Nightside CIty (4 page)

I looked at it without seeing it. If I was
ever in the Trap? That meant she wasn’t about to come out to the
burbs; I’d have to meet her at her home or office. They weren’t the
same place—banks are old-fashioned about that in the Eta Cass
system, they don’t like their human employees working at home.

I typed in an order for all available data on
the person last called and scanned through it as it came up, froze
it when I had her current addresses and work schedule. She hadn’t
tagged any of them for privacy, so I didn’t have to do any
prying.

She’d be working for another four hours, and
her office was in the bank’s central branch, at the corner of Third
and Kai. If I happened to bump into her there we could go get a
drink somewhere.

I could live with that.

Meanwhile, I had four hours—three, when you
allow for travel time and the vagaries of fate. Maybe, if I prodded
the right program, I could wrap up the whole business by then, from
my desk.

I start punching buttons, cursing under my
breath the idiot who had put in touch instead of voice.

Com security varies. Some people don’t bother with
it on anything, since everybody’s known for centuries that anything
one person can set up another person can crack. Other people put
their damn grocery lists under sixteen layers of alarms and horse
and counter-virus.

The people I was after seemed to all be the
second kind. I ran a customized parasite search-and-trace pyramid
program that could run through all the unshielded open-system data
anywhere in Nightside City in under an hour, and except for the
official records I’d already scanned I didn’t find a single one of
the fifteen names, not once—at least, not that the program managed
to report back about before a watchdog or scrubware cut the feet
out from under that piece. Parasite programs are weak on
self-defense; they have to be to run in other people’s systems
uninvited. They need speed and stealth, not strength. This one,
though, had a lot of redundancy built into the pyramid-building, so
I doubt I missed much.

It wasn’t sentient; I don’t trust sentient
software to do what it’s told, never used it if I could help it,
because anything complex enough to be self-aware is complex enough
to be untrustworthy. Even if it doesn’t glitch or get moody, it can
be duped or sabotaged. That’s why I used a pyramid instead of a
net. My pyramid wasn’t even close to consciousness levels, but it
was fast and sneaky and did what I wanted.

And it came up empty.

But that was in unshielded, open systems. The
names were out there somewhere; they had to be. Not unshielded,
though—and the truth is that I hadn’t
really
expected to
find anything unshielded. It just didn’t feel like that sort of
case. So for most of the time that my parasite was running, out
there on its own with no connection to my system except its
destination address, I was plugged into my desk, doing a little
slip-and-grab on a couple of the casino systems.

As I think I said before, I don’t like
running on wire—I know too damn well that every connection is
two-way, and I don’t like the idea of giving anybody, human or com
or otherwise, access to my head. I like my personality the way it
is, and I like my memories to stay mine. So I don’t like wire.

When you’re tackling good security, though,
wire helps. Helps, hell, it’s essential. A com operates a zillion
times faster than a human brain, but most coms are pretty dumb, and
need a human to tell them what to do when something new comes
along. We humans build them that way on purpose, so they don’t get
uppity. When you’re running on wire, if you’re any good, you can
come up with new stuff faster than any program can handle it, and
can usually get through, in, and out before a human on the other
end can get his act together enough to stop you—or rather, to tell
the com how to stop you. Sometimes, by the time the com realizes
it’s in trouble and tells a human you’re there, you’re gone.

But that’s on wire. Try it by voice or
codefield or keypad, and you can’t give the orders fast enough to
do anything, can’t get information either in or out fast enough to
do any good at all.

So I plugged in, made my brain into another
interactive terminal on the com network, and there I was,
perceiving the casino security systems as layered synesthetic
tangles, and picking holes in them wherever I could and shooting in
retrievers. I wasn’t programming, really; I can’t think that fast
in machine language. I had interface software translating for me,
so I was doing everything in analog, looking for flaws not by
analyzing programs, but by studying the surfaces of those tangles,
looking for any unevenness, anywhere that didn’t feel tight and
solid, and ramming the retrievers at whatever weak spots I
found.

