John Scalzi - The Android's Dream

The two stood there in front of space 4088, section 91, for a minute, silently.

"You didn't have me come out here to talk about something Brian and I did twenty years ago, Ben," Creek said, gently.

"Right," Javna said. He reached into his coat pocket and tossed something to Creek. It was a bracelet with a small metal disk on it. "Put that on and press the button," Javna told Creek. Creek slipped on the bracelet with a little effort and pressed the red button in the center of the disk. He could feel a small vibration from the disc. He looked back over to Javna, who was wearing one as well. Javna was placing a small cube on Brian's headstone, attaching it by the suction cup on one of the sides. He pressed the top.

"That should do it," Javna said.

"Should do what?" Creek asked.

"I was being followed when I met up with you today," Javna said. "I laid a few red herrings across my trail to confuse my tails and I'd be willing to guess that they're thinking we're meeting at a bar. But you can never be too careful."

Javna pointed at the cube. "So, that little object does two things. It creates a sphere of white noise with a radius of thirty feet. Anyone trying to listen in more than thirty feet away is going to hear static, if they're using conventional listening devices. It also vibrates the headstone, to confuse devices that can register sound conduction by bouncing lasers off of solid objects and processing how much the sound waves make them move. The little wrist doodads are doing the same thing to us. Not that they would have much chance with the lasers. Human bodies are poor sound conductors, and the headstone doesn't give them much to work with. The whole outdoor thing really messes with laser detection. But better safe than sorry."

"That still leaves Up reading," Creek said.

"Well, then," Javna said. "Try not to move your lips too much."

"Cloak and dagger shit bores me, Ben," Creek said. "What's going on?"

Javna reached into his coat pocket again and produced a small curved tube. "Ever seen one of these before?" He handed it to Creek.

"I don't think so," Creek said, taking it. "What is it?"

Javna told him the whole story, from the murder by fart to the need to find sheep.

"Wild," Creek said. "Disgusting, but wild."

"Let's say I wanted to find out who made this," Javna said. "How would I do it?"

Creek turned the apparatus around in his hands. "I'm assuming this isn't a mass-produced object," he said.

"Probably not," Javna said.

"Then someone either designed this from scratch or altered an existing design. You could probably check the UNE Patent and Trademark Office database to see if something like this exists, and then if it does, you could try to see who's accessed the information in the last year or so. Presuming your guy searched off the government database and not off a private archive, you might get something."

"So you think we could get the guy that way?" Javna said.

"Sure, if the guy was an idiot and didn't bother to cover his tracks," Creek said. "Does that sound like the sort of person you're looking for?"

"Probably not," Javna said again.

"There's another place to look, though," Creek said. "This isn't mass-produced but it's also not something you could make in your garage shop. This thing was probably made in a small-scale fabricator." Creek looked up at Javna, who shrugged. "A small-scale fabricator is like a printer that works in three dimensions," Creek explained. "You provide it a design and some raw material and it 'prints' the object you want to make. It's inefficient—you wouldn't use it to make a lot of things—but if d be perfect for a job like this."

"How many of these things are out there?" Javna asked.

Creek shrugged. "Couldn't tell you. I'd guess a couple hundred in the DC area," he said. "They're used by people who need to make replacement parts of old things whose manufacturers have gone out of business or stopped supporting the product. Like that old car of yours. If you ever got a replacement part for it, it was probably fabricated. But you could narrow it down in a couple of ways. This is mostly a metal object, so you could ignore the fabricators that output plastics, ceramics, and carbon composites. That's still going to leave you with a few dozen, but at least that's a smaller number."

"But that still doesn't tell us which of these fabricators made the thing," Javna said.

"No, but you could find out pretty quickly from there. Fabricators are like any mechanical object—there are small, unique differences in their output. Put this under the microscope to find the pattern unique to its fabricator. Basic forensics." Creek handed the apparatus back to Javna, but Javna held up his hand. "You want me to keep this?" Creek asked.

"I want you to find who made it," Javna said. "That, and one other thing."

"What's that?"

"I need you to find that sheep I told you about."

"You can't be serious," Creek said.

"I'm totally serious," Javna said.

"Ben, even one of these things is a full-time job for actual analysts and investigators. And if you recall, I already have a full-time job. You got it for me, remember."

"I do," Javna said. "Don't worry about the job. I've already given you cover for that. Your boss has received notice that for the next two weeks you'll be participating in a State Department Xenosapient training program. And as it happens, there actually is a State Department Xenosapient training program going on over the next couple of weeks."

"That's swell," Creek said. "Then there's just the minor detail that I'm deeply out of practice in what you're asking me to do."

"You figured out how to track down this fabricator pretty quickly," Javna said.

"Jesus, Ben," Creek said. "Anyone who watches detective shows could have told you that."

"Harry," Javna said. "Just because you're currently slacking through life with a dead-end job doesn't mean that I have to pretend I don't know what you can do."

"That's not very fair, Ben," Creek said.

Javna held his hand up. "Sorry," he said. "But, you know, Harry. If I had half your brains and talent, I'd be running the country by now. I mean, hell. I know you find your current job interesting. But it's like using an n-space drive to go down to the store to get a bottle of milk."

"Not everyone wants to run the world," Creek said.

"Funny, I said something like that about you to Heffer," Javna said. "Anyway, you don't have to run the world. I just want you to save it a little. We need to find these things, but we can't be obvious that we're looking for them. I need someone I can trust to do this thing for me, and do it quietly. You fit the bill, Harry. I need your help."

"I don't have what I would need to do all this," Creek said. "I don't even own a proper computer anymore, you know. I've got my communicator and the processors in my household appliances. That's it."

"What happened to your computer?" Javna said.

"I had a crisis of faith about its use," Creek said. "I stored what I was working on and gave it to the neighbor kids."

"Then we'll get you a new one. Tell me what you need," Javna said.

"How big is your budget?" Creek asked.

Javna smiled, reached into his pocket yet again, and gave Creek a credit card. "Anonymous credit," Javna said.

"How much?" Creek asked.

"I don't rightly know," Javna said, and nodded towards the card. "I don't think one of these cards actually runs out of credit. So don't lose it, or I'm in deep trouble."

"Oh, wow," Creek said. "A boy could have a lot of fun with a toy like this."

"Don't get too excited," Javna said. "If you buy yourself a tropical atoll, it's going to get noticed. Buy everything you need. Just don't buy anything else."

"No worries," Creek said, pocketing the card. "I'm also going to need access. I don't know what my access level is on the UNE database, but whatever it is I guarantee it's not high enough."