Текст книги "The End Is Nigh"

Автор книги: Jack McDevitt

Соавторы: Nancy Kress
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

He reached into his back pocket and laid a smudged index card on the table, folded in half. She didn’t touch it, but she saw a shadowed Santa Cruz address in careful script.

Then he ate in silence while Nayima sat beside him, her face and eyes afire with tears of rage and helplessness.

“Where’s your car keys?” he said.

“In the car,” shewhispered past her stinging throat.

“You need anything in the house?”

The question confused her. Which house?

“My backpack,” she said.

“Your gun in there too?”

She shook her head.

“Then where is it?”

She told him.

“I’ll go get it,” he said. “Thanks for the chicken. Real good job.. I’ll get your stuff. Just go around and wait in front of the house. Then I’ll open the garage, and you can get in your car and drive away. One-two-three, it’s done.” His voice was gentle, almost playful.

Nayima was amazed when she realized she did not want to hurt Sanchez. Did not want to lunge at him or claw at his eyes. The index card on the table fluttered in a breeze. The air was so filled with smoke, she could almost see the wind.

“No,” she said. “Just go. Please.”

Any sadness in his eyes might have been an illusion, gone fast. He left her without a word, without hesitation. He had never planned to stay long.

When he left, Nayima ripped up the index card into eight pieces. Then, panicked at having nowhere to go, she collected the pieces and shoved them into her back pocket.

When a coyote howled, setting off the chorus, she heard the ghost of Gram’s screams.

A sob emerged, and Nayima howled with the coyotes and lost dogs and sirens.

Then she stopped. She thought she’d heard a cat’s mew.

A scrabbling came, and a black cat bounded over the wooden patio fence. The cat had lost weight, so she would not have recognized Tango except for the V of white fur across his chest. The sight of Tango made her scratch her arm’s old flea bites.

Maybe it was a sign. Maybe Tango was a message from Gram.

Tango jumped on the patio table, rubbing his butt near her face as he sniffed at the chicken bones. Nayima cleared the bones away—chicken bones weren’t good for pets, Gram always said. Instead, Nayima grabbed a chicken thigh from the grill and tossed it to the patio floor. Tango poked at it hungrily, retreated from the heat. Mewed angrily. Poked again.

“Hey, baby,” Nayima said in Gram’s voice, scratching Tango behind his ears. He purred loudly. Nayima stroked Tango for a long time while he ate. Slowly, her thoughts cleared.

Nayima went into the house, took a blanket from the sofa, and draped it over Gram in her bed. Nayima kept her face turned away, so she did not see any blood, although she smelled it. She wanted to say goodbye, but she had been saying goodbye for weeks. Months, really. She would have the rest of her life, however long or short that would be, to say goodbye to Gram.

Instead, Nayima gathered the remaining chicken, her gun, and her backpack. She didn’t need the meds now, but they were in the car. They would be valuable later. She also had endless cans of Ensure, which would soon be her only food.

Tango followed Nayima to her car; she left the back door open for him while she packed the last of her things. If Tango jumped in, fine. If he didn’t, fine.

Tango jumped into the car. She closed the door behind him.

As she pulled out of the driveway, she took one last drive around the green belt, although she purposely did not look at Gram’s house and the jacaranda tree. The pool’s blue waters were as placid as they’d been when she and Shanice lived in chlorine all summer, with Bob yelling at them to keep the noise down. She noticed a flat basketball at the edge of the court. The shirt and jeans still flapped in the tree.

Tango did not like the car. Nayima had not finished rounding the green belt before he began complaining, a high-pitched and desperate mew that sounded too much like crying. When he jumped to the large cooler on the front seat, she knew she’d made a mistake.

Nayima stopped the car. She opened her door. Tango bounded across her lap to get out of the car, running free. He stopped when he was clear of her and stared back from his familiar kingdom of grass, the only home he wanted to know. He groomed his paw.

Tango was Nayima’s last sight in her rearview mirror before she drove away.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tananarive Due is the Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College. She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient has authored and/or co-authored twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. In 2013, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. She has also taught at the Geneva Writers Conference, the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and Voices of Our Nations Art Foundation (VONA). Due’s supernatural thriller

The Living Blood

won a 2002 American Book Award. Her novella “Ghost Summer,” published in the 2008 anthology

The Ancestors

, received the 2008 Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society, and her short fiction has appeared in best-of-the-year anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. Due is a leading voice in black speculative fiction.

