The Pedestal (42 page)

I can read between the lines—he unloaded another programmer in order to make room for me on the books. It angers me that Keith would toss that upon my shoulders, when we both know who actually hopes to benefit from it. I feel my old irritability stretching its wings, ready to take flight. It slips through my fingers before I can get a hold on it.

“Is that supposed to be flattering, that you fired someone to hire me on? Jeez, man. You should’ve just turned me away—I don’t have any seniority here anymore.”
Oops. That’s not helpful, is it?

I feel the temperature of the room cool a few degrees, but Keith keeps a firm grip on his composure. Glad one of us is in control of his faculties today.

“Sorry,” I murmur. “I’ll make it my top priority, believe me.”

Keith steeples his chubby fingers and watches me contemplatively. “It’s okay, Wil. I need to ask you something, though.”

“Okay, shoot.”

“I’ve never been one to question my employees’ personal decisions, but I gotta admit it makes me a little nervous that you’re always in privacy mode lately.”

Oh, scrap.

“It’s your right, don’t get me wrong. It just creates an impression, you know? Like you’re hiding something.”

I gulp.

“Just something to think about, that’s all.”

I retreat from Keith’s office like a kid who just got busted cheating on a quiz. I don’t really care what Keith thinks of me, but he’s right about one thing: privacy mode will do me no favors right now. Too bad I can’t do anything about it, with my implant rattling around in my pocket like a loose coin.

I poke my head into the rack room and when I catch Tim’s eye, I don ear protection and slip inside. He drops what he’s doing and follows me at a short distance to the back of the warehouse.

The moment I’m certain we’re alone, I say, “I need a favor, Tim.”

“Yikes. Those are words I never want to hear from you.”

“Nothing big. I just have a little problem with my NanoPrint.”

“What kind of problem?”

“The kind where it’s in my pocket instead of in my body.”

“What? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I wish, buddy. At least, I do right now. Anyway, my problem is that I can’t access anything on it, and I need to figure out how I’m gonna stay on top of the day-to-day stuff without it.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Sure. Dodgers do it all the time, right?”

“Yeah, but that requires some illegal hacking. This is crazy, man. I’m surprised it hasn’t deactivated yet.”

I don’t need more fuel for stress at the moment; I feel my blood pressure rising like a balloon. “Listen, can you help me or not? I don’t need to hear how messed up my life has become to know it’s messed up.”

“Simmer down, toots. Let me think on it for a little while.”

I leave him tapping his fingers against a server rack and return to my office. It’s absolutely filthy; I guess the cleaning crew hasn’t figured out that it’s in use again. I spend half an hour scrubbing things down, coughing and sneezing at all the dust I stir up.

Just as I sit down to appreciate my work, Tim pops in—sweaty and breathing heavy, as if just returning from a run—and deposits a small device on my desk. “This should help.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“I do not. Just keep it near your NanoPrint and you’ll be able to access everything manually.”

“Whoa. I didn’t think implant readers were legal.”

“Strictly speaking, they’re not. This is a law enforcement model.”

“How’d you get your hands on it?”

“Don’t ask, all right? The less you know, the better.”

He walks me through a maze of touch screens. I’m sure that as soon as he walks out of the room, I’m going to forget a step and have to track him down again, so I ask for repeated demonstrations until I’m vaguely competent at navigating the menus.

“Tim, what am I gonna do about this, I mean long-term?”

“Get it reinstalled, man,” he says with a shrug, like it’s the most logical thing in the world. “Not that big of a deal.”

I consider it for about two seconds before I feel a bad taste rising in my mouth.

“What if I don’t want to?”

He pauses. “Then you’ve got a problem. No telling when it’s gonna happen, but eventually that thing’s gonna deactivate and you’ll lose all access to the nexus. How long’s it been now? Three or four days? I can’t believe it’s still running, man.”

“It’s been a week, actually. How long does it usually take?”

“Dunno. Hold on a second.” His eyes lose focus for a few seconds as he consults the nexus on the subject, and suddenly his mouth curls up in a smile. “Normally twelve hours. Sounds like your implant has gone rogue.”

“How can that happen?”

“Human intervention is my guess. I’m thinking it’s time we took a look at it—maybe we’ll find something on there that explains things.”

Tim calls up my files on his reader and begins sifting through them. Hundreds of updates await my attention—they downloaded to my implant as I reentered the planet, but they’ve yet to be installed. Tim gets them going and continues plunking around.

“I wonder if my privacy mode has anything to do with all this,” I offer helpfully.

“Maybe. But I doubt it. Looks to me like someone’s hacked the access point to your vital stats.”

“Who could do that?”

“There’s only a handful of people I can think of,” he admits with a frown, but his eyes are sparkling. “And one of them was Arthur.”

