Idempotency (25 page)

She sat down on a bench at the top of the stairs and looked out upon a rocky island outcropping that sat about twenty meters offshore. She was momentarily surprised that no huts or tents resided on the rock; just a mass of birds and bird shit. She figured rightly that the space would be too impractical for use, and anyway, the mass of birds needed a place to huddle and shit. She wondered why they didn’t spread out, find a larger rock, or fly to an unpopulated stretch of beach. Why would they willingly cram hundreds of themselves (and their bird shit) onto one tiny piece of land; it was disgusting.
Safety in numbers, I
guess
, she thought stoically.

Without warning, her vision flashed red. She winked with her right eye to turn on her ocular implants; the earth within her eyes began to twirl wildly. She made a few subtle gestures with her dominant left hand and a text chat appeared in front of her.

BEGIN 256 PETABYTE OpenPGP PUBLIC, PRIVATE, & AUTHORIZED ENCRYPTED CHAT SESSION . . . AFFIRM THREE TIMES TO ACCEPT PUBLIC KEY AND SIGNED CHAT FROM:

GREPMAN:GRP_e9992dd5f134. . .<256PB>. . .7fe23a

[GREPMAN 17:02:08] You’ve been followed.

[SinTh3t!c 17:02:18] That’s impossible.

[GREPMAN 17:02:23] Nothing’s impossible.

[SinTh3t!c 17:02:31] I’ve been cautious. I know what I’m doing.

[GREPMAN 17:02:47] On the beach. Tattered white shirt. He’s looking up, as if beyond you. I’m standing next to him—as a virtGhost that is.

Sindhu glanced casually down the cliff toward the beach. She did notice a tall man looking up toward her. He looked the part of a vagrant, without any ailments. A lithe, possibly hungry body swayed aimlessly in the wind. His eyes were set deep within his face, as if they balanced on his cheeks. He wore a tattered white T-shirt above older, nondescript denim shorts. No shoes. He appeared trancelike; his gaze fixated upon the clouds, or the birds, or . . .

[SinTh3t!c 17:03:04] So—what? His skin is clean so he must be dirty? How do you know?

[GREPMAN 17:03:15] His eyes. I’m looking at them. They’re ocImps.

[SinTh3t!c 17:03:26] Well . . . that could mean anything. So are mine. It doesn’t prove that he’s following me. Why would someone tail me anyway?

[GREPMAN 17:03:37] Are you serious? You are on their watch list, probably top one hundred, maybe even top fifty. With your comp-sci talents and your strident beliefs in wealth equality? Don’t be naive, Sin.

[GREPMAN 17:03:45] Move to a bench at the back of the park, out of his view.

[SinTh3t!c 17:03:47] Fine.

Sindhu frowned. She was fairly certain this was standard protocol. She couldn’t imagine any government or nefarious corp having their eye on her. And besides, she had taken every possible precaution: public transit, network tunneling, encryption, anonymous network traffic routing, going off grid entirely, and a truly grueling and arduous ride on the public magRail system that had included five different switches. She had come this far, though; what was one more simple request? She stood and walked down a row of plastic dwellings—government housing at its finest: interlockable low-income living units, or LILUs. Behind the plastic boxes sat decrepit old houses. Some had been torn down, replaced by more their more efficient LILU counterparts. Those houses that still stood were typically a patchwork of additions and repairs. Many houses had been shoddily connected by haphazard structures joining the two buildings together. At the end of the row she found another concrete bench to sit on; on its face, a weathered plaque denoted the bench’s christening seventy-five years in the past, when this area had once been a shining tourist trap. She sighed as she sat.

[GREPMAN 17:07:51] Better.

[SinTh3t!c 17:08:00] Why would they follow me in real-world? Why not just follow me as a virtGhost, like you?

[GREPMAN 17:08:05] I thought you were top of your class.

[SinTh3t!c 17:08:12] Would you like me to ask our mysterious follower for a job? I bet he’d hire me without this shit.

[GREPMAN 17:08:14] I bet not.

[SinTh3t!c 17:08:17] Answer please?

[GREPMAN 17:08:27] He wants to get somewhere that virts can’t access.

[SinTh3t!c 17:08:30] And where’s that?

[GREPMAN 17:08:40] The same place you are trying to get to: us, in realWorld.

[SinTh3t!c 17:08:52] I’m trying to get to SOP and Simeon. I don’t know who the fuck you are, Mr. GrepMan. What kind of name is GREPMAN? Are you some kind of unix superhero?

[GREPMAN 17:09:02] You’re a funny girl. We didn’t have in our records that you minored in comedy. Look toward the stairs.

