Lawrence Watt-Evans: Realms of Light

“Done.”

“Recorded,” said the floater.

I could live with it. I’d get ’Chan and ourfather out, at least. And if I actually found the would-bekiller-well, five million is a lot of juice.

I was going to give this an honest try,anyway. If it didn’t run, well… I’d been broke before. And I’dhave ’Chan and my father out of Nightside City.

“All right,” I said, “Now tell me all aboutit. Someone tried to kill you?”

He told me.

I had time to think it over on the ride back toAlderstadt.

It was not going to be an easy job. Nakadahimself had already done the easy stuff, and it hadn’t worked.

The way it scrolled along was this: Someonehad turned the old man’s own personal com against him, in theNakada family compound itself. In his own bedroom, in fact. He hadbeen settling down for the night, about to jack in for a nicelittle dreamscape, when he decided to double-check the program.He’d already read out the schedule once, but on a whim, just alucky accident, he read it out again.

It was wrong. Instead of a sensible,conservative dream enhancer, the com was running a euthanasiaprogram. If he’d jacked in it would have quietly shut down hisautonomic nervous system. And when they found him in the morning itcould have been put down to wetware systems failure-old ageaffecting the brain, his body just giving out on him.

After all, he was two hundred and forty-oneyears old, he said, and at that age no one was really surprisedwhen even healthy people didn’t happen to wake up.

He’d shut the bedroom com off from the restof the household net immediately, of course, and used his personalimplants to analyze the programming. It was clever-the euthanasiaprogram was nested inside a worm that would control the entire unituntil he was dead, and would then shut itself down, turn controlback to the original program, and set markers so that the com’s owneveryday internal monitoring would wipe out all trace of the wormand its contents, just as if it were an ordinary bit of gritwarethat slipped in over the lines. The worm was started in the firstplace by his regular check of the night’s dream schedule.

If he hadn’t done the check over again afterthe worm had been invoked, or if the programmer had set the worm tohide its tracks even while it was actually running, he’d have goneto sleep and never woken up. Sweet and simple.

And it was on his own bedroom com. That comwas not on the planetwide nets. It wasn’t even on the internalcorporate nets that Nakada Enterprises ran. It was only hooked intothe family’s household net.

So only family members could get at it-intheory.

In practice, both the old man and I knewbetter than that. The household net wasn’t totally closed off; ithad links to the top-level corporate net, and that had links to allthe rest. All those links were heavily screened and firewalled,though. It would take phenomenal skill and planning to work intothat bedroom com from outside the household.

It wasn’t impossible, but it came close. Thatmeant the most likely explanation was that someone inside thefamily compound-which meant either a member of the family or one oftheir AIs-was responsible.

The next most likely was someone on the toplevel corporate net at Nakada Enterprises.

And so on, down through all the internalcorporate nets to the intercorporate net and finally the publicnet.

That was from the point of view ofopportunity; if you considered motive, then business rivals jumpedup the scale-but the family and the corporate insiders at Nakadastayed on it, too.

And if you considered means-who knew? Someonewho knew a lot about the old man’s personal com habits had designedthat little booby-trap, but that didn’t mean much.

It could be anybody.

Anybody, Grandfather Nakada thought, exceptme.

So I was going back to Alderstadt to cleanout my office-I was moving to American City for the duration ofthis case. The trip would give Nakada time to start the disksturning to get ’Chan and my father off Epimetheus. When I got backto American City and saw some proof that they were coming, I’dstart to work.

There wasn’t really much to clean out. Iduped my office software, and left one copy in Alderstadt, took onecopy with me. I’d already had my gun with me. I didn’t own all thatmuch else, in the way of external hardware-mostly just a set ofteacups my mother had left behind when she headed out, and a coupleof changes of clothing. The furniture was rented; it stayed.

I hadn’t made any close meatspace friendsduring my stay in Alderstadt. I’d gotten to know some of the localsoftware, and I said hello to some of the neighbors when I sawthem. There were a few people I chatted with over tea, and aroundthe corner, at Steranko’s, I called Ed the bartender by his firstname, but that was about it. No one would be heartbroken if I left.I didn’t know if I’d be back or not, so I didn’t say anygoodbyes.

I was on my way out the door when the combeeped. I wasn’t in that big a hurry; I turned and went back andsat down.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Mis’ Hsing,” said a synthetic voice.“There’s a problem.”

“Yeah?” I said again.

“Details cannot be given here, but you mustreturn to American City immediately.”

“I was planning to,” I told whatever it was.There was no visual.

“You must go to where you spoke to thefloater.”

“Got it,” I said, and signed off.

If whoever it was was being that mysterious,I didn’t want to ask any more questions. I didn’t need to, either.It meant that someone wanted to talk to me in private. Either itwas the old man, or one of his flunkies, or else the wholeinvestigation had already been blown. Whoever it was didn’t wantanything important to get out on the nets.

So it was back to the dressing room.

And a couple of hours later, there I was atthe clothier.

“Number Four,” I said. “I’msuperstitious.”

The entry clerk said, “I hope you’ll findsomething you like this time, Mis’.” I ignored the sarcasm,but decided this time I’d pick up a little something-maybe a videoscarf. If I was going to keep meeting here, I wanted to keep myhosts happy by buying a few things. I could even put them on theexpense account with a clear conscience.

“We’ve coded Number Four just for you,” theclerk said. “Will you be taking your floater in again?”

I looked up, and there was the blue andsilver floater, right behind me.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’ll tell the door,” the clerk said. “Youcan go right in.”

We went. The stardust still itched.“Privacy,” I ordered when we were inside. “And kill the display, Iwant to think.”

The booth obeyed. The screen over the doortold me we were private. I turned to the floater. “What’s up?” Iasked.

“Mis’ Yoshio Nakada would like to propose amodification of your agreement.”

“No,” I said.

It fizzed, then asked, “Don’t you want tohear what he’s suggesting?”

“No,” I said again.

It hung silently for a moment, mulling thatone over. With the privacy seal on it couldn’t ask anyone else tohelp it make up its mind, so it had to work the problem out foritself, and the neural net in a floater isn’t really made for thatsort of decision.

Eventually, though, it said, “I would like toask you to reconsider.”

“I don’t intend to modify the deal,” I toldit, “but we’re here, so what the hell, give me the read-out.”

That it could handle.

“Mis’ Nakada would greatly prefer to pay youthe five million credits now, in advance, and to bring SebastianHsing and Guohan Hsing from Epimetheus to Prometheus only after theinvestigation has been completed to Mis’ Nakada’ssatisfaction.”