Rook Winters - Weight of Ashes

“It’s definitely Aldebaran tech,” Polk said. “An encrypted personal data vault. Very short range signal, so hard to detect if you don’t know it’s there. It uses a standard handshake but requires a decryption key.”

“Can we brute force it?” Marsh asked.

“Just a moment. Let me check the specifications.” Polk tapped and swiped on one of his many displays. “No, it says here that it makes you wait longer between every failed attempt, maxing out at one attempt per day. Huh, it says that you can request unencrypted metadata. That’s unusual. Let me try that.”

Walker understood the individual words they were saying but was missing the meaning of the conversation. Too self-conscious of his ignorance to say anything, he tried to look like he was following along but Marsh wasn’t fooled. He said to Walker, “We can’t read what’s on the data chip unless we can figure out the combination of letters and numbers to unlock it. And if we guess wrong too many times, we have to wait twenty-four hours between guesses.”

Walker nodded to acknowledge that he understood.

“Well, now, this is interesting. Unencrypted metadata isn’t part of any standard protocols but this could be a clue to the key.” Polk tapped on the screen and Marsh leaned in to read it.

“C-H-E-R-I-C-I-T-R-U-S.” Marsh ran his fingers through his beard as he considered the word. “Che-ricit-rus. Che-ric-itus. Che-ri-citrus. Oh, it’s cheri citrus. Of course. I wonder… How long does the decryption key have to be?”

“It depends. A lot of human encryption technology is long past obsolete but a personal device like this would use a human-friendly key, something a human could type or speak.”

“Like the words to a song?”

“Yes, it could be something like that. The length of the key would depend on how paranoid the person is and how good their memory is.”

“Are you saying that cheri citrus makes sense to you?” Walker asked.

“It took me a moment but I think it’s a reference to an old joke Clint and I had with a friend of ours when we were in school. A woman named Sofia. She desperately wanted to work in space. She had her heart set on low gravity research. We used to tease her about leaving us behind. We made up our own words to the song Oh My Darling Clementine. Cheri citrus has got to be a reference to that. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“It’s worth a try if you’re confident. You don’t want to make a bunch of wild guesses.”

“How much of the song would it need?”

“How much is there?”

“Not a lot, although remembering it after fifty years will be the trick. Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling, Clementine…” Marsh spoke the words but was clearly struggling. “I might need to sing it.”

Polk’s wide eyes matched the bemusement that Walker felt as Marsh started to sing.

“That is a first,” Polk said through a wide grin. “I’ve helped a lot of folks with a lot of problems over the years but no one’s ever sung to me before. I recognize the tune. There have been some lewder versions of it in my tavern.”

“Did it work?” Walker asked.

“We’ll need to type the lyrics in first. The clue is in uppercase with no spaces and no punctuation so I’m guessing that’s how we type it in. Can you repeat the words slowly?”

Marsh half spoke and half sang the ditty a second time.

“Here goes nothing.” Polk tapped several times on a screen. Nothing moved. No lights flashed. There was no audible signal of success or failure.

“What’s it doing?” Walker asked.

“It didn’t work. It’s possible the vault is damaged but just as likely that it simply doesn’t acknowledge a failed attempt.”

“That’s inconvenient,” Marsh said.

“To us maybe but think about how you’d feel with a chip embedded in your bone. You don’t want it being chatty with malicious devices. Someone sits down beside you on a transport and locks you out of your own data vault by silently bombarding it with bad decryption keys?”

“But what about the metadata? If the device responds to metadata pings, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of not responding?”

“Like I said, that part’s not standard. I can only tell you what I’m seeing and what the specifications say.”

“How do you even have the specifications for something like this?” Walker asked. This world was foreign to him but he understood enough to find it suspicious that Polk had so much conveniently at his disposal.

Marsh elbowed him roughly, and he had to suppress a grunt.

“Listen, kid, I can see your grandpa hasn’t clued you in to what you’re involved with here but I’m giving you one warning. I make things happen that otherwise don’t happen easily. Have you studied any chemistry?”

“A bit.”

“You know what a catalyst is?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I am. And my work affords me some privileges and access. And like a catalyst, I’m a constant while the things around me react and change. That requires discretion. My means and my sources are private and will stay that way. And once you walk out my door, you were never here. Do you understand that?”

Polk’s tone was soft and his words were mild. The threat was in those tiny eyes that projected menace with the subtlest narrowing of the lids.

Walker gave a single bow of his head. The air suddenly felt thicker, and the walls seemed to draw closer. Walker wanted out of the room.

“I got the words wrong,” Marsh blurted. “We didn’t sing dreadful thought, dear Clementine. We used to say going to miss you, Clementine.”

Polk tapped the new words into a tablet and waited.

“Ah, here we go.”

“The governor called for me,” Kane said to the human receptionist. She was pretty, although far too young for him. Not that it mattered. Fate held no pairing off option for him.

“You can suit up and I’ll check with the boss.”

“How’s the mood?”

“I don’t know. You’re the first human today.”

“Sour split. Just my luck.”

“The governor ate not long ago so it should be in gentle spirits.”

A door to his left was marked with the silhouette of a human. Inside, a variety of ambassadorial suits hung sterilized and ready for use. He found one labeled LARGE and pulled it on. These suits used to be tight in the chest and loose in the belly on him. He noticed today that it felt a little snug everywhere.

He swiped the panel on the left forearm of the suit and it dinged after completing a self-diagnostic test. Kane set its emotion-to-temperature conversion sensitivity to its lowest setting and pressed his palm on a wall panel where a virtual READY button pulsed green.

Alien sounds came through a speaker which his suit translated for him. Inside his helmet, a synthetic voice said, “Kane, you will wait for many seconds. You may sit if you desire.”

Modern translation systems had a large catalogue of generic synthesized human voices so that humans could differentiate between individual Qyntarak in group conversations. The computer would normally decide on the appropriate voice to use for each speaker, but the most elite Qyntarak members were assigned dedicated voices in all translation systems by law.