The day got off to a bad start when I put my wife’s MemriDrops in my eyes. At least, technically she’s still my wife. I guess I should call her my soon-to-be-ex-, but that sounds as bad as it feels.
Mornings have never been my thing, and with Marion’s departure I find it hard enough to get to sleep at night, let alone climb out of bed in the morning. You know how it feels when you try to sleep in, only to discover that once you’ve prodded yourself out of bed, you can’t really get moving? That’s how it is with divorce. The more time I pretend to sleep, the less I’m required to be awake—which is a good thing, especially because, all too often, there doesn’t seem to be much of anything worth doing when I’m awake. Which is a separate problem, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
Even though they must have been nearing expiration, the ’Drops firmed up into contact lenses just fine. But I was slow to realize they were the wrong lenses. Halfway downstairs, I started getting that stepping-off-a-curb feeling that comes when your eyes insist your legs are three inches too short.
In the kitchen, the AutoPot was perking, so I thought I’d wake myself a bit before dealing with the eyes. Bad idea. My arms didn’t feel any closer to the right length than my legs, and I wound up spilling the pot’s contents all over the counter in an overshoot/undershoot effort to hit the mug. It might have been comical if all that hot coffee hadn’t trickled down and caught me where it really hurts.
There’s one good thing about pain: it wakes you up even better than caffeine. I yelled, cursed, and with remarkable accuracy for a man whose depth perception wasn’t working, turned and threw the mug through the vidscreen, where a perky newscaster with a voice too similar to Marion’s was reciting today’s pinpoint forecast. “On the West Side, the waterfront will see brief showers at 9:15, 11:20, and 12:45—” she managed to say before my lucky shot found its mark, terminating not only her broadcast, but my favorite mug and a bunch of electronics I could ill afford to replace.
“Damn you, Marion!” I roared into the silence. “Why didn’t you take those stupid ’Drops when you took everything else?”
Another problem with divorce is you think everything’s a conspiracy. Professionally, I’ve dealt with enough divorces to know all about that, but for the moment I was sure Marion had left the ’Drops as a booby trap and was now sniggering at me for breaking the vid.
Meanwhile, my own ’Drops were in the medicine cabinet and my vision wasn’t going to improve on its own. I stumbled upstairs and rummaged for a bottle of Erasure. Even the big print on the label was hard to read, but I was awake enough now to find the right bottle by shape, without compounding my problems by squirting something nasty into my eyes, like rubbing alcohol or sunscreen.
When I could see again, I located my own ‘Drops—and chose the Baby Blues, whose bottle, I realized, was the same color as Marion’s.
And suddenly I knew why she’d left it. A few years ago she’d gone on a togetherness binge and matched several of my eyeshades, with the idea it made us look more like a couple. I’d thought it silly, but that’s the way I’ve always been about most of that “togetherness” stuff. She was a romantic; I’m strictly utilitarian. I’ve got a variety of eyeshades, but all for practical purposes. Today, I wanted the Baby Blues because the rent was due and I needed that frank, innocent gaze when I begged for Extension.
Sadly, the rent wasn’t my only problem. If someday soon I didn’t come up with enough to pay my lawyer’s retainer, Marion would clean me out and the rent nano wouldn’t be the only one to come home to roost in ways that might almost make me wish I’d just poured bleach in my eyes and gotten it over with.
Still, the rent was today’s concern. A few minutes later my landlord proved it by intercepting me on my doorstep.