Sindhu looked down the row of dwellings, as her eyes focused away from the vagrants milling outside of their plastic boxes, she saw the white-shirted man’s head rise above the stairs. He stopped as he reached the top and moved off to his left. His gaze still appeared focused on the sky.

[SinTh3t!c 17:09:07] What do we do?

[GREPMAN 17:09:19] We have procedures . . . But . . . the procedure usually involves evacuating. Shit. This is not good. I need to huddle with folks. I’ll be back. Don’t do ANYTHING. Got it?

[SinTh3t!c 17:09:25] Yes sir Super GrepMan sir.

Simeon looked over his shoulder to the couch that Grepman was virtTripping on. Grepman was sprawled on the couch appearing to be asleep: He was breathing consistently, like a metronome, peaceful. In fact, Grepman was interacting virtually with a real-time rendering of the slum that Sindhu was currently sitting in. The virt of the beach was being rendered by a combination of local vid feeds and several overhead satellite feeds. To Grepman, it was as if he was standing on the beach as a ghost; he could see everyone but they couldn’t see him. At this moment, Grepman had jumped back into the room, at least partially, still as a virtGhost.

Simeon glanced over to the holographic version of Grepman that had just appeared in the room—a 50 percent replica of the real thing that was now standing on a holographic oblong tabletop display, surrounded by the rest of the group. Grepman’s holograph representation wore a tight-fitting black shirt atop a pair of slick slacks. He appeared roughly similar to the man slumped on the couch, though slightly enhanced. His holographic self glanced questioningly at Simeon. Simeon sat back in his chair, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, as the yellow flames of his aniToo licked his arm playfully.

“We can assume everything the T-shirt man is seeing is being instantly beamed back to NRS, or whatever security subsidiary they are hiding behind this time,” Simeon almost whispered.

“Definitely. And if we . . . immobilize him, for lack of a better word, that will most definitely spike alarms somewhere,” Jay-san added.

“We could send her home,” Nimbus said, looking directly at Simeon. “If we send her home, she probably can’t come back here again, ’cause that would set off alarms that something important must be here. If she doesn’t come back, they probably just assume this was a vacation and there’s nothing to see here.”

“No way.” Simeon shook his head. He placed both hands on the table. “If we send her home, it’s almost a dead giveaway that she realized she was being tailed. Come on—we talked about this. The fact that we had her go through so many security hoops to get here shows that she’s somewhere important—”

“I told you guys,” Chicklet whined, then crossed his arms emphatically.

“Go frag yourself, Chick,” Mitlee rejoined as she hit her littler-by-two-minutes brother in the shoulder, slightly harder than playfully.

Simeon wore a pursed smile as he watched the kids. “Kids—calm down, this is serious. Chicklet, you had a good idea at the time, and it looks like you were right. We should have had her come straight here—no pretense—and sold it as a . . . minivacation, or something. But hindsight and server logs are twenty-twenty.”

“What if we try to ditch him again?” Grepman’s standing hologram asked.

“It might be our only choice. Then we could have her hang out at another dozen areas similar to how she’s doing here,” Nimbus said.

“No. That merely buys us time by giving them a dozen targets instead of just one.”

“We could move again. We’re all thinking it. It was obviously worth doing for Boxster,” Grepman said.

“Yes. But I want more ideas. Come on, people. Out of the box. What if we interfered with network transmission?”

Jay-san had been sitting quietly opposite Simeon on the other side of the holoTabletop. His chair was pushed back, and he was slouching while running his hand through his jet-black Japanese hair. Without changing expressions, he began to speak softly. “Yes. We could use a wireless network amplifier to blast momentary interference to any wireless networks; it would run down our batteries, but worth it assuming it works. But how does that help?”

Everyone became quiet, contemplative. Breathing could be heard around the dark room.

“Uhh, guys. You might want to see this.” Grepman’s holograph was pointing beyond the table at something in the virt. Everyone else turned to the look at a large flat-media wall in the front of the room; Simeon had to turn entirely, as he was at the front of the oblong holoTable. On the display, Grepman’s point of view could be seen. He glanced to his right, and T-shirt man was standing right next to him. Glancing back in front of him, the group saw Grepman’s view of Sindhu walking down the row of dilapidated slum boxes. She was walking directly toward the T-shirt man. Grepman’s holograph atop the table mirrored the movements that were being displayed on the vid.

“Who the hell are you?” Sindhu had grown impatient. She wasn’t one for passive action.

