Lightspeed Magazine - September 2016 Read online

  Oh, crap, Aedo thought.

  Then she looked at the woman. Cadares wasn’t a name she recognized, and inviting a young hacker out to dinner seemed like an odd move for someone whose department had been screwed over by said hacker’s actions. Inside ally, maybe. Could be a bureaucrat trying to line up another leak, in which case Aedo would rather just point her at an anonymous server and call it good. “Why?”

  Cadares hesitated. “Call it professional curiosity?”

  “I’m not giving interviews,” Aedo said.

  Cadares looked pained. “Please,” she said, then looked past Aedo, and glanced along the shelf of food. Gestured to the pemmican. “Unless vegetable shortening and protein powder is more appealing?”

  Dammit. Aedo would have killed for a decent meal.

  Or, if not killed, then rubbed elbows with someone from the Energy Division for a while. She eyed the woman, gauging the relative levels of danger and social awkwardness.

  “You buying?”

  • • • •

  The place Cadares picked out was, unsurprisingly, in toward the central districts, where the buildings rose tall enough to segment the sky into a frustrated grid. Business-drone restaurant. In her T-shirt and jacket and pants with all their carpenter loops on it—loops which would never see use, because heck if she knew what she’d do with a hammer—Aedo was as obvious as a blinking light.

  To her credit, Cadares seemed to notice the incongruity as soon as they walked in the door. But she set her shoulders, opened up the seat menu, and found them a booth near the back. Aedo kept her head down and followed Carades there.

  Cadares sat first. Aedo slid into the booth opposite her and positioned herself to hide from as much of the restaurant as possible, her fingers making abortive little motions toward the datapad in her pocket. Eighteen months without the thing, and setting it aside for dinner seemed viscerally wrong, like she’d just gotten a sense back and had to numb it again. Of course, now she was sitting across from a woman whose generation still thought that bringing data to the dinner table was a breech of the social contract, or something.

  Cadares was already turning her attention to the interactive tabletop. She selected a menu, swiped a few dishes on or off the offerings—accounting for cost, or ideological stance, or whatever—and sent the menu over to Aedo’s seat, where Aedo stared at it. The sheer overabundance of choice aside, this was the kind of food she didn’t normally eat. After a moment, she just poked the listing with the most ingredients she recognized.

  “So,” Aedo said, and let the sound hang there.

  Cadares made her decision, selecting a dish and a drink with two sharp jabs. “They always have such interesting selections here,” she said. “Apparently one of their menu consultants spent part of his life around the cooking stalls in the Undermarket.”

  That was … interesting, in a useless way. “Um,” Aedo said. “Why am I here?”

  Cadares paused. It was very un-politician of her. “I suppose I wanted to get to know you,” she said, and Aedo thought oh, shit, should I be thinking about stalkers? Her semi-fame had gotten her name out there, and to read some of the boards, that was all it took for people to decide that your life was theirs, for their entertainment and one-sided emotional attachment. But Cadares just went on, “you know, get to know the mind behind the infamy. Maybe ask why you distributed those files.”

  “I’ve given this interview,” Aedo said. “Like, a hundred times.”

  “Humor me?” Cadares said.

  Aedo sighed. She’d released her statements, she’d explained herself again and again, but everyone seemed to think hearing it direct from her voicebox would be so much more real than hearing it from a news clip. She didn’t think so. They’d still get a canned answer, because making up a new one for everyone who asked was a colossal waste of time.

  “Because there’s no reason not to know,” Aedo said. “Energy reports—this is how we light our homes, right? This is what runs the computers and phones we use. That’s how we talk to each other, and work, and how we traverse large buildings and take autocabs across the city. This is stuff we need to live our lives, so why shouldn’t we know about it? What’s the point of it being secret?”

  “Is that really it, though?” Cadares asked. “You didn’t need a reason to do it, you needed a reason not to?”

  Aedo didn’t answer that. If people wanted to paint her as some kid with poor impulse control and an antisocial streak, they’d do it no matter how she protested.

