Pacfin had summoned Fred to an unscheduled meeting to reconsider organizational decisions that he, himself, had finalized three months ago. To make matters worse, Rendezvous, a gathering of over fifty-thousand chartists from all corners of the United Democracies, was to take place this Wednesday, the day after tomorrow.
Marcus, the BB of R’s own mentar, prompted Fred, Myr Pacfin is concerned about the makeup of the security staff at McCormick Place. He would like its composition to be entirely russ.
Fred intensified the Rondy scape in which Pacfin stared reproachfully at him from across the teletable. Next to Pacfin sat a woman from the TUG charter, who wore that charter’s olive-mustard-olive jumpsuit uniform. Members of Charter TUG maintained a clonelike physical uniformity—they were all big, solid people with square heads, even their women—but they were not clones.
Also present in this scape were MC, the McCormick Place mentar, and a jerome named Gilles, Fred’s operational officer.
Fred said, “I sympathize with your concerns, Myr Pacfin, but you signed the standard McCormick Place security contract.”
“Which is?”
“Uh, MC?”
The McCormick Place mentar replied, “Forty-two percent russ, thirty percent jerry, twenty-four percent belinda, and four percent pike.”
Pacfin fell back in his seat and threw up his hands. “Come on!” he cried. “Aren’t jerrys bad enough, but pikes? You want to foist pikes on us?”
The large TUG woman, Veronica according to her name patch, rolled her eyes, like tiny beads in a slab of dough.
Fred was out of patience. “Again I apologize,” he said, “but a matter of national security has arisen and calls me away. I will dispatch a proxy to continue this meeting.” He muted the scape and said, “Marcus, proxy me. Inspector Costa, I’m all yours.”
Fred shrank the booth controls and pushed them away. He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. He thought about the multiplex convention center, with a main hall with five tiers, two more halls with three tiers, and twenty-three satellite venues, and all of them packed solid for twenty-four hours with over fifty thousand yahoos—no, scratch that—fifty thousand chartists from everywhere. He thought about maintaining order of this gathering with a security force of 420 russes, 300 jerrys, 240 belindas, and 40 troublesome pikes.
There was a ding, and when Fred opened his eyes, his proxy floated before him in the booth. For his proxy style, Fred, like most russes, chose a head, a keystone-shaped section of shoulders and chest, and a detached right hand in a white glove.
Fred’s new proxy saluted him with that white glove and said, “Oh, sure, you take the blacksuit job and stick me with Pacfin.”
“You’ll do,” Fred said and swiped the proxy on its way. Then he got up and stretched and left the booth only to find someone else’s proxy waiting for him in the hallway. It was the TUG woman’s proxy, which she must have cast while he was casting his.
“May I help you?” he asked it. The TUG proxy was as imposing as the TUGs were themselves: a brick head on a barrel torso, two mighty arms and hands.
“I know you’re in a hurry, Myr Londenstane,” it said in an incongruously sweet voice. “I just wanted to ask you to overlook Myr Pacfin’s regrettable racism. He doesn’t represent all of charterdom. There are many of us who would like to remove the artificial wedge that certain sectors of society have used to divide chartists from iterants such as yourself.”
Fred wasn’t sure how to respond to the woman’s remarks. In any case, this was neither the time nor place for a discussion of class warfare.
“No offense taken,” he said. “And I’m sure we’ll iron out the Rondy arrangements. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
“THIS IS WHAT a regional landline opticom hub looks like,” said Inspector Costa. A ball appeared on the windshield HUD in front of Fred. He was riding in a HomCom General Ops Vehicle, a GOV, to the Bell Opticom switching station on 407th Street, where the inspector awaited him. The opticom hub she was showing him was about the size and color of a cue ball and had a slowly revolving, shimmering, pearlescent surface. “What you see modeled here is packet flow,” the inspector continued. “The more traffic, the larger the sphere. This sphere represents about three trillion tetrapackets per picosecond, a fairly normal flow rate for a hub like Chicago. What’s important to remember is that for every packet that goes into a hub, a packet must emerge. Likewise, no more packets can emerge than went in. It’s just a switch, after all, not a generator or accumulator. What goes in must come out, right?”
“I guess,” Fred said. His GOV left the local grid and descended into the vehicle well of the Sharane Building. “But you said the Chicagoland hub is wobbling?”
“Yes, it is. Compare this model to the opticom hub we will be visiting.” A second ball appeared beside the first. Fred scrutinized it and compared it to the first. If it was wobbling, it was doing so too subtly for him to discern. “See it?” asked the inspector.
“Well, ah, no, Inspector,” he said.
“No need to be so formal with me, Londenstane. Call me Costa. Back away from the models a little and kinda squint your eyes at them.”
Fred did so and noticed a slight difference. The horizontal lines of the shimmering sheen on the surface of the second ball seemed slightly off-kilter. They meandered slowly above and below the equatorial guide. “Got it,” he said. “What’s causing that?”
“The switch is sending more packets than it’s receiving. That means there’s a packet generator tapped into the hub. People who keep mentars like to hide secret backups inside opticom hubs. That way the backups can act as passive conduits for their mentar prime, keeping constantly updated while staying invisible. If the mentar prime goes down, however, and a covert backup takes its place, it’s suddenly not passing data through but creating it. And since a mentar is a gushing geyser of packets, the hub—”
“Starts to wobble,” Fred said, mesmerized by the shiny orb. He shook his head and looked away. “You think it’s our fugitive?”
“No one’s swept this hub facility in years. By now, there are probably dozens of covert backups down here belonging to a host of different sponsors. One of them has gone active. The only mentar we’re aware of in need of activating a backup at this time is our fugitive. Yes, we believe it’s Cabinet. In fact, we believe this is its last backup.”
“By the way,” Fred said, “how did Eleanor Starke die?” Although it was thirty-nine years since he’d left her service—Marcus had refreshed his memory of the details of that duty—he had continued to follow her career in the media. She was the last person he would expect to fall victim to an accident, or to foul play, for that matter.
“Couldn’t say,” said the probate inspector. “Really, I couldn’t,” she added when he frowned. “It’s not my beat and I don’t know.”
Fred’s car settled onto a docking platform in a priority area. Another GOV, probably the inspector’s, was already parked there. He decarred and took a lift seven stories down to the foundation of the Sharane gigatower. “Last backup? What makes you think so?”
Gut feeling, the inspector said in Fred’s ear. It’s a good bet that Cabinet would reserve its hub taps for last.
When Fred’s elevator car arrived at S7, he passed through a series of automated scanways. There were plenty of maintenance arbeitors wheeling around, but no humans. Except for one—USNA Justice Department Inspector Heloise Costa. Fred found her waiting outside the switching room vault with an entourage of four large tank carts. He did a double take when he saw her in the flesh. She did, indeed, resemble a lulu, which was ridiculous. Lulus were never hired for cop work. He had to get pretty close before he could tell for sure that she was a hink, not a cloned woman.