David Brin - Earth

This time, her mother had gone too far. She’d installed a watchdog program right outside Claire’s own mailbox!

“Did she actually think I wouldn’t notice something like that?”

Probably. So many parents were members of the

“reality disabled” when it came to having a clear mental image of their children. Perhaps Daisy still considered

Claire a child when it came to the demanding, grownup world of the Net.

“I’ll show you,” Claire muttered as she tapped out code of her own. Oh, she knew she’d never be able to tackle

Daisy one-on-one. But it just might be possible to take advantage of her mother’s preconceived notions.

Vivisector was an object program she’d borrowed from Tony just the other day… a tasty little routine going the rounds among young hackers that disassembled other programs and put them back together again without leaving a trace — even while those programs were running. Carefully, Claire sicked Vivisector on her mother’s watchdog. Soon its guts were laid out across her inspection screen.

“So, just as I thought.” Daisy had assigned the little surrogate to pluck anything piped to Claire from Logan Eng.

“He’s not your husband anymore, Mother. Can’t you leave the poor codder alone?”

Carefully, Claire excised a core gene from the watchdog, to use as a template. Then she dialed her father’s Net access code and performed a hybridization test on the protocols controlling access to his private cache. Sure enough, there was a match. Some lines throbbed redly near the heart of Logan’s own security system. Claire tsked.

“Very lazy, Mother. Using close genetic cousins to perform similar tasks? In related databases? I’m disappointed in you.”

She wasn’t, really. Claire actually felt relieved. Comparing codons from two infiltrators was a technique she knew and understood. No doubt Daisy could have made the trick moot had she tried. And although it showed benign contempt, her mother was capable of worse emotions — like wrath. You didn’t want to tangle with Daisy when she was in the latter state. Not at all.

The red lines throbbed. Claire considered going ahead and excising the retrocode. Or writing a warning to her father.

But then, what would be the point? At best Daisy would wind up paying a fine. Then she’d just pay attention to doing the job right.

“Why is she suddenly so interested in Logan’s work, anyway?” Claire wondered. Of course her mother disapproved of Logan’s career. But there were so many engineers out there who were far worse… far less sensitive to environmental concerns. Until now Daisy had seemed tacitly amenable to leaving her ex-husband alone and going after bigger game.

Claire bit her lip. There was one way to find out what was going on without triggering Daisy’s alarms. That was to have her mother’s infiltrator send duplicates of whatever it stole to her , as well as to Daisy.

No . She shook her head. I won’t do that. I’ll wait till Logan’s back in town and tell him in person .

Unfortunately, her father was hopping across the continent, sending her little blips from all the sites his new employer sent him to. His messages implied something was up, certainly, and Claire’s curiosity was piqued.

But I’ll respect his privacy , she determined. I’m not Daisy

With that resolve, she carefully worded a simple message to her father, saying she missed him, and adding a final line: “Mirror-mirror, Daddy. Don’t take any funny-looking apples.”

It was a bit of shared context code, from back when she used to liken her mother to Snow White’s wicked queen, complete with all-seeing, all-knowing magic mirror.

I just hope Logan gets the meaning. It’s pretty thin .

Carefully, Claire exited that portion of the Net, leaving all her mother’s agents in place. That done, she went back to reading her own mail.

“hi, claire!”

Tony Calvallo’s bright, cheerful face popped out of one message blip, less than an hour old. Had she been wearing her wrist-comp while out repairing the mulch bin, she’d have been able to take his call in person.

“there’s a party at paul’s tonight, you know he’s by the north main levee, so we could stroll over there along the way and look for subsidence cracks.”

He grinned and winked.

Claire had to smile. Tony was getting better at this… keeping up a gentle pressure while remaining all the time light and easy, letting her ultimately control the pace. As for tonight’s pretext, it had been a long time since she’d inspected the levees over in Paul’s part of the valley. Tony was showing more imagination and insight all the time.

Claire bit her lip — enjoying the pressure on sensitive nerve endings. A couple of times lately, she had let Tony kiss her and had been surprised both by his eager roughness and by how much she liked it.

Maybe I’m only a little slower than other girls, instead of plain retarded, as I thought.

Her mother’s generation, of course, had been precocious and downright crazy, starting sex on average around age eleven — an appalling notion she figured explained a lot about the present state of the world.

Still, there might be such a thing as moving too slowly…

All right, let’s see what happens. Anyway, I can always insist on actually looking for cracks in the levee.

With a smile, she punched Tony’s number. Predictably, he answered before the second ring.

At the same moment, Daisy McClennon watched rivers of data stream down the walls of her private chamber, each reflecting another view of the world.

One screen panned the recent Wyoming dam collapse… pictures laxly stored by her ex-husband where she could easily get at them. Taking into account other case studies in his file, this series of “coincidences” had gone well beyond happenstance into the realm of enemy action.

She’d already tapped her usual sources and come up with, at best, rumors and vague hints. One of the rich expatriate banking co-ops in Ulan Bator seemed to have an intense interest in these events. So did a Canadian old-money clan in Quebec. Then there were the government spook agencies — one of whom Logan was clearly working for. They were hard to crack, and risky, too. For one thing, some of their best hackers were about her equal. Daisy preferred sniffing round the edges till she knew enough to warrant a full assault.

One possible hint turned in a nearby holo tank — a pictorial globe of the Earth, sliced in half, with lines drawn through the cutaway. The anonymous tip had found its way into her box this morning — no doubt from someone in her web of worldwide contacts. At first it made little sense. Then she saw how each line was pinned, at one end, on the location of one of the “anomalies” in Logan’s file. Each line then passed through the center of the Earth to arrive inside one of four broad ovals at the antipodes.

What could that mean? So far nothing much had occurred to her. Daisy was about to discard the hint as spurious when she saw one of the ovals centered on Southern Africa.

I wonder. Jen Wolling seemed to be involved in something she thought serious, even dangerous. Then she up and left for Southern Africa again. Could there be a connection?

There was another link, now that she thought about it.

Wolling’s collaborators were based in New Zealand. Wasn’t that where some of the earliest quakes had been centered?

Daisy poked away at the puzzle, sending her electronic servant beasts to seek and fetch new pieces. Brazenly, she rifled the files of several companies owned by a cousin she hadn’t seen in years, but who owed her more favors than an aristocratic prig like him would ever want to be reminded of. One of his companies handled data transfers from Australasia…