  “I believed we were being lied to,” Aedo said. Back to the security of a canned answer. “And then I looked at the data and it looked a lot like we were being lied to, and I didn’t—I don’t understand how people don’t get angry when they see that.”

  “Ennui and apathy,” Cadares offered.

  Aedo shook her head.

  Cadares fixed Aedo with a stare. “No?”

  “That’s what they always say,” Aedo said. Thing was, she didn’t know anyone who didn’t care. A few people claimed not to care, but look hard enough, and you could find something that kicked them off like a virus. Most of them just didn’t think there was anything they could do about it.

  Well, she’d found something she could do. And they’d unloaded both barrels at her. Done the worst a topheavy bureaucracy could do. That was enough to deter plenty of people, but hey, she’d survived, and it’s not like her job prospects were much worse now than they had been before.

  But before she was forced to articulate it, their food arrived, courtesy a post-education kid who still hadn’t grown out of his lanky phase and looked like the branded restaurant suit he was wearing was what he’d be wearing for the rest of his life.

  Whatever Aedo had ordered, it looked like soup when he set it in front of her. Big chunks of vegetable and some kind of starch product and some kind of meat, with the kind of striation that suggested it had actually come from the muscle of an animal.

  Aedo sawed a chunk into a smaller chunk with the edge of her spoon, and tasted it. It had some kind of identifiable and not-unpleasant flavor, which put it head and shoulders above what she’d been eating lately.

  “I think you could do some good work,” Cadares said. “You’re skilled and civic-minded. I’d like to offer you patronage.”

  Part of Aedo’s soup went down her windpipe, and she slammed down on her breathing to keep herself from choking out and making a scene. Cadares looked alarmed.

  “Are you all right?”

  Aedo made a series of gestures to her throat and the soup, and tried to wave Cadares off, and hoped that it read as Don’t worry! Just fine! and not I am having spasms and need immediate help! She focused on breathing through her nose, made a few small coughs until the instinct to hack up a lung subsided, and squeaked out “Is that still a thing?”

  “I,” Cadares said, but after a moment her expression changed. Less taken-aback and more amused, maybe. “I have an extra room. You could do with some help getting back on your feet, couldn’t you?”

  Aedo nodded, then caught herself and shook her head, then realized that was technically a lie and swallowed and said “Wait, you want me to move in with you?”

  “Would that be all right?” Cadares asked. “I mean, you could certainly move in and see how you felt about it, and if you wanted to move out later you could.”

  After navigating a whole world of socially awkward shit, Aedo expected. But really, was moving in with a strange woman from the Energy Division any more of a bad idea than moving in with a strange woman from the net? She’d done that before.

  “Uh,” she said. “Okay.”

  She also made a mental note to tell some of her friends in Virtual Liberation, just in case. It would be her luck to get out of prison and end up with a stalker.

  • • • •

  Cadares seemed content to hail a cab and check her own messages while Aedo pulled out her data pad, keyed up the screen, and sank into the comforting rhythms of checking the newsfeeds, slinging a bi
t of code, playing a round of Commerce, and letting the outside world take care of its own business without input from her. She was expecting the trip to take a good bit of time.

  Instead, it wasn’t long before the cab slid to a halt and announced their destination, and she turned to blink out of the window.

  Oh.

  Cadares worked on the Energy Division, so something in Aedo’s brain had slotted her in with the energy farms outlying the city. But no, she was administrative, which meant that she was in one of the suburbs of the government sector, in one of those building where every flat took up a floor.

  Cadares had the seventeenth, which meant that she signed them into the elevator lobby and they rode up, the city dropping away or rising with them as they ascended. It might not have been the top of the tower, but the view—inside and out—was extraordinary.