The T-shirt man didn’t look at her, but he did acknowledge her. Keeping his gaze skyward, he held out both hands and cupped them together as if asking for a handout. Sindhu studied him closely. If he did have ocImps, she couldn’t tell; his eyes looked normal to her. He had dark, tanned skin and appeared to be in good health, though he was skinny. Any conjecture on the T-shirt man’s age was momentarily difficult for Sindhu to discern; but his youthful looks were betrayed by an almost perfect symmetry around his deeply set eyes that opened systematically with his mouth as he began speaking in tongues.

Sindhu started to turn around, as if to walk away, but instead she gained speed and twirled into a full circle. She came around suddenly and hit the T-shirt man with merciless force to the neck. Her knuckles popped. Tamil letters scrambled wildly around her back, as if they were a deck of cards thrown chaotically onto her skin. The T-shirt man stumbled awkwardly backward and, for a fraction of a second, she saw his eyes flicker preternaturally. The man regained his footing and immediately retook his previous position; hands cupped in front of him, gaze skyward.

[GREPMAN 17:15:29] What the hell?

[SinTh3t!c 17:15:49] It’s an android. Pretty much the best one I’ve ever seen, but definitely an android.

[GREPMAN 17:15:54] How did you know?

[SinTh3t!c 17:16:02] I didn’t. But that perfect skin of his, it’s definitely metallic.

[GREPMAN 17:16:04] One second . . .

“Nice! This girl has moxie!” Simeon growled, and then laughed his guttural start-stop chuckle. The flames on his muscular arms danced and his long ponytail bobbed in unison.

“What do we do? What should I tell her?” Grepman asked.

Simeon didn’t hesitate in responding. “Okay, first off, let’s see if she can deactivate it. If so, we can bring it in to study it. We can possibly reverse-engineer the software. This could be a coup for us.”

“That could be dangerous!” Nimbus retorted defensively with an admonishing glare that wasn’t acknowledged by Simeon. “It ignored her last time, but it could fight or flee if it detects true danger. And why would she do it, anyway? I wouldn’t if I were her.”

“She’ll be fine. You’ve read her CV—she’s had years of Kalaripayat training. Androids aren’t designed for fighting—”

“—that we know of!” Mitlee piped up, quick to join Nimbus’s side.

Simeon ignored her, too, and went on, “And if anything happens, we’ll jump in. We’re probably going to have to evacuate again anyhow.”

“Fine,” Nimbus acquiesced quickly, knowing they had no choice but to leave. Mitlee echoed her reluctant agreement, and then Nimbus added, “But let’s be ready. Chick, go notify security. Jay, Sim, let’s get going.”

Chicklet darted out of the room, his Mohawk swaying wildly from side to side, cycling through all of the primary colors.

“Wait! I still don’t see why she would do it. What do I tell her?” Grepman pleaded.

“Grep, tell her . . .” Simeon looked at the table, smiled, then looked back at Grepman’s holograph. “Tell her that this is her interview.”

[GREPMAN 17:19:12] Sin, we want you to incapacitate the android. Then bring it in and help us reprogram and reverse engineer it. Consider this is your interview; do this and you’re in SOP. It’s that simple.

[SinTh3t!c 17:19:17] OK. Fine.

Sindhu responded with a shrug. She held no compunction about hurting anyone who was surreptitiously following her, let alone an unfeeling android. She was also confident in her athletic ability—if not entirely fearless—having obtained the status of Verumkai one year ago. Verumkai were the highest recognized masters of the Kalaripayattu martial art, and Sindhu was one of a handful of people left on the planet who took part in this fighting style, which dated back to the eleventh century in South India. Her initial strike on the android had been one of her most recent lessons; a weaponless attack to an incapacitating pressure point, or marman. The lesson had been taught by her ninety-seven-year-old teacher, a lesson that included secrets handed down only to the masters of the art. Secrets that were likely to die out with her. She was confident the android would have no knowledge of Verumkai, but she was also at a loss as to where an android’s marman might be.

She looked quizzically at the T-shirt man, studying his subtle movements. They appeared mechanical to her now. She shook her head in frustration, and reached around her head to wrap her long, flowing hair into a bun that she pinned together tightly. She had lost her patience.

With a graceful dancing motion, she lunged while kicking a leg outward behind the T-shirt android. The machine twisted defensively, calculating too late that it was under duress. Her body pivoted lithely, and brought a surprisingly strong arm up toward the T-shirt android’s chest; she pushed with relative ease, using the leverage created by her body, and toppled the android over her right leg. She flipped on top of its back and placed the full weight of her knee against its lower back.