Tobias S. Buckell – SYSTEM RESET

Toto’s waiting for me in the old rust-red Corolla with tinted windows and the oh-so-not street legal nitrous system I know is hidden away under the hood. The only external hint that the car’s a getaway-special comes from the thick tires.

He rolls a window down as I walk out under the shadow of the imposing concrete and glass corporate facade I’ve just been politely rebuffed from. “Charlie?”

I keep walking along the sidewalk, so he starts the car up with that belch/rumble that lets the car’s secret out. Like Toto, the car isn’t nearly as camouflaged as he thinks; a nearby cop on foot eyes us as Toto creeps the car along to pace me.

“You look funny in a suit, Charlie,” Toto says, leaning an arm out and giving me a puppy-dog sort of look. He has a three dimensional splay of barbwire tattooed on his arm, complete with streaks of blood where it appears to cinch his bicep. “They know you don’t belong. They sniffed you out, huh?”

He knows my moods well enough. I’m angry, hurt, frustrated. Walking fast, leaning forward, my hands pushed deep into the pockets. I’m sweating in the black suit, and the tie is choking me, but I’m thinking maybe I can get used to it. Maybe I can ignore the seams riding up hard against my crotch and the ill-fitted, scratchy fabric.

“You look hot in that shit, man. Come on, hop in the AC. Let me give you a ride back to the apartment.”

We both stop at the intersection. The car’s brakes squeal slightly. I stand still, my toes pinched in the dress shoes. The light turns green. A split second passes, and someone behind us lays into their horn. Toto leans out the window and flips them off.

“Damn it, Toto.” I move to the other side of the car, open the door and slide onto the cold leather passenger’s seat. Because I know Toto’s not going anywhere, I want to save the guy behind us the trouble.

Toto hits the gas, and we growl across the intersection with a bounce of stiff suspension. “They didn’t give you the job, did they?”

I shake my head, looking in the mirror at the corporate monolith behind us with a forced wistfulness.

“Fuck ’em,” Toto says, hitting the wheel. “

Fuck

.

Them

. You would have kicked ass at handling their corporate firewall. You’d have kept their secrets lock-tight.”

“I know,” I say, squinting through the scattered sunlight bounced off the sea of buildings around us.

“They don’t know what they’re missing,” Toto says. “But you know what, I got something for you.”

“No,” I tell him. “I just want to go back to my apartment.” Get back to my job searches, hang the suit up in the bag and seal it up until I could try again.

“Look, what happened in Florida: That shit wasn’t your fault. That was on me. That was on

him

. You can’t let it get to you.”

I don’t reply, just lean tiredly back into the seat.

“I got a good one, Charlie. It’s

right

by you.”

• • • •

Toto’s from Kansas. And he’s loyal. Knew him from a message board where he sold stolen credit card numbers online. That was back in high school, when I first dipped my toe into the other side of the internet. He takes to wearing cut-off shirts and ironic trucker hats, which is doubly ironic given that he calls himself trailer-trash-reared and city-ambitious. He likes layered jokes like that.

Back then we’d both been illegitimate. I used the cards to get some equipment shipped to a dead drop in a nearby county, then had a fifth grader bicycle to the mailbox center to pick the stuff up. He would hand it off to another kid, and once I was sure

that

kid hadn’t been followed, I was rocking some serious gigaflops for my part-time, personal server farm.

Every kid needs a hobby, right?

Most others liked creating botnets, but I had a soft spot for my own gear. It made me feel in control.

Toto moved out to the city when I told him where I lived. “You need muscle,” he had said.

And he was that. Spent most of his spare time in the gym, though I didn’t think he stuck himself with any needles to get that kind of beef.

He odd-jobbed. Wheelman, dealer, enforcer, but for the last couple years we’d been working together. Skiptracing. Like he’d always wanted. Toto couldn’t get a license as a bounty hunter—his record was shit—but I’d always kept my fingers clean. Toto knew the shit-side of the city; he grabbed the runaways, the strays, while I sat in the Corolla. I was the one that hunted them down. Sniffing through their digital scat, spotting the broken twig here and there, or the absence of a bark, and then putting the clues together.

Felt good.

Until Florida.

The kid we hunted down in Florida was a straight-up runaway. Toto said finding him was a paid favor for an old friend. Child services was worried about the kid.

