K Jeter: Farewell Horizontal

Sai nodded, pleased. “It takes you awhile, but you get there eventually. You still don’t know everything you need to know, but you got the process started, at least.”

The little light going on inside his head had carried its own sparking circuit, a trickle of excitement, seeing one small bit more clearly. “Right – I still don’t know why . I mean, why they did it in the first place, what the Grievous Amalgam got out of sneaking around and burning out that sector -”

“That’s unimportant; that’s not what you need to know. Stuff like that, the reason shit happens, you can just make your assumptions and let ’em ride. Maybe the people in that sector you ran across had gotten a little uppity and needed their chain given its ultimate yank; or else whatever factory they ran had been working under contract, and it was easier for the Amalgam to pay ’em off like that. Plus, you got to remember that the Grievous Amalgam’s an old organization; they’ve been sitting up on the toplevel for a long time. Long enough to get fat and lazy, to lose that warrior’s edge, the hungry feeling, that put them up there. They’ve got to substitute cunning for what they’ve lost, if they’re going to hang on. You don’t know how long they’ve been pulling this shit, and on how many people; they’ve got a lot of alliances to keep in line. And good PR is ninety percent of that process. For all you know, the Amalgam might’ve been generating false reports of all the battles they’ve won, opposing tribes subdued, areas conquered – all of them nonexistent. Then they use Ask & Receive to distribute the phony accounts, and everybody else thinks it’s fact, just because they got the info from a supposedly impartial source. And who’s going to find them out? You’re talking a lot of territory; practically anything – or nothing – could be going on, and nobody would know the difference. The only ones likely to discover that something’s not quite kosher are freelancers like yourself; you’re the only ones who might blunder into a sector reportedly raided by the Grievous Amalgam and find a completely different reality from the one everybody’s been handed by Ask & Receive. You might not be the first poor bastard who’s gotten into this kind of deep shit – you just might be the first one to have gotten this much of a run out of it.”

That was a chilling thought. There were always stories going around in the loose fraternity of freelancers about one or more of their number whom nobody had seen in a long time, too long a time. The final assumption being that something had happened to them – unspecified as to what – or else they had taken the big step of their own free will, cutting free from the wall and embracing the clouds below, depressed at some negative turn in their ramshackle careers. You just never saw them again, never knew. But this meant that the spooky Something might not have been accident or suicide, but murder.

“Yeah, well, that may be for all I know -” Axxter peered closer at the other. “But what do you know? I mean, if you knew what I was going to find in that dump… and you’ve got so much stuff figured out… then what else do you know?”

Sai laughed. “You’re wishing for something, but I don’t think I can give it to you.”

“Come on. The way you know what’s going on… how you can just tap in on whatever lines people are using… how the building works, all this high-tech stuff you and your friends keep running… You must be able to do it.”

“Do what? That hacking shit? Go on-line and break into restricted access files – is that what you’re talking about?”

Axxter nodded.

“As they used to say in another time, another place – boy, I despair of you.” Pity in Sai’s voice. “It just goes to show how hard old mythology dies. Especially myths that serve somebody’s purpose, and that key right into some little need inside people’s heads. That hacking bullshit goes back a long way – not just before the War, but before Cylinder itself. You gotta ask yourself, who did it benefit to have people believing that restricted-access data files and operating systems could be broken into by some bright thirteen-year-old with a dime-store terminal and a fast hand on the keyboard? That was a line of crap from the beginning; the only basis for it was a brief historical period right at the beginning, before the really good methods of locking up stuff were invented. Some little hacker punk would manage to get into someplace on-line where he wasn’t supposed to be, and then go around bragging about it. But it was like somebody going to a sector where everybody leaves their doors unlocked, and then claiming to be a master burglar because you lifted somebody’s toaster. Soon as everybody started locking their doors, that penny-ante stuff was over . But it was an interesting coincidence that right at the time when that kind of information-handling technology was taking over the world, a bunch of stuff started showing up in the popular media that depicted it as essentially harmless because teenage kids could crack it open – so what’s there to worry about, right? People were less likely to worry about the files being kept on them in massive, cross-linked data banks as long as they could be made to believe that the machines running the info were just kinda cuddly and easily fucked with.”

Axxter shook his head. “You lost me there somewhere. All this ancient history jazz -”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to give you a lecture. Just one of my pet subjects, is all. I wonder about the people who got involved in handing out that line of crap – there were so many of them, they couldn’t all have been on the payroll. Some of them, maybe most of them – hell, maybe even all of them – must’ve actually believed that bullshit. Because they wanted to. So they wouldn’t have to deal with the scary stuff that was actually happening.” Sai switched the flashlight on again, drawing a circle with its beam across the train. “So anyway, you don’t get some magic key to everybody’s deepest secrets. You’ll just have to do with what you know already.”

He had to laugh. At the way things had worked out, the set of the teeth in the vise around his ankle.

“I’m sorry -” Axxter wiped his eyes. His laughter had bounced wildly back and forth in the high-ceilinged space. “It just all seems so funny. I’m not only sitting on the info that would save my own ass, but it’d also blow everything on the other side to pieces – I mean, stuff like this would go off like a bomb right in the middle of the Grievous Amalgam hegemony – I’ve got all that tucked right inside my head, and there’s no way I can use it. Eventually, their megassassin is going to track me down and waste me, and that’ll be the end of it. I might just as well have never found out what’s going on at all.”

“Is it as bad as all that?”

Axxter stared at him. “Are you joking? I can’t just call up the Havoc Mass and tell ’em, can I? If I get on the phone line again, the Grievous Amalgam megassassin will pinpoint my location, and it’ll be all over – I might have enough time to blat out some of what I know, which I’m sure the Havoc Mass will appreciate knowing, but a fat lot of good that’ll do me. And if I climb on board this thing here and head straight for the other side, without telling the Havoc Mass what I’ve found out and getting off the hook with them, then their megassassin creams me. Either way, I’m dead.”

“What you need is some other way of getting hold of the Havoc Mass. Instead of the phone line.”

He grunted. “Yeah – too bad they’re the only game in town.”

A smile in Sai’s voice. “Sure about that?”