Reaching into the deep vents of her coveralls, Jack thumbed her knife, remotely starting her truck and unlocking the storage space. She wanted an exit route, and fast.
“We noticed you talking with this man,” Slag continued, his broad chest momentarily obfuscated by a grainy projected image of CanadaDoug2120, his head topped by a bright orange spray of pixels. “Is he a friend of yours?”
Jack paused for a moment, considering her options. It didn’t seem like these bots were from any kind of patent authority. But if her association with CanadaDoug2120 had tripped some kind of social network alarm, she wasn’t about to get into a long conversation with them—especially when she had no idea how many alerts her biometrics would trigger once they started looking.
Moving her fingers as unobtrusively as possible, she raised the doorway on her storage space and backed the truck out. The vehicle was only a few meters away.
Before she could delay Slag any further, she caught a blur in her peripheral vision that rapidly resolved itself into Threezed, swerving behind the bots. He snapped open the control panels on their backs. In an instant, the bots were staring at her silently, their minds occupied by whatever Threezed was doing to their command interfaces.
“Ha! Nobody ever resets the defaults.” Threezed stood between the two bots with his arms buried in their bodies like some weird puppeteer.
“…the fuck?” she got out.
“They’ll just sit like that for a few minutes and then start up again. A friend of mine taught me the command—works great on cheap bots like these. Just hit the panel button, type in the string, and they stop moving for a while.”
Her truck was waiting silently in the street ahead of them.
Jack looked Threezed square in the face and gave him a nod of respect. “Get in the truck,” she said. “We’re going to Yellowknife.”
6
SIDE EFFECTS
JULY 6, 2144
Paladin and Eliasz were sitting under a tree in the main room of the Arcata Solar Farm house when Bluebeard and her cohort clattered back down the stairs. The bot could tell Bluebeard was pleased. It was written into her relaxed gait and expressed through the pattern of her breathing.
Across the room, listening to her feed on full blast, Roopa glared at them and curled her fingers to touch the weapon trigger pads in her palms. Three hours of sitting in peaceful immobility, and the security guard was still treating them like adversaries. The house network, though—not so much. Paladin was making some headway there. He carefully scanned devices around the room, from the atmosphere sensors to the kitchen appliances, and got lucky with the sprinkler system. The device sat on the network waiting for requests from tiny sensors peppered throughout the soil floor. Once in a while, those sensors would signal that it was dry enough to start watering the furniture.
But the sprinkler system was also waiting for requests from other devices. Somebody careless had set it up to pair with any new device that looked like a moisture sensor.
So Paladin came up with a plan. He initiated a pairing sequence with the sprinklers by disguising himself as a really old sensor model. Because the sprinkler system wanted to pair with sensors, it agreed to download some ancient, unpatched drivers so it could take requests from its new, elderly friend. Now it was a simple matter of exploiting a security vulnerability in those unpatched drivers, and Paladin was soon on the network, running with all the privileges of the sprinkler system. Which had access to quite a lot, including house layout and camera footage. After all, you wouldn’t want to start watering a room with people in it.
That camera footage would tell them everything they needed to know about who had been here and when. Paladin felt a rush of pride. Maybe he couldn’t do social engineering on humans yet, but he could still fool most machines.
He’d gotten access just in time. Bluebeard sealed their deal with a credit transfer, while Eliasz dropped hints that he might be able to get more IP from the same source. The pattern of heat in her face said she was interested, though her response was carefully neutral. “You have Thomasie’s contact information, eh?”
“Actually, no.” Eliasz looked over at Thomasie.
The two men exchanged a beam of data.
“Contact him if you want to set up another meeting,” Bluebeard said. Then she crouched down next to Paladin, still seated awkwardly beneath the tree, and looked right into the abstract, matte black planes of his face.
“What’s your name?” she asked him.
“Sorry, his vocalizer’s broken,” Eliasz spoke quickly. “He’s called Xiu.”
“I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk more, Xiu. Can you shake hands?” She held out her hand, tiny and calloused with an age her face didn’t show. Paladin extended his arm, allowing the scuffed metal of his fingers to curl around the pale pink of hers. She pressed her fingertips into his alloy, which yielded slightly and recorded the whorls embedded in each.
They matched nothing in the databases he had access to. Either Bluebeard had a completely unregistered identity, or age had degraded her prints so much that she was effectively untraceable. When their hands broke apart, she looked at the cluster of sensors on his face again, far longer than most humans ever did.
Bluebeard wanted him to know that she was unknown. She wanted him to explain to Eliasz later that this group of pirates was not to be fucked with. And that’s exactly what he did.
Flush with credits, Paladin and Eliasz rented a cheap room near the university, in a hotel that Gertrude had recommended. It was packed with visiting researchers and their families. The local mote network kept slowing down because everybody on it was downloading and uploading files that were far too media-rich to be scientific data.
“This city really is full of pirates,” Paladin remarked as Eliasz lay on the tiny futon and stared at the ceiling. “Almost everybody on this network is infringing copyrights.”
“That’s Iqaluit for you. As soon as we’ve got a handle on where Jack might be, we’re out of here.”
“I’ve got a backdoor into Arcata’s network, Eliasz, so we can analyze security footage from their cams. But I’m going to have to access it either really slowly or for really short periods of time. Otherwise it will be obvious that somebody is messing around in there.”
Paladin explained about Bluebeard’s extreme anonymity, and the relative sophistication of the Arcata Solar Farm operation. “I’m not sure how long we have before they figure out that we’re agents.”
“I’ve thought about that, too.” Eliasz sighed. “They’re not idiots. We’ve got to do this thing fast. You work on the network—look for Jack’s face in the footage, or references to Zacuity. Or even references to Federation business contacts.” He paused and sat up, putting a warm hand on Paladin’s lower back. “Let’s blow all this credit tonight so we’ve got a good excuse to do another sale tomorrow.”
That evening, they had two missions. Paladin would sip from the Arcata network, and Eliasz would hemorrhage cash in the most obvious way possible.
They walked along the dome’s edge, its massive vents rendered translucent and tilted open to admit the warm summer air. In winter the dome would seal shut, the meager hours of sunlight extended with an artificial glow that kept the suicide rate down to a statistically average level. Spiraling above them were dozens of towers whose trellises erupted with fruits and grains, and the air drifted with birds and shimmering tendrils of plant material. When Paladin zoomed in on the topmost farm levels, he could see humans and bots fertilizing the plants with tiny paintbrushes full of pollen.
“Let’s go to the ammo store,” Eliasz said. “The bullets are trackable, and the shooting range has a public feed for gun fans.” Then he grinned, and for once Eliasz’ facial expression perfectly matched the emotions indicated by the flow of blood in his cheeks and the dilation of his pupils. “Plus, we could use some shooting practice, right, Paladin?”