The Pedestal (5 page)

I’m bewildered, and don’t mind showing it in front of these cranks—they’re used to dealing with dimwits; actually, I think that’s what they prefer. “How is that even possible?”

Tim passes Ryan a sidelong glance, as if requesting permission. Ryan responds with a weak shrug. Tim looks back at me and clears his throat.

“In theory? It’s not. You couldn’t destroy a NanoPrint if you tried—corpses from seventy years ago are still online.”

“What about dodgers?” I ask. “They don’t even have implants, do they?”

Ryan shakes his head. “That’s not how it works, Wil. Having your implant removed doesn’t take it offline. It may power down, but it’s always threaded in the system.”

“Besides,” Tim adds, “dodgers usually have their implants hacked to maintain functionality. It takes a special kind of person to
really
go off the grid, you know? Dodgers usually just want a little more privacy.”

“Oh,” I say, deflated.

We stand there in silence for a few seconds—well, we didn’t speak; there is, of course, no such thing as silence in the racks. Ryan makes a sudden whistling sound between his teeth, which peters out into a clicking of his tongue. “You know ...” he intones, as if dangling a bit of candy to a child. Tim and I both peer at him plaintively, hopefully.

Ryan smiles—one of those thin, crooked smirks that he must know annoys the pee out of everyone—and pauses for effect. My eardrums are beginning to smart, so I’d just as soon dispense with all the drama.

“Spit it out, man!” growls Tim.

Yeah, what he said!
I add with an exasperated tossing of my hands.

“I’m just saying,” Ryan explains reasonably, “I mean—it isn’t technically possible for a NanoPrint signal to disappear. As long as ...”

Until 2086, the capital of Florida was ... anyone? Anyone?

Tim’s eyebrows slowly rise, scrunching his forehead into an epiphany of skin rolls. He gets it now, even if I don’t. I clear my throat—my own dramatic contribution—which is only just audible above the noise. Turning to me, Tim blessedly completes the fragment of thought that I’ve proven incapable of completing on my own.

“As long as it’s still on the planet.”

I’ve been knocking on Uncle Stewart’s door for a while now with no response. He isn’t in the best of health these days. Now, I’ll grant that he’s pretty spry for a man in his seventies, but he’s been coughing lately. A lot, in fact. It’s hard enough to keep from dwelling on the looming of his eightieth birthday, when his NanoPrint will automatically shut him down. Lately, I’m not sure he’ll make it that long.

I happen to know that Stew never enabled medical monitoring on his implant. It’s a shame he and Arthur never got along; they certainly had that in common. I’ve tried more times than I can count to steer the old man toward reason. He isn’t just stubborn; he’s utterly incorrigible.

My knocking crescendos into pounding, fueled by a lifetime of abandonment issues. Behind the panic, I’m acutely aware that I’ve begun to draw some unwanted attention from the neighbors. But some things justify extraordinary behavior—like the idea that my uncle Stewart is lying in the throes of death, helpless to let me in. I’m on the verge of kicking the door in when a shuttle lowers in front of the building. Uncle Stewart steps out of it and, spying me on his doorstep, shakes his head with mild irritation.

“Don’t you ever read your updates?” he grumbles. “I ran out of Earl Grey.”

Oh, Stewart. Blessed Stewart.

I don’t, incidentally. If I had my druthers, I’d delete my NanoPrint updates out of hand—and Uncle Stewart knows that perhaps better than anyone. They remind me that my every moment is theoretically mapped out before me—whether I like it or not—and I hate that.

“Sorry, Stew,” I wheeze, rushing him on the sidewalk with an uncharacteristic bear hug. I’m so relieved my eyes are stinging.

If there’s a god out there, thank you.

We sip our weekly cup of tea—decaf for Stewart, since he’s an old fogey and has probably been ready to hit the sack since noon. He’s already heard about Arthur, who he’s known vicariously through me for many years, but never really clicked with in person. I want to tell him about the list and Arthur’s missing NanoPrint, but I suppress this urge. The last thing I want is to worry Stewart unnecessarily with such things. He’s the type of person who cares too much to be an idle listener.

Once, when I told him that Keith had me working mandatory overtime while another programmer was on an unplanned vacation, Stewart actually stopped by IDS to tell Keith what a miserable boss he was; I barely intercepted him at the elevators in time—ten seconds later and I’d be painting office buildings and hanging my hat in the ghetto stacks. Another thing: he’s always trying to get me to eat when I’ve already eaten—
You’re too skinny; a boy your age shouldn’t be so skinny
—as if he doesn’t share a skinny gene with me. Come to think of it, I don’t think he’s ever let me out of his apartment without a piece of fruit for the road. I don’t have the heart to tell him that I usually toss them without taking a single bite.

He annoys the daylights out of me. And I love him all the more for it; he’s one of a dying handful who cares enough about me to bother.

Heading home, I’m so immersed in my thoughts—worrying about Stewart, wondering what I’ll ever do without him around, now that I’ve learned to fear death—that I almost don’t notice the stranger loitering at the front of Stewart’s building. I only notice at all because he’s trying so hard to be unnoticed—at my approach, he seems determined to avoid eye contact, yet I could swear he’s watching me from the corners of his eyes as I wait for a tram.

Huh
.

After three long days of vigilant analysis, I’ve come to one solid conclusion regarding Arthur’s files: if I’m truly our last hope to get things back in order at IDS, we’d all better start revamping our résumés. I’m brain-fried and frustrated beyond measure, and I have absolutely nothing to show for my considerable time and energy.