“Sorry, Trevor,” I said, practicing my innocent gaze. I’d planned on calling him for an appointment later in the day, but I already know my spiel. “I’m expecting a nice fee, but it’s been delayed. Can you give me a week’s Extension?” Actually, I’d not seen a paying client in a fortnight, but a week was the most I could ask for with a straight face. In the back of my mind, I was trying to remember the terms of my lease. Landlord/tenant law requires the enforcement nano to be non-lethal and non-maiming, but that leaves a lot of room for unpleasantness. When I’d accepted it, I’d been more than marginally solvent. Marion was a computer tech whose career seemed immune to the forces that had ruined my own, and I hadn’t paid much attention to the fine print. If I were lucky, I’d simply agreed to turn blue or have “deadbeat” appear on my forehead in neon tones. But I might have accepted a month of diarrhea, an ugly skin disease, narcolepsy, Tourette’s syndrome, or any of a host of other legally permissible ailments that merely make you wish you could die. Too bad Trevor hadn't insisted that Marion accept the nano, too, because now she was the one with the money while I was the one stuck with the nano. It wasn’t fair—but who’s ever seen a divorce that was?
Trevor had chosen a stern, dark look: his bill-collector persona. Actually, he’s a pussycat who’s given me a lot of slack, but he has his own nanos to tend to, and property taxes were due sometime soon. Getting the government to give you Extension is damn near impossible.
“Blast it, Alex,” he said. “You know I like you, but I need the rent. Preferably on time.”
I shrugged. “Tell that to my client. I gave him Extension, but that means I need it from you.” A total fabrication, but I was getting desperate. What had been in that rent nano?
Trevor was still trying for stern, but I could see the softness around the edges. “Come on,” I wheedled. “Just a week.”
“Twenty-four hours.”
“Five days?”
“Three.”
“Four?”
Sometimes, I push too hard. It was one of the things Marion complained about. “Three,” Trevor said. “And count yourself lucky.” He tapped a trio of triangular pills from a packet labeled Rent Extensions and slid them into a pill-sized envelope. It amazes me that he dispenses Extension this way, rather than just reprogramming the nanos with a code-locked scanner. Maybe he doesn’t trust scanners, even though they’re pretty much the same devices the bank uses when you log a payment. Or maybe he’s just old-fashioned. After all, he’s willing to visit tenants in person, rather than hiding behind a rental agency that would never give even a day’s Extension.
Briefly I wondered how many pills were in his packet and what would happen if someone got really desperate. Then I decided it didn’t matter because the number was finite and eventually the clock would run out. Still, I wouldn’t flash something like that around when rents were due. Maybe it’s just my profession that makes me cynical, but Trevor is too trusting.
I started to thank him, but he interrupted. “I mean it,” he said. His normally open face clenched and I realized that even pussycats have limits. “Don’t even think about trying to tell me you lost one. Three days, or you can just rot.”
Not rot in hell. Rot. As in a literal threat. Had Trevor once talked rich, complacent me into some kind of flesh-eater? Perhaps because he knew he was a pussycat and needed a big gun to back up threats he didn’t want to enforce? The worst of those were reserved for the IRS, but commercial ones could be pretty nasty—muscle atrophiers, rashes that deprived you of a month’s sleep. Gads, the prospects were endless.
My office is a dive. Once upon a time, I had digs in the financial district, back when I was a junior partner in the law firm of Lorencz Biggle Tracy & Epstein. My 43rd-floor window office had been only a mile from here on the map, but infinitely removed in the hierarchy of what-you-can-afford. Now Alexander Copley, Private Investigator, operates out of a hole-in-the-wall in Old Town, domain of drunks, derelicts, and druggies.
Ours is one of several cities whose Old Towns boast of being the original Skid Row. Here, in the ancient logging capital of the Northwest, the term had a literal meaning: Skid Road was where timber was “skidded” into the river to be lashed into rafts for shipment downstream. Today, rather than being an embarkation point, it’s where everything fetches up when it hits bottom, including yours truly. Rents are low, nanos mild to nonexistent, and if there’s any mystique to being a PI, having your office in the most disreputable part of town doesn’t hurt.