We move on to my financials, and right off the bat, we stumble across something that absolutely floors me: evidently, I have received substantial credit deposits for every month I spent on Mars. Grogan and I never discussed compensation in any detail—after all, what choice did I have?—so I’m a little surprised—pleasantly so—to see a handsome sum piled in my personal escrow account. It occurs to me that this might well be the breadcrumb trail that led Gunn to my interplanetary doorstep. Tim and I do some quick and dirty math and find that I did better financially on Mars than either of us has ever done on Earth; it doesn’t hurt that I wasn’t in a position to spend anything there, either.

But that’s just the beginning.

The real surprise is revealed in a little something left behind by Arthur’s
pedestal
program. Gunn’s guys managed to scrape off Art’s files before I got my implant back, but they clearly didn’t find everything there was to see.

Tim looks paler than I’ve ever seen him. I peek over his shoulder to see what’s got him so freaked out. At first, it looks like something has glitched. Tim spends a great deal of time chewing his lip and tapping around on the drive with shaky fingers, bobbing his head and saying things like,
No freaking way, man!
And,
Are you kidding me?
Eventually, he looks at me and guffaws. Closing my door, he leans back against it and says, “You’re either unbelievably lucky, or you’re seriously screwed.”

“What does that mean?” I demand.

So he shows me.

One of Arthur’s parting gifts: embedded in his
pedestal
program was a procedure that shuffled eleven million credits—roughly one month’s extortion payouts—from IDS’s capital accounts into an unnamed offshore account. Because of the serendipitous timing of this process, the payout log has the appearance of transacting as usual, just before I dropped Arthur’s bombshell on the nexus.

Technically, the payments stayed right on schedule—they just fell off the radar before anyone could claim them. When Arthur’s program was finished, it wrote out the account information, including its private-access credentials, to a commented field of a user-preferences file—one of thousands on my implant. This one only captured Tim’s notice in the first place because, like me, he’s in the habit of sorting files by time stamp, and this one was near the top of the list.

Counting all those zeros, my eyes glaze over. “Oh. My. God.”

“Guess you’re buying dinner tonight, huh?”

I’m too tired to watch a movie tonight—after a shameful display of fresh-seafood gluttony with Tim, it’s all I can do to stay awake on the way home—so I settle for the news. For once, I’m glad I bothered. The networks are saturated with constant tidbits on Palmer Gunn. After years of fruitless investigation, the FBI finally convicted their man—thanks to Arthur. Evidently, as the nexus was permeated with Arthur’s whistling from the grave, hordes of victims came out of the woodwork to testify against Gunn, documenting his otherwise untraceable hand in more crimes than anyone could’ve imagined.

An added bonus: Palmer Gunn’s blood link to our dear president has also made mountainous waves. Coupled with her implication in the IDS extortion ring, it has secured her membership in one of this continent’s most exclusive clubs: the impeached presidents. Her administration is crumbling at this very moment, and the new regime is chomping at the bit to take control. I doubt they’ll be any less filthy than her, but I must admit I feel considerable pleasure to witness—and even play a role in—her fall from grace.

Incidentally, Miritech was ripped to shreds at the first sign of President Carlisle’s demise, and all of its subsidiaries are rapidly disappearing into vapor. I still know nothing of Fiona’s status, and I’m loath to drag Tim into my world of espionage to find out. All that aside, I continue to lose sleep over a single, haunting thought: did any of the blood plant seeds make it back to Earth?

Speaking of Tim, he explained over dinner that I can have an anonymous token issued on Arthur’s phantom account, since I’m in possession of all the necessary information. The token can be retrofitted to just about any inanimate object, though they’re most popularly fitted to jewelry. I’ve decided to order a handsome watch—for this purpose, and also because I have absolutely no sense of time without my NanoPrint. Normally, this is an option reserved for corporate entities. But eleven million credits tends to sway customer service a bit.

I’m grateful to have Tim by my side through all this—not only for his technical expertise, but because he’s one of a handful of people on this planet who I believe is trustworthy enough to be a part of this without undercutting me for a piece of the pie.

All of this amounts to one thing: I’m comfortably financed—wealthy by most people’s standards, including my own. Perhaps I should be excited by this—and I suppose I am, at times—but I’m equally terrified. I fear that at any moment, Palmer Gunn, or perhaps the FBI, is going to kick in my door and plunder what’s left of my earthly life. Rationally, I know Gunn is no longer a real threat—even his own cohorts have abandoned him at this point—but there remains a scrim of uncertainty over the money, which prevents me from relaxing completely. I don’t dare spend a single credit.

So I work out instead.

I’ve often heard people say they’d continue to work for a living, even if fate called their number in the lottery and bestowed unimaginable wealth upon them, because they enjoy working too much to leave it behind. It hasn’t taken me long to learn that I would not be at home among these people. Now that I’m ostensibly well-to-do, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to drag myself to work. I’m still very much motivated by my yearning to bring Keith down, yet every day at work feels like precisely that—another day at work. I know my presence is serving a purpose—at least, I think it is—but I’m wondering if it’s possible to just buy my revenge.