On the thirty-third day, I roll through the fence, smelling like a female wolf, my arms wrapped around the Alpha guard dog. Inside, he cuffs me sharply on the shoulder and leaves me there. He’s been trained never to let a stranger inside. But I’m a member of his pack filling a necessary position. It makes all the difference.
The Subnet claims, over and over, that it keeps no records. But the Subnet itself is a record, endlessly down-loaded. If there’s one, there’ll be others. Nobody can remember every business deal without help. Especially if you need to know who you had better not try to deal with a second time.
Nothing inside Red Goldfish Trucking is locked. But nothing gives me what I want, either. The windowless building is mostly used for storing cargo and fixing trucks, with a tiny, filthy office walled off in one corner. There’s a terminal, although I know better than to think I’ll find anything on that. It’s free-standing, but the government has new microwave equipment that can lift data off even free-standing terminals, as long as the terminal’s switched on. The Subnet says it also has that equipment for sale. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe anything on the Subnet unless I try it out for myself, like I did the dog attractant. However, I know the Red Goldfish records won’t be electronic.
They’re plastic, written by hand on stiff blue cards stored in a blue box in the back of the closet. And they’re in code.
Beta dog comes into the office. He’s off duty. I have to let him knock me around for a few minutes before he curls up in the corner and goes to sleep.
I take the whole box with me, ride Alpha back through the fence, and catch the next bus out. On the bus I fall into the deepest sleep of my life. It feels like a reward.
There are five blue plastic cards, headed 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That could mean chronological order, or groupings of different kinds of trucking jobs, or almost anything else. Each card is densely covered in small neat handwriting, row after row of it, letters and numbers and symbols with no breaks between. Card 5 is covered only two-thirds of the way down.
Donna stares as I walk with my suitcase into the Kellsville restaurant where she works. It’s not a cheap table-delivered soysynth place; it has real food and human servers, including Donna. She wears a black uniform with a blue apron. Her red hair is piled on top of her head. She looks like Mama.
“Carol! What on God’s green earth… Daddy said you went clean over into Ohio to work!”
“I did. I’m back. Can I stay with you a bit?”
“’Course you can, honey! And I want you to meet my boyfriend Jim, he’s a real sweetie and I just know you two’ll—”
“Is there a housecleaning firm in town? I’ve been working as a maid.”
Donna laughs. “In Kellsville? You got to be kidding. But in the city, maybe… there’s a gravtrain goes back and forth every day now, they just started it. But honey, you look terrible. You all right?”
I look at her. It’s like looking at Mama: just as dead to me, just as far away. Donna’s put Precious clean out of her mind. She doesn’t know anything about deep black places you can fall into and never get out. She just doesn’t know.
“I’m fine,” I say. “Tell me your address and give me your key. You have a terminal, Donna?”
“One came with the apartment,” she says proudly. “Though I don’t use it much except for vid. You’re welcome to it, honey. You’re welcome to anything you find there, except Jim.”
She laughs, and I try to smile, and then I go to her place and get to work cleaning it up.
The next three months I work as fiendishly as I did at Denny’s. Every day I take the new gravtrain to the city and work my cleaning job. They’re glad to have me; I’m experienced with every kind of maintenance bot they have. Every night I sit at the terminal in the ten-by-ten living room of Donna’s apartment, trying not to hear Donna and Jim making love in the ten-by-ten bedroom.
I start with free code programs off the Net. I feed in all the data from the five blue plastic cards and run the programs. None of them makes any sense out of the data.
After a month I’ve saved up enough credits to download programs that cost money. None of them works either.
“What’re you doing on that terminal all night every night, honey?” Donna asks. “You’re getting circles under your pretty eyes. Don’t you want to come out dancing with us and have a little fun? Jim’s got some pretty peccy friends!”
“No, thank you,” I say. “You seen Daddy lately?”
Her face goes flat. “Tomorrow. You know I go every Tuesday. You want to come with me?”
I shake my head and go back to the terminal. Donna doesn’t say anything more. After she leaves, I can still smell her perfume, flimsy and sweet, in the stale air.
The best code breakers aren’t programs you can buy. They’re netsites that take your data and run it through their own decryption algorithms. All are very expensive, although you can negotiate with them. They’re on the Subnet, of course. From what I read, some of them use programs stolen from the government. The best ones might even be stolen from the military. Maybe.
The problem is guessing which ones might be best. Housemaids don’t make a lot of money, not even when they’re called cleaning bot technicians.
Finally I contract with a Subnet site called Bent. They seem to do business in Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio. It’s a heavily shielded transaction, although it uses regular credit, not a cash drop. I give them the data off the blue plastic cards, and they empty my bank account. Afterwards I close the account and open a new one with a different e-bank.
That night, for the first time ever, I dream about Precious. She’s sitting in her high chair, dressed in pink overalls, laughing. Whatever she’s laughing at is behind me, and when I try to turn around, I’m frozen in place. Frantically I twist my body, but no muscles will move. Precious goes on laughing.
Donna and Jim bring home a chair. They’ve been saving to buy it. It’s bright screaming green, and it gives off eight different scents, including sex pheromones. They spend ten minutes trying to decide where to put it.
“In this corner, sweetie,” Donna says.
“In the bedroom would be better.” Jim leers.
“Carol Ann, what do you think?”
I think it’s the ugliest piece of furniture I’ve ever seen. “I don’t care.”
“About anything,” Jim says under his breath. I pretend not to hear him. He’s getting a little impatient with me living here so long. But he won’t say anything, because it’s what Donna wants.
Donna says, “Okay, the bedroom,” and she and Jim look at each other in a way that says I should leave the apartment for an hour or so.
I leave for three, walking the streets more or less aimlessly. When Bent tells me who the bastards are who sold Daddy the sleepless dogs… Daddy’s gun is one thing he hasn’t sold for whiskey. I know because I buried it before I left, well oiled, behind the place the dog pens used to be. Ammunition doesn’t cost that much. It can be ordered off the Subnet, no questions asked, no records kept. (Right.)
I would recognize the Arrowgene scientist anywhere. His appearance, his voice, his supercilious manner with people who are ignorant. Scientists aren’t cops. They don’t go around armed. They don’t walk wary. I’m not a good shot, but with this gun, I don’t need to be.
It’s not what I’d prefer, of course. I’d prefer to get him somewhere isolated, tie him up, smear him with blood from a freshly killed rabbit. Let loose a pack of dogs that have been starved for a week…
These imaginings fill up three hours. They’ve filled up whole nights, weeks, months. I walk until the sun starts to set, and then I go back to Donna’s apartment building. Outside sit two police aircars. A stretcher bot rolls out beside an orderly.