  Cadares tossed her bag into the corner of the entryway and logged Aedo in as a guest, having her press her hand to the biometric panel at the door and keying in a set of permissions for everything from the main door to the refrigerator and showers. Then she led her across a livingroom space larger than Aedo’s old flat, and to a bedroom which nearly matched her old flat in size. The bed was better quality, though. So was the desk. And the data port looked top of the line, and already had a wireless hub glowing cheerfully from it.

  “Make yourself at home,” Cadares said. “The only thing I’ll ask is that you don’t have friends visit here. I understand you have a source of income, if you want to meet them out?”

  “Uh,” Aedo said. “A bit, yeah.” Which mostly meant bug bounties in distributed software and some shared income from distributed development, but Cadares seemed like the kind of person who wouldn’t think that was real work. Just a bunch of socially-awkward kids typing at each other over the net.

  Which, you know, it was a bunch of socially-awkward kids typing at each other over the net. But also socially-awkward adults, and unexpected media dynamos, and charismatic project managers, and people who thought far too deeply about software until they came up with a change in one block of code that cut processing time from three hours to thirty seconds. People like Cadares probably didn’t know how much they owed to the socially-awkward-kids group.

  “Good,” Cadares said. “We need to talk later. I can’t right now—I have a meeting I can’t miss. But really, please do help yourself to anything unlocked.”

  Anything unlocked. Like she needed to say it. Like Aedo was going to hack the wine fridge, or something. She nodded, and Cadares turned to go. It took a moment for Aedo to get her throat to make a sound.

  “Hey,” Aedo said.

  Cadares turned back.

  “Um.” Aedo shifted, and fished for words. “Look, I have this daemon on one of the VL community servers, it’s been checking my newsworthiness—I mean, that dipped during the sentence, but it’s up again, and—I mean, I probably already have a bunch of bullshit requests for interviews, and they’re going to ask about how I’m getting back on my feet after my prison sentence, you know, human interest stuff, and—”

  She trailed off. Typing her thoughts was so much easier; she had a chance to get all the information in the right order instead of just blurting it out and hoping the recipient could extract the meaning from all the noise. This had always been a problem. If she sat down and thought through the sentences, she wasn’t talking fast enough; if she talked fast enough, her words were a mess. She was so much more comfortable in text, where latency was fine.

  At least Cadares seemed to know what she was getting at. Her expression cooled.

  “For the next week or so,” she said, “I’d prefer if you kept my name out of it. You can refer to me as ‘a patron,’ but please don’t disseminate any identifying data. After the week, I’d say you can share whatever you want.”

  “Okay,” Aedo said. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected—Cadares taking in a young activist for the social capital? Capital with whom? —but the answer didn’t inspire confidence.

  “If you need anything, my message address is coded in the flat,” Cadares said. Professional warmth was back in her tone. “I’ll see you later.”

  “Yeah,” Aedo said, and Cadares left.

  Aedo stood exactly where she was as the lift doors closed, and she listened to the noise-damped shufffs as it carried Cadares downward. Then she let out a breath and made a cursory effort at familiarizing herself with the flat. The windows were equipped with dimmers, the lights had adjustable spectrums, the couch wasn’t a smart couch, but it would be large enough for a very satisfying dogpile if she was allowed to have friends over. The food in the fridge was mostly heatable boxed meals from restaurants, the only doors that wouldn’t open were a glass door to an office space and an opaque door to what was probably Cadares’ bedroom. Aedo retreated to her own bedroom, and checked the newsworthiness daemon. She was up two points, probably as the larger sites and aggregators caught onto the blog noise.

  Aside from the daemon, the next interesting thing on the pad was 15,289 new messages—a number that blipped up to 15,292 while she watched it. She turned the message center off. She’d need another daemon to classify those: hate mail, automated advertisements, VL list nonsense, requests for interview, support mail, messages from friends, total crackpot mail. Probably 2% of it would be something she actually wanted to read, and that was a daunting number all its own.

  She sighed, opened up her script environment, and got to work.