We drove all the way to Florida—that retired syphilitic wang of the country—trading places every couple hours at the wheel, then found him in a shelter in Boca Raton. We were tired. Which is why neither of us noticed that we’d been followed.

Kid’s name was Ryan. His biological father, Emry, came after us in a damn parking lot with a giant fucking pistol and a ski mask. Cameras didn’t have anything on him, and the car he used was stolen. But Toto recognized the voice and stature. Emry had dragged the kid away from us. Shot him four times and left him for dead in a ditch in Georgia.

Kid was ten.

Ten years old.

Can you imagine?

• • • •

“Look,” Toto’s saying. “I fucked us both up on that. I feel your pain. It’s been keeping me up all night, trying to think about how I can make it right.”

“You can’t,” I tell him. He grimaces, holds the wheel tight. Corded arms flex as he bites his lip to stop the snarl.

“I got a job for you.” He’s excited, because he thinks he’s got everything fixed. And that it’s going to go back to the way it was between us. “A job that’s

right

. No, it’s better than right. It’s

righteous

.”

“I’m done,” I tell him for the hundredth time this week. Toto comes to a stop in front of my building, puts the car into park.

He sighs. “You sure?”

“I can’t fucking sleep without pills,” I tell him as I open the door, kicking it out with my gleaming dress shoes. “I’m out.”

“Hundred grand,” Toto says.

I’m unbuckled and half out of the car. But I stop. “What…”

He pulls a folded up printed sheet of paper from his back pocket. “I was at the post office, right? And I’m looking at these ‘most wanted’ posters. So I get online, and I find out they’re hot for some guy they think is the new Unabomber. Only he’s a hacker type. And the reward is—well, it’s not just the reward.”

Toto shoves the paper at me. I unfold it, sitting in the barrier between the cold air of the Corolla and the muggy, garbage-reeking heat of the sidewalk

“You want to get right with the universe after Florida, this is how you do it.”

• • • •

Toto’s at the wheel, his natural element, pointing us out West toward the last place I sniffed out a trace of our quarry. There’s something Zen in the long drive for him. His hands rest at a perfect ten and two on the wheel; he almost never lets go. He refuses to eat while driving, and has a camelback filled with purified water and the straw dangling over his left shoulder.

He doesn’t expect the same of me, but he only ever hands over the wheel when he believes his reflexes are in danger and can’t be complemented with those uppers they hand out to Air Force pilots for extended missions.

A year ago, I offered him some pretzel rods after he took a fierce nap, aided by downers, but he shook his head. “You know how you pass out after Thanksgiving? Ain’t tryptophan, that’s bullshit. It’s the blood sugar crash that comes from eating so much stuffing, potatoes, and pie—shit like that.”

On trips like this, he mainlines protein bars and nuts.

“This guy,” Toto says. “I spent two days on background before I came out for you. I wanted to make sure this wasn’t some kind of thing where this guy is just getting sit on by the feds because he’s digging up stuff they don’t like.”

I’ve got a palm-sized WiFi hotspot plugged into the lighter and stuck to the dashboard with double-sided tape. My go-laptop is cradled between my thighs as I fight motion sickness. I’m using it to monitor active search results and IM pings from people on the dark net I’m using to help my hunt.

Of course, they don’t know how they’re actually helping me. They think they’re hacking a bank for numbers; I just want to know if there’s activity in any of our quarry’s false personas.

“I read his manifesto,” I tell Toto. “You’re right. He sounds like a real asshole.”

“I was worried. At first, he sounded kinda like you when you would talk about Snowden, how the whistleblowers and leakers were genuine heroes. You know, how it’s bullshit that the hacker who exposed the Steubenville rapists is being charged with more jail time than the actual rapists? This guy seems cut from darker shit, though.”

“Yeah.”

Norton Haswell. Born in California. Nice, sunny suburbs. School with a nice computer lab. Honor student. Rich parents. His choice of colleges. Companies lined up to show off their pool tables and “alternate” working environments.

“You’d think, the sort of life he had,” Toto says, “that he’d relax and enjoy it.”

I snort. “He thinks he’s an original thinker, but the stuff he posts is all the usual techno-libertarian talking points. Until he invested in that offshore floating haven cruise ship—some kind of techno-utopia away from ‘interference and regulation’—he was safe and comfy in his nice offices. But after he lost all his money, he blamed anything else but his own dumb decisions.”