The retrievers were like sweet little buzzes.
They went where I pointed them. If you’ve never been on wire I
can’t explain it any better than that. If you have, you know what I
mean.

I stayed away from anything really touchy,
never went in too deep, and made sure that any retriever that
didn’t get out destroyed itself before it got nailed. I didn’t want
anyone analyzing the programming style; the stuff I was using came
from one of the standard black market jobs, but it had been
modified by a friend of mine, and touched up a bit by me, so it
might have been traceable.

The retrievers had the fifteen names as
guides, of course, and when they got out—if they did—they showed
either positive or negative. If it was negative, I erased them
completely; if it was positive, I sent them back for storage.

Twenty minutes of that and I had watchdogs
looking for me, I was exhausted and sweating, and I had a couple of
dozen retrievers tucked away. I pulled out, pulled the plug, and
got myself a bulb of Coke III to suck on until the shaking
stopped.

When I unplugged, my system went into
high-security mode automatically, and I watched the screens to see
if anyone was coming after me successfully.

Nobody was, or if they were they were eluding
my own stuff. I figured they just weren’t coming.

People pick at the casinos all the time,
hoping to find some way to beat the odds, or bleed off a bit of the
daily take, or turn up something juicy in the way of gossip, so the
watchdogs are usually on short tethers; it’s not worth pursuing
every nibbler, especially when she might just be a decoy for
someone else. I hadn’t touched anything basic, so I figured I was
out clean and safe. As long as I was alive the casinos would
probably never even know I’d been there.

Of course, when I die, if the news reaches
anyone on Epimetheus, the complete records of everything I ever did
on my business com, legal or otherwise, go to the city cops, both
the port watch and the Trap crew, or whatever law enforcement there
is at the time—maybe by then it’ll be on Prometheus. That comes
with a detective license in Nightside City; it’s a requirement for
the job. Try and duck it and you lose the license, or maybe
worse.

You want to see
real
security? Check
out the city’s in-the-event-of-death files. The whole ITEOD system
is semi-closed, supposed to be input only—though I already told you
what I think of that. They don’t count on that closure, though;
they’ve got full-range security. Go at it on wire and you’ll get a
scream that’ll rip your hearing up for weeks, even though it
doesn’t touch your external ears, and you’ll hit a glare of white
that’ll burn you alive. It tastes of acid and stinks of burning
corpses. You’ll be blind and deaf, and you won’t want to eat for a
week when you unplug.

Yeah, I tried it once; of course I did. Who
could resist?

I never even got close, but at least I didn’t
get caught; you can get yourself sent up for reconstruction if you
tamper with ITEOD stuff.

The casinos are nothing by comparison. I
could handle anything they threw at me, as long as I was careful,
and I’d been careful. I read what my retrievers had brought me.

The nine casino names had all turned up, as I
expected. I hadn’t managed to tag any real names; that was in a lot
deeper, behind at least one layer more security than I wanted to
tackle. They were all legitimate names, though—and they were all
first registered at the New York. Bond James Bond 54563 had also
played the Starshine and the Excelsis, and Darby O’Gill 34 had
spent a few nights at the Delights of Shanghai, and so on, but five
of the nine had only played at the New York, and they’d all started
there and played there more than anywhere else.

That was interesting.

Whoever was buying up the West End apparently
had some connection with the New York.

I sat back and sipped my Coke and waited
until the parasite pyramid finished up and reported back empty. My
chair wiped off the sweat from my wire run, and massaged my back,
and the holoscreen on the far wall ran some contemplative
scenery.

I still had two hours. Should I go down to
the Trap and drop in at the New York?

No, I decided, not yet. First I wanted some
background on the place.

I’d never spent much time in the New York,
not when I worked in the Trap, not as a kid, not even when I ran
wild for a year in my late teens. I was never that fond of sleaze,
and when I live dangerously it’s generally for some better reason
than a cheap thrill. I lost plenty of credits in the Starshine
Palace and the Excelsis and the three IRC joints, but I’d stayed
out of most of the others. I’m not real big, after all—a hundred
and forty-five centimeters, forty kilos—and most casinos don’t like
their customers armed, so I’d be in serious trouble if I got in a
fight with someone who knew what he was doing.