  A minute in, and something popped up on the corner of her screen. Network connected, it read. This network has the following local public subscriptions: • Energy News Digest. • Energy Division Public Releases. • Energy Division Public Information Request Release Aggregate. Would you like to add these to your subscription manager?

  She blinked, then selected yes on the first and third. The second was already in her manager, the first was one of the zines whose subscription had lapsed while she was doing time, and the third—

  Well, tucked under a title that could only have come out of a bureaucracy, that was the aggregated text of every file the Energy Division had to release in accordance with a Information Request from the public. The sort of thing someone working in energy would have access to, but a member of the public would have to request piecemeal. And 99% of it was probably people asking if they could upgrade their flats or businesses to draw additional power from the grid, but there was probably 1% that was gold.

  Which was, at the moment, just more noise, when she needed to polish her life down to some signal. She turned back to the script.

  • • • •

  Four hours later she pulled her head out of the script and blinked at the clock on the corner of her screen. Her hand found the bottle of water she’d fetched; now empty, again. She got up, stretched, grabbed the bottle, and headed out toward the kitchen.

  And there—who know how long she’d been there—was Cadares sitting on the couch, some white drink on the table in front of her, pouring over her data pad.

  Aedo considered just slinking past her, but she didn’t feel comfortable enough for the kind of easy cohabitation she could manage with roommates. She cleared her throat.

  Cadares didn’t look up. Just waved a hand at one of the empty spots on the couch, so Aedo slunk there instead.

  The room still had its strange, preternaturally put-together grandeur in the dark, though the window glass had dimmed to black so their indoor light wouldn’t attract gazes. It felt more than a little like being in a submerged building, or one up in orbit. Or like Aedo imagined those places would feel.

  “How was your evening?” Cadares asked, eyes still locked on the screen.

  The lack of eye contact was the most comfortable thing about the situation. Aedo wished she’d brought her own pad out, let it distract her from the smalltalk. “Okay.”

  “Any interesting reading?” Cadares said.

  Aedo tucked her arms in around herself, and neglected to mention that she hadn’t actually gotten around t
o reading any. “I noticed you made some feeds local-public. I mean, I expect since you live alone, and they default to restricted access …”

  She trailed off, and Cadares finally sighed, and set her pad to sleep. “I expected you’d be interested in them, so I changed the access settings,” she said.

  Aedo nodded, two, three times. Then cleared her throat.

  “So, why am I here?”

  Cadares arched an eyebrow.

  “I mean, I leaked energy data,” she said. “And now you’re giving me a feed full of request-only info? And the thing about ‘a patron,’ I mean, historically—”

  Cadares held up a hand. Aedo’s jaw snapped shut.

  “I do want you to do something,” Cadares said. “I thought it would appeal to your sensibilities.”

  The muscles across Aedo’s shoulders went stiff.

  “I need to see energy distribution records for One East,” she said. “I can request them, but I have reason to think they’re being doctored. I need the originals.”

  “Um,” Aedo said.

  “You do have a history,” Cadares said, and finally put her data pad aside.

  Aedo might have counted down from ten, might have done some kind of calming exercise, except that her brain felt like a kernel of panic.

  After a moment, she asked, “Do you actually know what hackers do?”

  Now Cadares looked like she’d been handed an input error.

  But that was all right, because more words were already tumbling up at Aedo’s teeth. “You want data espionage,” she said. “I mean, there are people who go and find security and try to crack it for fun, but that’s not the def —I mean, I hack, but I don’t crack. I got the energy data ’cause—I mean, did you actually read any of the reports on my trial?”

  “I didn’t understand all of them,” Cadares admitted.

  Aedo slumped back into the couch.

  It was a very nice couch. Some kind of synthetic upholstery that yielded but didn’t let her sink down, smooth to the touch but not slick or squeaky. She’d spent two and a half days camped out on a couch like this, once, in a marathon coding session to put together a repository for people to secure politically-sensitive data. But that couch had been third-or fourth-hand, stuffed into a room full of third-or fourth-hand furniture, and the company had been people who knew what they were doing.