David Marusek: Mind Over Ship

“I wanted to know why you’d be willing to sell your company to Saul Jaspersen.”

“Jaspersen? I would never sell to him.” The sidebob agreed with the sim, and Andrea wiped them away.

“This doesn’t track,” she said. “Are you sure the pin came from Zoranna?”

From her hands to his, we’re highly confident of it .

Andrea sat back as her car crossed the Copper River Valley below. Count on Jaspersen to reside beyond the reach of modern infrastructure, nearly four hundred kilometers from the nearest Slipstream station in Wasilla. Knife-edge ridges plummeted to ice-carved gullies. Water seeped from every cranny. Everything below timberline was a deep, vital green. Few signs of humans, no roads or power lines, no towers or relay stations, no strip mines, no forest clearings, and no flat places for her car to put down in case of emergency. She fretted for the continued purr of its engines.

After a while the car left the wilderness and entered a busy traffic corridor in a narrow valley. The second six-month term inside the quarantine space elapsed with no sign of trouble.

“Can we communicate with my sim?” she asked.

Not without breaking quarantine .

Andrea wasn’t ready to do that, but neither could she let the mystery go. At the Wasilla tube station, she transferred from her taxi to her private Slipstream car. After the glory of the raw Alaskan landscape, the claustrophobic Slipstream tube was so bland that she returned to her always room. The room would make the four-hour trip tolerable at least, though her bones longed for the buoyant relief of her tank. “What if we went around the Jaspersen interface altogether and decoded and analyzed the pin ourselves?”

Assuming it didn’t blow up, it could take months of realtime to decrypt it in quarantine. It’s a very strong cipher .

“Can’t you use the E-Pluribus processors?”

That would require taking our quantum lattice off E-Pluribus preffing work and quarantining it. That could seriously disrupt our core business. Is your sense of danger that great?

“I don’t know. Better safe than sorry.”

If something went wrong, we could lose the processors .

“Better than losing everything.”

So E-P constructed a second quarantine space, this one containing an Andrea sim, the datapin clone, decoder algorithms, and three of the world’s most powerful quantum processors. The lights came up in E-Pluribus preffing suites all over the UD, and patrons were asked to stand by during technical difficulties.

THE CAR WAS approaching the Bay Area when the quarantined processors went into standby mode. That meant the cipher had been broken. One of the processors started up again as the Andrea sim inside the quarantine space analyzed the data on the pin.

Andrea, meanwhile, waited in her always room, taking comfort in its well-ordered space. Outside her window, the sun was already setting.

After a half hour of sporadic activity, the processor cycled off and on three times — her sim’s signal for all clear. At the same time she could feel the jostling of the Slipstream car as it rose from the intercontinental tube and joined the Bay Area traffic grid.

“Break quarantine and open a text channel to my proxy,” she said. Soon a message came through:

BOOBY TRAP SET FOR JASPERSEN, NOT US. CLUMSY,

LOW-TECH SLEIGHT-OF-HAND. DATAPIN FILLED WITH

PROPRIETARY FINANCIAL RECORDS,

AS JASPERSEN SIDEBOB SAID.

PAINTED FALSE PICTURE OF APPLIED PEOPLE

FINANCIAL WORTH MUCH ROSIER THAN JUSTIFIED.

APPLIED PEOPLE BARGAIN OF THE CENTURY.

NUMBERS RIGGED TO CHANGE BACK TO

AUDITED VALUES AFTER SALE COMPLETE

LEAVE NO TRACE OF DUPLICITY.

DIFFICULT FOR FORENSIC SLEUTH

TO PROVE OTHERWISE.

“Amazing,” Andrea said.

We agree , E-P said. Alblaitor thought she could sell Applied People to Jaspersen for far more than we would have paid, and it would have bankrupted him. Who knows, considering his lack of technical sophistication, it might have worked .

“All our careful planning upset by a simple bait and switch.”

Do you feel it safe now to reintegrate the processors into the E-Pluribus lattice?

Andrea thought about it. All her suspicions had melted away. There was no disconnect after all: Zoranna Alblaitor was acting true to her character. “Yes, it’s safe.”

She could feel the tube car’s deceleration, and her sense of satisfaction was increased by the knowledge that she was less than twenty minutes away from her tank. She was about to leave her always room when she heard a strange sizzling sound behind her. She turned to see a thin yellow stain creeping up a corner of the room and spreading out across the walls.

“What is that?”

We are under attack. We are analyzing its nature .

The stain quickly crisscrossed the walls and ceiling, covering everything in a slimy yellow crust. Even the windows clouded over. Andrea’s cheeks tingled, and her eyes itched, and she returned her POV to her Slipstream car afraid she’d find the real world also under attack. But all was normal inside her car. It was parked at a platform in the Oakland station. Commuters passed outside her windows.

“Give me a mirror!” she said, but no mirror opened. “Mirror! Mirror!” In desperation, she unlatched her pod harness and peered at her reflection in the window. No yellow streaks on her cheeks, though they burned. Nothing wrong with her eyes. A panic reaction?

“I’m going home,” she said, making her way to the car door. “E-P?”

The infection is within my mind. The datapin was merely a catalyst that crystallized trojan elements already in place. I have no ready defense. I must isolate my mind while I can .

“Wait!” Andrea called. She stumbled leaving the car and nearly fell on the platform. “Save the Oship clones!”

The teams aboard the ships have been independent since their creation. They are safe for now. I must go .

A pain greater than anything Andrea had ever experienced stabbed her in the head. When she looked again, she was sprawled on her back on the concrete floor. She had no idea where she was or how she had gotten there. Mechanical bees were swarming all around, and a man in a gummysuit like a stack of green jelly pillows was looming over her barking angry, meaningless words. She couldn’t make out what he wanted or why he was so angry. She sat up and shouted, “Go away!”

But the man didn’t go away; he came closer. Andrea brought her knees to her chest. Her knees were scraped and bleeding, but she hardly noticed. She made a fierce face at the horrible green pillow man and screamed, “Go away!”

After Mary’s last brainscan was complete, Meewee escorted her to the little room that had served as a ready room during their brief stay. The small facility had a provisional feel to it, as though it had been assembled for them alone and would be pulled apart once they left. Which Meewee suspected was probably the case.

Mary leaned on him as they shuffled along the corridor. “That was exhausting, so many memories. Did Ellen think that they were going to cure me?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

Inside the ready room, Ellen was on the floor crying while Cyndee and Georgine looked on impassively. They were further along than Mary and had not spoken during the entire three days of their stay. When Mary entered, Ellen got up and hugged her legs. Mary merely looked down at the girl. She had no comfort to give her.