“Well, he didn’t have to bother mixing with riffraff like me on public transportation. Had a company shuttle pick him up at his sidewalk every day so he could code on his way to work.” Toto sounds bitter. “Someone like

me

says the things he does with a drawl—drives a pickup and stocks up too many guns—you get raided. For sure. But you nerd up and say the same anti-government shit, and people toss venture capital at you.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “He’s probably a mirror image of me if I hadn’t grown up in the cold.” Shivering away with a mother who literally drank herself to death one winter when we couldn’t seal the gaps to keep its icy fingers out. A lot of free lunch and foster care later and here I was. No vested stock options. “There’s a lot of stuff in his manifesto I could have written.”

“You’re not Norton Haswell. You’re not trying to kill people you disagree with,” Toto says.

“Point,” I say. I had never hacked the lane-keeping and pre-crash emergency functions of a senator’s luxury car to try and kill him. Haswell, though, had. It was the act that led to him getting tagged with that fat, juicy FBI reward.

Toto points at the road ahead. “It’s all politics and bullshit, and we all have the right to get as worked up as we want. This is fucking America. It’s what we

do

, man. But ain’t nothing worth killing people over until people’s being killed on your side. You make the first move, it ain’t disagreement, it ain’t the mess of democracy—you’re a fucking traitor. A terrorist. And that always leads to the response coming back in kind. And then, basically, you’ve just shit your own bed.”

I grunt. “Okay. Let’s find the mealy little fucker before he does something really newsworthy like actually killing a senator.”

And Toto’s right. I’m feeling kinda righteous about this hunt.

• • • •

The Jitters Cafe in a small town in Nebraska offers free WiFi with purchase. They print a temporary, one-hour password out on the receipt, which I have to squint at as I type the long string into my laptop because the nines and sixes, zeros and Os, all look the same.

This gets me onto their internal network.

Toto sits over by the door, carefully eating a ham and cheese breakfast bagel (no bagel please) with knife and fork, an oversized never-ending mug of coffee steaming behind it.

“You really think he’s posting anonymous rage-comments on news articles from a coffee shop in Nebraska?” he’d asked earlier as we’d eased down the small main street, huddled against the plains like a modern version of some old west movie set.

“The linguistic fingerprints match up.”

It’s the little, stupid things that get us, isn’t it? Haswell ranting away in his free time. He could be holed up in any of the small apartments on the second story of the old brick buildings. Or in one of the trailers on the edge of town. He was coming into town to use the free internet to argue.

And maybe other things.

He’d only been here a couple days. Probably moving soon. Toto’d gotten us here faster than we could have flown, with the connections and delays.

Packet sniffer up and running

, I texted Toto.

After a casual minute, Toto checks his phone and taps a reply.

Don’t need it

.

I look up from my screen at Toto, and he nods toward the bathroom at the end of a hallway. Someone’s just come out and sat back down at a laptop. I frown. Really? It doesn’t look like our guy, but Toto nods at him again.

Go on

, Toto texts.

I walk over to our quarry, who is thoroughly glued to his screen. He’s grown out his hair, has a Huskers cap skewed off to the side, and is sporting a green flannel shirt under dirty overalls that belong to a local utility company. Apparently his bathroom break has dammed up a flurry of thoughts, because he’s typing at top speed, face scrunched up, attacking the keyboard.

“Norton Haswell, I’m—”

I never really get too far along introducing myself. He rabbits quicker than I would have thought for a fellow keyboarder, slamming his shoulder into my stomach to get around me.

Coughing, my lungs flattened, I stagger half-heartedly along the hallway after him. People stand up, concerned. This is open carry territory, and I don’t figure Toto wants to get shot, so I shout “Bounty hunters! He’s wanted for skipping bail and is on the wanted list.”

As I shout—more like wheeze—all that, Toto steps up and clotheslines Haswell in the chest, then, just as expertly, catches him on the way down like a dancer doing a romantic dip. He casually bear hugs the man to him so I can put the cuffs on.

Toto leads him to the back of the car while I leave my card with the baristas. We don’t need the local cops coming in hot and bothered.

“Got lucky,” I murmur as we tear out of town.

“We were due,” Toto says.

“Still think we should dump him off with the locals.” I look up the mirror, where Haswell glowers at us but says nothing.

“No.” Toto shakes his head. “You know they’ll just as likely lose our processing paperwork and try to hand the claim over to a buddy. Trust me.”

“Just because you grew up in one good-ole-boy small town doesn’t mean you know how they all work,” I tell him.

