Freedom Incorporated (26 page)

He extended
his search to include secondary sources, the flashing of data and
routing of packets tickling something deep within his mind. He
found Dan listed in no fewer than 17 of his 20 regular sources,
though the mere fact
that
he was missing from three was remarkable enough.
He examined each record in turn, discarding one after the other;
his suspicion elevated
a notch
with every incomplete record.
Someone cleared his history. Maybe Dan, maybe someone
else.
He pressed on, determined to find what
he was looking for.
Nobody can
fully
erase
the
past; everybody
misses at least one database.
It intrigued
him that someone had bothered to erase Sutherland’s past at all. He
wondered why.
He or she
ha
d
certainly
done a good job. Normally it
took a cyborg
to
scour the world’s databases that thoroughly, and even a cyborg
couldn’t
erase
things completely.

He retrieved
and discarded 50 records
in his
search
for pieces to Dan’s
jigsaw-puzzle
history
.
Dan had
spent
the past few months working for UniForce. That part was easy. Prior
to that, as far as the Raven could tell, he’d been a detective
working for the New South Wales Police Department. His records
depicted nearly ten years of exemplary service before a
psychological evaluation had rendered him unserviceable and the
Department had discharged him from duty. From there
the Raven
had to work
forward.
Dan
was
born in 203
0
and
he’d lived a normal life up until his eighteenth birthday. But it
was the gap that bothered the Raven – the eight years spanning 2048
to 2056 where none of the databases could account for Dan’s
existence.
It’s as if he fell of
the
face
of the
planet.

It wasn’t for
another hour of sweating through disused and chaotic databases that
the Raven finally found an answer to plug the gap. He found it in a
database located in Argentina, of all places, and it had taken him
20 minutes to puncture the database’s defences. His eyes snapped
back into focus and he gripped the handle of his Redback, pulling
further back into the shadows and peering cautiously toward
Jennifer Cameron’s apartment. An alien emotion forced him to
swallow, and his dry throat scraped on the way down. It took him a
while to understand what the emotion was:
Fear.

*

Thursday, September 16,
2066

UniForce
Headquarters

03:01 San Francisco,
USA

James Ellerman
blinked to clear the sting from his exhausted eyes and slurped
noisily on his cup of coffee. He’d been working without a break
since eleven in the morning when his computer had first bleeped to
warn him about a network breach.
Yesterday
morning,
he reminded himself
acrimoniously.

A quiet-spoken
man, he knew his wife was going to kill him when he got home. But
he couldn’t phone her now, not this early in the morning. He
snorted and thought,
If I ever do get
home.
He absently wondered whether she
thought he was with another woman.
Or
another man?
It wasn’t the first time he
hadn’t come home without phoning to warn her. Last time she’d been
hysterical when he finally had turned up, two days later.
You’d think I’d learn
. He
snorted again. Snorting was his pet mannerism, which had always
thoroughly irritated his colleagues. They called him Piggy behind
his back
because
he
frequently snorted at the end of every sentence.

In his first
real lapse of concentration since embarking upon the tedious
exercise of patching the network
,
he conjured an image of Susan, his
wife, holding his three-month-old daughter, Lillian. His wife had a
motherly smile and looked positively radiant. And the impish grin
on Lillian’s chubby face made James smile too. Then his wife’s
smile mutated into a snarl and she growled viciously at him,
flaying him with her sharp nails while biting and screaming, “Why
didn’t you call me?” James severed his daydream at that point and
opened his eyes
,
though his daughter still pleasantly tickled his inner vision.
In truth Lillian had been an accident, the result of
a
failure for Xantex’s Pill for
Men.
A
nd while
V.H.E.M.T, the Voluntary Human Extinction MovemenT, had in more
recent years taken to promoti
ng
abortion for
mistakes
,
James
couldn’t imagine not having her. Sure, he was exhausted from
feedings and midnight diaper changes, but Lillian Ellerman was the
joy of his life. He loved to make her laugh and watch her make
those cute little spit bubbles, which he found adorable and others
found repulsive. Sure, he could see the world was overpopulated; he
knew they didn’t have the resources to cope with more, but at least
he was stopping at one. His brother hadn’t stopped until his cow of
a wife had squeezed out her fourth and the puppet-government had
forcibly tied her tubes. James could see their point.
Why can’t they see mine?
He was too engrossed with his own fatherly feelings to
comprehend that the ‘other side’
did
understand his feelings. It wasn’t
illegal to reproduce, and the corporate rulers hadn’t yet been
brave enough to mention mandatory licenses for pregnancy, but they
frowned upon reproduction and discouraged it wherever possible. One
child was still socially acceptable, two was the social limit, and
more than two was selfish and deserved ostracism. Sixteen billion
people crammed onto the small rock called Earth was approximately
ten billion more than the planet could cope with. Space exploration
with portal technology had come too late. If humans didn’t
carefully control their spiralling population, they’d exhaust their
resources before they found a new place to settle.
What was the saying? Only
after
chopping down the last tree
will you realise that you can’t eat money.
James could never remember who had written that, but he
intended to pay heed. Lillian was the first and the last child to
spring from his loins.
You see, I do care
about the common wellbeing.

He diverted
his thoughts before lingering guilt could consume what was left of
his loving fatherly feeling
s
.