This isn’t cowardice, just caution. I mean,
even unarmed, I can take out your standard drunken miner easily
enough, but I can’t handle them in groups, and I can’t handle them
if they’re sober and know how to fight, and I can’t handle them if
I’m
drunk or otherwise mentally or physically unsound, so I
always did my drinking and carousing in places where the bouncers
knew their job.

The New York wasn’t quite up to my
standards.

Which is not to say the place was a dump; the
New York was not like Buddy’s Lucky Night, a dive down on North
Javadifar that no tourist had ever come out of alive, and even the
smarter miners avoided. No, the New York was a serious Trap casino,
living mostly off the tourist trade—though some miners did play
there, and you never saw miners in the Excelsis or the Luna Park.
Nobody had ever been killed in the New York so far as I knew, not
even temporarily, and nobody ever caught the house cheating, but it
played up this fantasy image of dangerous, decadent Old New York,
which is supposedly this ancient, corrupt city back on Earth, and I
avoided it because some of the customers got a little vague about
the line between fantasy and reality, and the management, by all
accounts, was willing to let things get fairly rough before
intervening. It helped the image they wanted.

I knew that image, but I didn’t know much
more than that, so I punched in some orders and read what came up
on the screen.

The New York Townhouse Hotel and Gambling
Hall was owned by the New York Games Corporation, a wholly-owned
subsidiary of Nakada Enterprises, incorporated on Prometheus. I’d
heard of them, of course—not New York Games, Nakada Enterprises.
Everybody had heard of the Nakada family. They weren’t very active
on Epimetheus, but they were sure as hell all over the rest of the
Eta Cass system, and probably every other inhabited planet I’d ever
heard of, as well. They’d been one of the founding families on
Prometheus.

I never heard that they had any connection
with Old New York, or Old Old York, or much of anything else back
on Earth, but that didn’t mean much. Maybe they just liked the
name, or maybe their marketing people suggested it; I didn’t see
anything about it on the files I was reading.

Getting back to the casino itself, the
manager’s name was Vijay Vo. I’d heard of him slightly, as he was
active in assorted civic groups and reputed to be a damn good
businessman, but I’d never met him; not my social circle, and sure
as hell not my age group. He’d been working there since the place
opened, in 2258, so he wasn’t exactly young any more, and probably
knew one hell of a lot by this time. He answered to the Nakada
family, as represented on Epimetheus by Sayuri Nakada, whose name I
knew from celebrity gossip on the nets. She answered to old Yoshio
Nakada himself, the head of the clan back on Prometheus, who made
Vo look like a beginner.

The property had no liens against it. New
York Games had no other assets on Epimetheus, no other tangible
assets reported anywhere—but reporting requirements were light.
Stock in Nakada Enterprises was not presently available to the
public, so I couldn’t get at any reports to stockholders or other
internal records. Reported crimes in the New York included hundreds
of thefts, assaults, rapes, com violations, and so forth, back over
the hundred and eight years the casino had been in business, but no
more than most of the other casinos. The New York had been the
second casino to offer its players false-name accounts on a formal
basis, following the lead of the long-defunct Las Vegas III.

The Vegas—
that
brought back memories.
When I was five I watched the salvage machines eat away the old
shell of the Vegas; those things scared the hell out of me, the way
they chewed through the plastic and cultured concrete like it was
tofu. I had this horrible idea that the building’s internal com
systems might still be conscious the whole time.

Las Vegas—that was a weird name. There’s only
one Vega; I’ve checked the star-charts. The casino was the Las
Vegas III, though. I don’t know any more about I and II than I know
why the name’s plural and the article Spanish. Nobody on Epimetheus
speaks Spanish. I suppose some of the big intelligences must know
it, but I never heard it spoken, and it wasn’t available on any of
the vids.