C James - Dome Six

Her father’s question didn’t make any inherent sense. The whole point of IDA’s location tracking was to have a real time account of everyone’s whereabouts. That data got correlated with other data or allowed proximity doors to open. The only situation where your previous location might be relevant was in prosecuting a crime. No one ever needed to ask where you were the afternoon of November 21, 2164 because they’d already know. That’s exactly why Hideki was now sentenced to die in the Box like they did for murderers and rapists.

And yet, she now understood that location data could be altered. In Downing’s case, he didn’t know what he was doing and corrupted the Dome’s entire database in the process. But the very data that would exonerate Hideki and implicate Downing instead would also prove that she’d given herself access to IDA. That was at least as much an existential threat as sabotage. If she wasn’t careful, the Authority would put them both in the Box.

The existence of eraser Macros, which she didn’t learn about until much later, explained why Downing’s visit to Elle in the hospital seemed to result in her sudden amnesia. The fact that he’d just tried to do the same to her was very telling. It meant he was willing to use something meant to delete the memory of a trauma to serve his own purposes.

What if the only memory that had actually been erased back then was her father’s?

If you asked IDA where you were on a certain date and at a certain time, it would tell you. But first it would query the same database Downing had clumsily changed. In other words, IDA only knew what the data told it. If her father lost several hours to an eraser Macro, he would go to the ends of the earth to fill in the blanks. That had to be why he asked about the cached data.

And she’d told him exactly how to do it.

If Downing erased her father’s memory, it could only mean that he’d seen or done something that Downing needed to hide. If he really wanted to cover his tracks, Downing would’ve been watching her father’s movements very closely after giving him the Macro — perhaps obsessively. He’d do whatever it took to keep him from learning the truth, or more to the point, from spreading it.

And what about her mother? She always tried to temper her father’s knee-jerk reactions, especially his righteous indignation toward the Authority. He’d gone to them two or three times to warn of problems with the Dome but without her to calm him down, it might have been dozens. Assuming he told her about his missing hours, she would’ve wanted to keep him from doing something reckless.

It all led back to Downing. What was he trying to keep secret and why?

If her father had used his tablet to pull location data off his own CHIT, was there a chance that it was still there? If so, maybe she could find out exactly what he was doing in the FPC and where he was trying to go.

If Elle wouldn’t help Dek or Owen, then Tosh would do it herself. At least she’d managed to slip him the little device Owen gave her. Whatever it did, he seemed confident it would save him from the Box. She was out of time.

She badly wanted to tell Dek what Art shared with her and Owen about Hopper and the data supposedly stored in Owen’s DNA. But she still wasn’t sure if she believed it herself. Besides, if it was as important as Art said, she thought it best to keep it between her and Owen for now.

Elle came back for her after exactly five minutes and bade her to leave.

“Whatever you have planned, Dek, I sure hope you do it soon,” she whispered.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’m crafty.”

She said a tearful goodbye and stopped at the door, which Elle held open.

“It’s too bad those eraser Macros can’t go back further,” Tosh said quietly. “Because I’d like to forget I ever knew you.”

She brushed past Elle and made a beeline for Dek’s place.

Tosh discovered her father’s tablet behind one of the panels in Dek’s bedroom, right where he’d showed her earlier. A scanner, wires and all, was still connected to the bottom port. The screen had a small crack, but it otherwise seemed intact. The battery was long depleted but she didn’t need the tablet itself — she needed its memory.

Using her father’s old tools, she disassembled the tablet. Aside from a tiny cluster of circuitry, it was all screen. Using the wires from the scanner, she carefully connected her father’s dead tablet to Hideki’s functioning one, then navigated the dense web of submenus to enter diagnostic mode. A few lines of code later, the unencrypted location data opened like a book.

The next step was to load the data into her program that decoded the data and rendered 3D visuals. She opened the mapping program on Hideki’s tablet and pointed it to this new dataset, which included time and date tags.

She found the file tagged November 16, 2164 — four days before her parents disappeared. The day before he came to see her.

She felt a shot of adrenaline. She was looking through a digital window into a digital past where she had never dared venture.

Her father’s day seemed to begin with a trip to the FPC’s entrance. The little red dot traveled all the way around to the opposite side of the FPC’s ring, roughly underneath the Authority, and descended to the floor near the massive, translucent outline of the machine she guessed was the multimeal processor. It paused right next to it for a minute or so, moved very slightly toward it, and then a very peculiar thing happened.

It disappeared.

She advanced through the next hour in the timeline, during which her father’s dot remained offscreen like he’d vanished into thin air. But then, one hour and nine minutes after it disappeared, it reappeared in the exact same place. It paused just inside the main doors to the FPC, then briefly outside before returning home.

It didn’t make sense. How could he vanish for more than an hour, only to reappear in the same spot? The entire FPC had been emptied that morning and dozens, if not hundreds of workers saw her father go inside with Downing. What kind of repair could possibly require shutting down both the FPC and the Towers for that long?

The kind of repair that no one — not even a technician — could ever know about. The kind that led him to discover a nest of mice where none should exist.

As much as Tosh’s rebuke stung, she was right to say it. Elle had let Luther railroad her into this situation with Hideki and now she’d failed her old friend yet again with respect to Owen.

But just as troubling was Luther’s behavior in the wake of Tosh’s visit to the Nexus. Why would he try and wipe her memory if not to cover his own tracks? Now that Tosh had planted that seed of doubt, it grew quickly, fertilized by her growing suspicion of him.

After Tosh left, she got to work.

Contacting the Stores to get her hands on a Listener would’ve raised too many eyebrows, so she started looking for them. They were tiny — perhaps a millimeter across and embedded in ordinary objects like bolts or light fixtures. Elsewhere, they might appear as rivets or bumps on a textured surface. Once she started looking, she found almost two dozen in her own unit, including one right above the bed she occasionally shared with Luther. It was more than a little ironic.

The smooth black walls of the Nexus offered no nooks or crannies, nor did the touch screen of the access terminal. Everything else was submerged in coolant. She affixed it to the underside of the railing of the metal walkway and changed its geodata from dynamic to static, meaning that as far as IDA knew, the mic was still above her bed.