James had no
need of a monitor, though he left one on his desk anyway. Sometimes
he used it, sometimes he didn’t. He piped the important information
directly into his mind much faster than he could
read it from
a monitor. He
had implants. They were quite simple really. A quick trip to the
implant factory
–
as
it was known
–
at
company expense to have a small incision made just behind his right
temple and a special plug inserted into his
brain
. They’d squirted
some
growth syrup in with it
to
encourage his nerve
cells to bind with the fibrous ends of the device. They’d finished
by drilling a neat hole in
his
skull and tucking his excess skin around the
plastic plug. He had to keep dabbing it with ointment to stop
infections and skin irritation, but since he’d had his operation,
the implant geniuses had invented replaceable plugs that
automatically seeped ointment into the surrounding tissue. With a
special adaptor, the new plugs could recharge while the user was
connecting to his or her computer. And that’s what James wanted – a
replaceable, automatically recharging plug. A tiny, plastic,
skin-coloured circle was the only visible sign that he had the
implant. It had a miniature plastic cover that stopped dust and
grit from getting into the hole. Whenever he inserted the leads,
the cover retracted and the finely engineered wires made contact
with their reciprocal pairs inside his skull, completing his
connection to the computer. The doctors had refined the procedure
to eliminate most of the training time, though James recalled that
he’d been clumsy at the beginning
. He’d
accidentally
order
ed
the computer to type ‘shit’
in
to
more than one
business e-mail. It was like any brain function, he needed to
practice if he wanted to be perfect.

Two types of implants
were available: input for replacing the keyboard, and input/output
for replacing the keyboard and monitor. Since UniForce was paying
and therefore money was no object, James had opted for the latter.
Ever since, he’d enjoyed boundless computer freedom, piping images
and ideas directly into his mind, ordered there by mental
commands.

He snorted.

The blip
itched his mind again.
Damn.
He had to admit the hacker was
good.
Pity he’s not working for us. Maybe
then I could get some sleep.
He couldn’t
follow his thoughts through the wires like a cyborg; he hadn’t
completely integrated his mind with a machine. He could only send
commands and wait for responses. But it was an infinite improvement
over a time-wasting keyboard and monitor combination. Tonight he
was using both. His fingers tapp
ed
away at his favourite
DataHand Qwerty. It was the tactile model,
which
pissed off his colleagues even more
than his incessant snorting because of the constant clackety-clack
when he typed. It was little wonder management pushed for implants
and silent keyboards. But nobody else was around at three in the
morning so he was indulging himself, enjoy
ing
the feel of his keyboard for old
times’ sake.

Everything appeared
normal. But he knew better than to trust appearances, which was why
UniForce had handed him the sought-after position of information
technology co-ordinator. James didn’t take chances. Somebody was
there, inside UniForce’s electronic defences, and he was gong to
find out whom.

*

Thursday, September 16,
2066

23:21 Tweed Heads,
Australia

“
Oh fuck!” It
started Cookie on a string of curses that ended in a climactic
half-scream.

“
What is it?”
Jen’s asked, concerned and fretful.

Cookie’s fingers were a
flurry of action. “Somebody knows I’m here.”

They flocked to his side
despite being unable to fathom what was happening on his screen. A
red cursor was flashing on an application that had ‘detection bot’
written at the top. It was a custom application, Cookie had written
it himself.

A bead of
sweat rolled off his forehead and trickled down his chin, at which
point Samantha noticed it and dabbed it away with a tissue. “I’ve
triggered some kind of alarm.” A scowl imprinted itself on the
previously blank mould of his face. “I wouldn’t have the foggiest
fuck of a clue where, or even when.” He scrolled through his
activity log for the past few hours, shaking his head at each
entry. “I haven’t done anything
recently
that would’ve tipped them
off.” That was a particularly unnerving thought. “They could’ve
been observing us for a while.”

“
Can they
track us?” Jen asked, tearing her eyes from the screen to look at
Cookie.

He shook his head. “They
haven’t tried, or if they have they didn’t get far because they
didn’t trip the alarm on my tracking app.”

Jen hoped he knew what he
was talking about. “What can we do?”

“
Nothing.”
Cookie shook his head irritably, trying to give 100 percent of his
brain’s processing power to the problem. “Just leave me in peace
for a while.”

They backed off
respectfully, leaving the genius to work amid a muttering of
curses.

Samantha and
Jen retreated to the kitchen where they whispered in low voices,
mostly about Dan. Samantha thought he was cute and was trying to
prise any juicy details Jen might
’
ve left out of her official tale –
such as why she hadn’t come home wearing her own clothes and why
she wasn’t wearing a bra under her stretched white top. Dan knew
they were talking about him but refused to leave the living room.
He scoured the neighbourhood from the balcony windows, glad the
moon
had risen. It
shone like a floodlight.

“
Can’t you
just drop it?” Jen whispered irritably, not in the mood to blather
about the man who’d saved her life.

“
You don’t
think he’s cute?”

Jen answered with
silence.

“
That means
yes,” Samantha said, chuckled softly. “So what’s the problem? It
sounds like you’ve already cleared your first date.”

Yeah, and it
was a real killer.
Jen caught herself
staring across the kitchen bench at Dan, her bounty hunter, who was
prowling like a caged tiger and steadily wearing a track into the
carpet.
He is kind of
cute.
It was the first time she’d permitted
herself to admire him in that way, in any way for that matter. She
couldn’t explain the animosity she had for him.
It must be what he represents,
she
mused.
But hasn’t he now proven that he
doesn’t stand for UniForce? I’d be dead or in chains if he
did.
Her dreamy
expression
betrayed her distant
thoughts
, but Dan snapped her from her daze
when he swivelled in
her direction and
their eyes met. Jen hastily broke contact and looked at the
linoleum floor.