But he doesn’t answer. He’s done hashing this one out. We argued about this on the way: Toto doesn’t trust the feds to give us the reward in a timely manner. Haswell’s a double win. He’s got the FBI reward on him, but he has a substantial bond as well. When he tried to kill that senator by hacking his car, he was jailed. Got out on bond, then skipped.

If we return him to the county he skipped out from, then no matter how long the FBI paperwork takes, no matter what actually happens, we get the percentage of the bond we’re due.

Toto settles into his comfortable altered driving state while I sit and fidget. My work is done. There’s nothing to do but wait for the long drive to pass. I load up an old, favored RPG on the laptop and start working through a side quest.

After hours of frosty silence, interrupted only by the wail of my vanquished enemies from the laptop, Haswell finally breaks the car’s quiet. His voice is guttural, laced with rage, and a little confusion. “How’d you find me?”

I smile and pause the game.

One master to another. But as I open my mouth, Toto looks over, his eyes ungluing as he comes out of his drive trance, and he shakes his head. Don’t reveal our methods. Don’t offer anything.

“We’re prisoners of our habits,” I say. But even that gets me a death glare from Toto. He glowers at me until he’s sure I get the point, then turns his focus back to driving. I lapse back into the game.

But Haswell’s not done with us. Like a terrier with a bone, he wants to keep chewing at this. “I’ve been sitting back here, going over where I might’ve made a mistake, and I can’t think of anything.” Our eyes meet in the mirror, and Haswell has moved from anger to respect. “Whatever you did, it was impressive.”

I really, really wish I could preen. Instead, I shrug. “Nothing special. Just look for weaknesses.”

“No,” Haswell says with messianic certainty. “It’s

not

nothing special. It was something

very

special. I’m impressed. Don’t be full of shit. You and I both know that whatever you did, it was clever. And very few people can do it. You’re one of the select.”

Well… he’s not wrong. But I’m still not giving him anything.

Haswell leans back, his handcuffs clinking. “Does it ever bug you?” he asks.

“Does what bug me?”

“The bullshit. This job of yours. When you could be doing something superior. I was sunk the moment they noticed me, long before I went after the senator. You remember those kids from Steubenville, Ohio? They passed that drunk girl around and fingered her, took pictures and laughed because they were the jocks? You know the hacker who got the pictures? He faces more jail time than the rapists got. Because corporations wrote those laws, you can get in more trouble for copying a DVD than raping someone.” Haswell leans forward between us. “Doesn’t that make you just want to get out on the street and rage?”

“It makes me want to send donations to politicians who aren’t idiots,” I lie.

Haswell sighs and slumps dramatically into the back seat. “You mean the same kind of people who can’t even remember their password properly unless they call tech support or have it on the back of a sticky note on the side of a monitor? You think they’re fit to pass laws about

technology

? Are half the other useless empty-headed illiterates out there fit to have an opinion on technology and law? You know, most people can’t even explain how a light bulb works.” He hits the back of Toto’s chair. “Either of you know how a light bulb works?”

Toto, jolted out of his trance, sets his jaw. We can’t bring our marks back to their county of residence with any bruises, but Toto knows how to fuck them up without leaving a trace. I wait for him to hit the brakes and pull over. But he doesn’t want to lose time. “I usually just flip the switch,” he says.

Haswell doesn’t think that’s funny. “Sure. So do they. But they don’t even know what that really means. Yet they’re going to explain to me how evolution is fake and climate change isn’t real. Give them half a moment, and they can’t even disprove the dark-sucker theory of how a light bulb works. It’s just magic. Flip a switch, there it is, you’re right. Send them back in time, they’d never be able to recreate it. They’d be lucky to figure out fire. Because they’re parasites that live off the largesse of the greater minds that came before them.”

“So it’s time to kill them, like that senator? You think that will solve things? Seems to have just ended with you handcuffed in our back seat.”

“Okay,” Haswell says. “I wasn’t thinking, then, just lashing out. I wanted people to realize that the internet was under attack. Literally. And that if war had been declared, people online needed to realize it. Before the internet could fight back, it needed to realize a war had started. I thought I could get some attention to this. But I wasn’t thinking clearly. Not like I am now.”

“What are you thinking now?” I ask.

“It’s time to reboot,” Haswell says. “Time to put in a clean operating system. No more patches. No trying to get old buggy code to work. A fresh upgrade. Everything has to be wiped out for it to work properly. Now that I know you all are getting close, it’s time to hurry and press the power switch.”