There’s no point in delaying the inevitable. I’m simply not the man for the job; no amount of staring at Arthur’s files is going to change that. So I corner Keith in her—dang it,
his
—office, prepared to officially throw in the towel.

“I can’t do this, Keith.”

“What do you mean?” he asks, eyes widening innocently, like he honestly doesn’t know the difference between one of his junior program analysts and his former A-game security administrator.

“Arthur’s files; I can’t make heads or tails of them. You’re gonna have to find someone else to work with them. Maybe hire a consultant or something.”

“Huh,” he grunts. “That’s surprising. They’re that cryptic, huh?”

“And then some.”

Keith leans back in his chair, which screeches as if it might buckle under his considerable form—and trains a reptilian gaze on me. “No change logs or read-mes? Nothing like that?”

I feel my blood slow, my eyes narrow.

“I kind of thought Arthur was highQ enough to leave a breadcrumb, or something we could use. Something in a language the rest of us could understand.”

Okay, this is getting weird—the way he said that last part? It’s like he’s trying to steer me—like he already knows. “What, you mean like a text file?” I ask, my voice filling with gravel and steel.

Keith smiles slightly and shrugs, tapping his desk with a fat, hot pink-nailed hand. “Sure, why not?”

Angrily, I turn to leave, but he calls after me. “Wait a second, Wil. Just hold your horses.” With a great creak, he heaves out of his chair and steps toward the door. Squeezing past me, he peeks through the open door and then shuts it.

Suddenly, I can feel my heart racing. It’s been doing that a lot lately, with everything that’s been going on; I wonder if in some high-rise, Nike analysts have taken notice of the trend as well, deducing that I’ve finally gotten into exercise and am now a worthy cause for marketing.

“What is this, Keith?” I demand. He smiles—it’s all in his mouth, though; nothing at all friendly in the eyes—and returns to his desk with slow, deliberate steps and hands clasped, as if he’s on a stroll through the park.

“Why don’t we just settle down for a minute, Wil? I can tell you’re upset, losing your buddy and all.”

“It’s Wil
son
.”

“Fine. Wilson. I know you like to think you have a monopoly on caring about this company, but I can assure you that IDS is just as important to the rest of us. And a few of us have a heavier burden here than you can imagine.” He pauses to make sure I don’t have anything wise to crack. I do, naturally, but now isn’t the time. “The problem we face as a company,” he continues, now with a professorial air, “is making money when everybody out there has a hand out, looking for his piece of the action. If it were easy to make a profit in that kind of climate, everyone would be doing it.”

I feel him taking me down a path and, though I can’t quite see where it leads, it smells a little fishy to me. “Last I heard we were turning a nice profit, Keith. So I’m still waiting for the part where you justify accepting illegal kickbacks. We don’t need to make money on those terms.”

Keith blinks. “Kickbacks?” He scoffs, covering his mouth to absorb the force of a magnificent guffaw. “Jeez, Wil,” he laughs. “You got your head on upside down and backwards, kid.”

Wait for it ... here comes my trademark dumb expression. “Uh, what do you mean,
upside down
?” Backwards I hear on occasion, so maybe there’s something to it. Upside down is a new one.

Keith plops back into his chair and sighs. “Nobody’s on the take here, okay? It’s the other way around. Listen, Wil—”

“It’s Wil
son
!”

Keith sighs and taps his desk with a pen. “Wilson. It wasn’t always like this. There used to be a time when we could all just come to work, bust our butts and keep the world running. Everybody was happy—we all got a nice paycheck, our shareholders made some fat coin. But then something happened.” Keith sighs and begins chewing thoughtfully at the inside of a cheek, forming a makeup-spackled, pocked, dimple on the outer surface. “You ever hear of Palmer Gunn?”

The air around me seems to smack me in the forehead.
Whoa
. Didn’t see that coming. At the invocation of that name, I feel the blood drain from my face. “Who hasn’t?”

“Exactly. Only, when he first started sniffing around this place, none of us had. Didn’t take long to figure out what the score was, though. That’s for sure. Told old Pinrose he had to pay the toll—you remember Pinrose? Way before your time.”

He was before my time, but among programmers around here, the guy’s still a legend—he and Arthur practically built this company from the ground up.

“Anyway, if you know anything about Pinrose, you know he didn’t take any circuit scrap from anyone. So when Gunn came in here, throwing his weight around like he owned the place, you can imagine it didn’t sit well with Mr. Pinrose. Way I hear it, he had Gunn tossed out like a piece of trash.”

My eyes must be bugging.

“Crazy, huh? These days, Gunn’d probably wipe a guy’s entire family off the map over an undercooked steak. But those were different times—I guess he was still cutting teeth. Anyway, green or not, Gunn didn’t give up there. Sure, Pinrose had some spine, but there were plenty of others who didn’t. So he got in their pockets instead.”

“So, what are you telling me? Those people are just passing the expense on to us?”

“In a manner of speaking, yeah. Cost of doing business these days.”

“But it’s illegal, Keith. Surely that crossed your mind!”

“Listen, Wilson, let’s make one thing real clear. This wasn’t my doing; you got a problem with the way things are done around here, look no further than your pal Arthur. He set the standard long before I came up the ranks. When a guy like Arthur tells you to look the other way like your career’s on the line, you look the other way.”

“Is that what you’re asking me to do, Keith? Look the other way?” I feel my NanoPrint at work, trying to calm me down with some hormonal concoction, but my indignation is too concentrated to be reasoned with. “Why didn’t you just clear the file off the drive to begin? I can’t believe you dragged me into this.”