hour? No. Everything you do with computers takes longer than you think. He did not want to risk being late for work. Jason took a capsule from his legal stash. Everyone had one. You went to the doctor, told your story and got a prescription written. The capsule's surface was cool, flawless, perfectly machined. One capsule of Executive Javelin. Perfectly safe, perfectly harmless, except that some people suffered strokes and died, but the drug company's statisticians had convinced three juries that the deaths were just a meaningless statistical cluster, just "a chance outcome in God's casino," as the leader of the dream team had put it. Jason dryswallowed the capsule. An hour later, he was functioning in the sharp-edged world of Executive Javelin. His thought processes were hyperactive, faster than usual and full of random stumbles. He kept making errors, but he was so sharp that self-correction was effortless and almost automatic. The color red was painful, so he had to hide his red ballpoint pen out of sight, but apart from that he was doing just fine. He was good for another seventy two hours of "cost-efficient process in a high productivity mode" as the EJ propaganda put it. (Propaganda? Hey, don't knock it! When you need this stuff, you need it. And if you die? Well, you were going to die anyway, one of these days. Should have faced up to that earlier - right?) In the next cubicle, Goth was on the phone. "Yeah, a hack. Got in with an outdated administrator password, so they, you know ... yeah. So I guess they must've got the guy, because that's one mean ... yeah, you got it." Laughter from Goth. And Jason, frozen in the next cubicle, tried to compute it, tried to make sense of half a telephone conversation's worth of clues. Were they talking about him? The Virtual Person Screening was done at the Trotter Laboratory, the complex of buildings collectively known as the Brown House, and Jason and Max went together on the same day. Jason was more than a little jumpy. If the illegal use of an administrator password had been traced back to him, then a prosecutor with a sense of drama might think that arresting him at one of the portals of the incarceration system would work well on TV. An outdated password ... he still couldn't get over it. They had allowed him to get in with an outdated password ... from a security point of view, not a smart move ... if maintaining the integrity of your computer system was the priority, better to reject all attempts at illicit entry ... but if you wanted to catch someone, to make an example of someone, to persuade some cybercriminal to stay online long enough to be traced .... Had he been as thoroughly, scrupulously, hygienically safe as he thought? Or had he screwed up? The gates. A cop ... two cops ... three, six ... cops everywhere ... one with a coffee in his hands ... someone telling a joke ... cops laughing ... of course, they might be waiting to get you when you exit, but it really looks as if .... As if you're in. As they were escorted along the neon-lit corridors of the Brown House, Jason was able to glance into some of the wards. Caught occasional glimpses ... men with plastic tubes hanging out of their veins ... someone with something red over his face, a mask maybe, except that it had veins in it, seemed to be pulsing ... a room lit with red light in which a figure was standing, either dancing or writhing, mouth open, either screaming in pain or giving vent to ecstasy, but the guy had lost his sound channel so you couldn't tell ... a startled guard, leaping upright, abandoning the body - corpse? - to which he had been doing - what? |
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