“Societies aren’t computers,” I say, but I have to admit that his metaphor is chilling.

Haswell wants to argue that, but Toto looks up. “Potty break!” We take an exit quickly, getting off the ramp and pulling into a small gas station. The bathroom keys are attached to a giant wooden canoe paddle.

We refill the car with gas, Toto’s camelback with bottled water, and get back in the car and on the road. Toto pauses at the stoplights before the ramp, waiting for the light to change.

“Huh,” Toto mutters, right before a white electric company truck emblazoned with a familiar logo blows through the red lights and slams into us.

• • • •

“It’s not your fault,” Toto tells me later. After we had been stunned by the impact, our faces covered in airbags. After Haswell’s two overall-wearing friends smashed in the window and spirited him off before we’d had time to register what had happened.

Who would have expected the crazy loner in the cabin to have a posse?

“Shut the fuck up.” I wince as I say it, feeling bad. But I don’t apologize. I’m on my phone, typing with my thumbs like a possessed demon because the laptop’s screen is cracked and useless.

“We should get you to the hospital to have someone look at your eye.”

“Fuck my eye,” I say. The bandage over the cut to my eyebrow has stopped the bleeding. It just throbs now. As does the rest of my head. I can still taste the smoke from the airbag in the back of my sinuses. There’s a slight tremble to my fingers.

“You might have a concussion,” Toto starts.

“I’m fine.”

“Happens to the best. We couldn’t have known what he was doing.”

I look up at Toto. I’ve brushed most of the glass out of my hair, and the adrenaline has long since faded and left me with the jitters. “I should’ve thought to check for other signals. Like a small GPS pip hidden somewhere. Can’t we go faster?”

The Corolla is vibrating and shimmying around. Wind whistles through cracks and warps in the doors. Toto shakes his head. “Barely in one piece,” he says. “We’ll shake apart.”

“We go back to where he lives, and we find his gear. I want to strip out every password, every user account, every one and zero he’s ever touched,” I tell Toto. “There’s going to be a mistake in there somewhere, and then we’re going to pick the bastard up again.”

I’m so full of fury. I feel like a bell that was rung when our car got hit; and that I haven’t stopped vibrating. That fury builds as we show Haswell’s photo around town to ferret out where he’d hunkered down. And that fury bleeds away into a dull sense of confusion when we find, waiting for us at Haswell’s apartment door, three FBI agents, a SWAT team with really big guns, two Department of Homeland Security officers, a local sheriff, and last but not least: the barista from the coffee shop.

“That’s them!” the barista says.

And all hell really breaks loose.

When it’s all settled, Toto and me are zip-tied to a table, and one of the blue-suited FBI agents eases into a chair across from us. Until they ran our info and realized we were skiptracers, they’d assumed we were working with Haswell. Coming back to pick up his computers for him. Now they were just pissed.

“We finally had Haswell staked out, and you got him right out of town under our noses.”

“Jesus,” one of the FBI suits keeps saying, rubbing her forehead and sighing as she paces around us. Then she grabs Toto’s shirt, and shouts into his face. “Do you have any idea what this man is currently into? When you created this algorithm to look for his writing, did you stop and read it?”

“I didn’t have time!” I protest, trying to get her away from Toto. “I was working on the match possibilities. I basically cobbled together a bunch of scripts…”

Her attention is on me, and I flinch. “So you didn’t bother to stop and read?”

“No,” I say. “Like I said…”

“He’s openly talking about trying to crack fucking nuclear missile codes. Sure, he did it under a handle, but you’re not the only one running text analysis. We found him as well. Only unlike you amateurs we actually stopped to read him.”

I remember snatches of text. Reactionary, rich Silicon Valley stuff floating around the net. Nothing I didn’t see in most anonymous forums. Between that and the anarchists, I mostly just tuned it all out as the background static that came with interfacing with a hacker community.

“Lot of idiots say a lot of stupid things,” Toto says. “Do you chase down every idiot calling for armed overthrow online? Because you’d end up wasting a lot of time at certain news sites…”

The agent’s attention is back on Toto. “This one is for real, has already struck, and you let him get away!”

One of the other agents pulls her away from us and tells her to calm down. The entire environment is really hostile.

This is feeling electric, and scary. Haswell has been getting into some seriously stupidly high level dangerous stuff online.