SUE: Missing in Action
You know what Liz wants you to do, don’t you? She wants you to go and find the nerd and the librarian, Jack Reed and Elaine Barnaby, and put it to them that they can be of help in your investigation. (That, and she wants you to switch all your network services off and wear a tinfoil hat under your four-leafed clover.) Which would be easy enough, if you could only bloody locate the terrible twosome. As it is, when you get back to the station and go live again, you bounce in quick succession off their voice mailboxes, IM receptionists, and social websites. Which tells you a lot about them (Jack’s into extreme knitting, Elaine likes dressing up as Maid Marian and hitting people with a sword) but nothing particularly useful like where they’re hiding. After half an hour of persistently not finding them—you know they headed over to Glasgow in the morning, but, by the time you get to the point of escalating your search, both their mobies are off-line—you’re out of ideas. So it’s time to get all twentieth-century and hit the pavement.
Except these two aren’t your usual neds. They’ve got no pavement to hang out on, just a hotel room and a recycled nuclear bunker. By the time you’ve confirmed they’re not filling up a conference room at the hotel, you’ve narrowed it down a wee bit: But then you hit a blank wall down at the bunker.
“They’re not here.” It’s Beccy Webster, the Market Stabilization Executive, coming on all Lady Macbeth at you. “I haven’t seen them, they haven’t been signed in, and you’re wasting your time.” She sniffs and stares down her nose, like you’re from the cleaning agency, and you’ve just smeared printer toner all over her nice clean walls.
“Oh really?” You raise an eyebrow at her, but your authority field is down below half strength. She just looks at you icily and nods.
“Yes. We’ve tightened up security a lot since last week.”
Fuck. “Is Mr. Richardson in his office, then?”
“Of course. But he won’t tell you any different.” One more sniff, and she signs you in, then stalks off in a huff. Bitch. But you’ve been here before, and you know the way. So you go and knock on Wayne’s door, and when it opens, you give him your best shit-eating grin.
“Mr. Richardson. I was hoping to find you here!”
Wayne gives you a rabbit-in-the-headlights look and backs into his room. “Really?” he asks cautiously.
You follow him in. It’s a dingy little hole, lit by a strip of blue-white daylight LEDs strung around the upper edges of the walls. He’s got a bunch of tattooed sheepskins with his name on them up on the wall behind his desk, framed so you can’t really miss them (ALL-ANGLESEY MIDDLE MANAGEMENT SHEEP SHAGGING CHAMPION, 2014) and a suspiciously large monitor parked on the blotter. “Have you by any chance seen Jack Reed or Elaine Barnaby today?” you ask him. And this time you’ve got the speech-stress monitor on real time, just out of curiosity.
“I’m sorry, I haven’t,” he says, and he’s telling the truth, dammit.
“Do you know where they’ve gone?” you ask.
“I’m sorry, but no. They haven’t been in all day.” He frowns pensively. “That’s odd, now you mention it.” He’s green-lit within the error bars, all the way: telling the truth again. How inconvenient. “They were running some sort of database trawl overnight, I think. They demanded access to a lot of rather sensitive data yesterday evening and left a big batch job running.”
“What kind of data were they after?” you ask, just cross-referencing in case it spooks Wayne into putting a foot wrong.
“A bunch of stolen magic plot coupons, described in Structured Treasure Language. I gave him read-only access to our code repository, so he could compile in some modules, and hooks into a bunch of the online auction-houses who buy and trade prestige goodies. I think that’s all, but I may be wrong—they were haggling with Sam.”
“Sam…?”
“Sam Couper.”
You twitch up a mug shot you captured earlier, back when you first parachuted into their full-metal panic. “Is he in today?”
“Sure!” Wayne looks surprised. “Third door down the hall on your left, you can’t miss it: It’s the one with the sign saying ‘Real programmers do it with a float’.”
He’s right, you can’t really miss it. So you walk right up to the door and, hearing voices, open it.
You are in a windowless room, with a huge, curved desk extending around three walls. The desk is covered in flat-panel displays, electronic gadgets, wires, books, print-outs, and half-eaten pizza crusts. The walls are covered with many-coloured maps gridded out with hexagonal overlays: What bare space there is is taken up by an Ansari Space Camp calendar. Three adult males sit bolt-upright in expensive wheelie chairs, facing the centre of the room, whistling a vaguely familiar melody while one of them—balding, thirtyish, red-faced—frowns furiously, concentrating as he juggles four or five small plush Cthulhu dolls. (After a moment you realize they’re all trying to whistle the Twilight Zone theme, slightly out of key.)
It takes a moment for them to notice you: Then the whistling falters to a diminuendo, followed by a splattering of bat-winged beanie-monsters crashing to the institutional blue-green carpet. For a moment there is a guilt-stricken silence so thick you could hear a snowflake fall, then one of them finds his voice. “What do you want?” he demands. It’s Sam “traceroute is my bitch” Couper, and his associates Darren and Mike. (Darren is the juggler of eldritch horrors.)
You smile evilly. “I want to pick your brains.”
Darren shudders, but Sam is made of tougher stuff. “I already told you everything I know.”
You can’t help it. Something about this room seems to exclude you. It must be all the frustrated testosterone sweated into the concrete walls over the years: But whatever it is, it gets right up your nose. “You told me everything you knew as of three days ago, Mr. Couper. I’d like to know what transpired between yourself and Jack Reed and Elaine Barnaby yesterday afternoon or evening.”
“Huh?” Sam looks surprised. “It was Wayne. He brought them in and told me, give them what they want. They wanted a list of what we could drag out of the journal logs from the bank, right before the robbery. And the source code to some of our in-house tools so that Reed could hack on them to go search for the missing loot. That’s all, I didn’t have anything to do with them afterwards.”
“I see.” Dammit, he’s telling the truth, too! How unhelpful. “Do you know when they left?”
“When they…? No, I don’t. Reed was still here when I went home, around 7:00 P.M. I think he was pulling an all-nighter.”
“Uh-huh.” Whatever else you can say about him, he sounds like a hard worker. You glance at Darren and Mike. “Do either of you know anything else? Your help would be very much appreciated.”
“Know—” Mike stops. “Yesterday Jack saved my ass.”
“What do you mean, he saved your ass?” you ask.
“We were—I was being Venkmann, one of the house avatars. Your two pet auditors were messing around in Avalon, and they called me in because they’d tracked down the entry point for the Orcs. Turns out it was a hacked Iron Maiden and someone had converted it into a shredder and added a bunch of traps. We were jumped by slaadi while I was immobilized, but they got me out of it. The other end of the shredder turns out to be in Zhongguo, where we don’t have any administrative access.”
It’s so much gibberish to you, but you pull one piece out of it as sounding like it needs further clarification. “Zhongguo?” You mangle his pronunciation. “Where’s that?”
“It’s another Zonespace game, run by Hentai Animatics. I captured the fight, if you want I can send you an AVI of it?”