The first order of business was caffeine. I scooped a healthy dose of instant coffee into a mug—no fancy AutoPot for the office—added water, and popped it into my economy microwave: you know, one of the mini- ones that convenience stores use to nuke stale hamburgers into a semblance of edibility. Mine wasn’t a whole bunch cleaner than those in the convenience stores. Someday, I really should do something about that, but I figure that each time I turn it on, the radiation kills anything nasty growing inside. Or maybe I’m creating mutant superbugs that will someday take over the world. As far as I’m concerned, they can have it. Let them deal with the nanos.
I should have seen the writing on the wall when I read about the first nanocontracts in the Bar Journal, but who in their right mind would put their bodies up as collateral?
People take worse risks with loan sharks, though, and nanotech is a lot more respectable. Suddenly you couldn’t even get a charge card without a nano. The first profession to suffer were bail bondsmen. Who needs bail if suspects can simply be given a nano nasty enough to guarantee they’ll show up in court? For the same reason, prisons needed fewer guards.
Soon, civil lawyers were also feeling the pinch. Nanocontracts still leave room for squabbling, but unless a court intervenes and orders Extension, they’d better be brief squabbles. Not the type that make attorneys rich. Then the insurance lobby pushed through the Tort Reform Nanobot Bill, which required plaintiffs to accept a nano before filing suit. Anyone could still have their day in court, but if you didn’t win, you didn’t receive the antidote. Frivolous lawsuits weren’t the only ones to disappear—and with them went the bread-and-butter work of defense attorneys like me.
By the time Lorencz Biggle, etc., were showing me the door, I was even hearing of nano-wills in which heirs had to take nanos before the reading of the will. Those who declined waived their inheritance; the rest could only obtain Release by agreeing not to contest the will. It was brutal but effective, and suddenly another class of attorneys was out of business.
In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the moneylender Shylock makes a loan to a man he despises. There are many things he could have sought as collateral, but what he wants is the option to extract a pound of flesh from the debtor’s chest. The borrower, secure in a successful business, accepts this barbaric term, but ships sink and Shylock forecloses. Then, at the last moment, he is stymied by the fact that his contract said nothing about blood. He can seize his pound of flesh, but if he sheds one drop of blood in the process, he will be charged with murder.
What Shylock needed were nanos. Off-the-shelf varieties aren’t that nasty, but custom jobs can do just about anything. Fatal flesh-eaters are illegal except as bail for violent felonies, but if you’re stupid enough to accept one, you’re going to be more interested in getting the antidote than reporting it. Today, anyone with the money for black-market nanos can be Shylock.
Waiting for the water to heat, I scooped old mail from the table where I’d deposited it yesterday, flipped junk mail into the trash, and tried to decide whether to open the telephone statement. At least it didn’t involve nanos. I’d opted for the pre-pay alternative, but that still gives the phone company plenty of leverage with the old-fashioned threat of simply turning off the service.
My PI business had never turned a profit. The sad fact was that two out of every three attorneys were out of work and I wasn’t the only one thinking that years of trial preparation might have taught me something about investigation. My main hope was that if I waited long enough, most of the competition would starve out.
Still, I hadn’t been losing a lot of money, so when necessary, I’d made it up from Marion’s and my savings. Then she moved out. A week later, irony of ironies, she hired a hotshot attorney who froze the savings account so I couldn’t spend any more of it until she got her share. If my own attorney was as good as he claimed, some of that money would eventually be mine, but it would be a long fight and meanwhile I was living hand-to-mouth.
Pretty soon, I’d have to take the first of Trevor’s little pills. In theory, I could hire someone to reverse-engineer the fulfillment code and make as many as I wanted—in Old Town, you can find people with some pretty arcane skills. It’s another reason Trevor is too trusting. But if I had the money for that, I could pay the rent, so why bother? And there are some nasty rumors about what happens when fake Extension meets a nano that can tell the difference.
Better would be to delay taking the first pill as long as I dared, then stretch the interval between them, hoping there was enough safety margin to gain me an extra day or so. I was getting desperate enough I might actually try it.
I swiveled my chair, ignoring its squeak of protest. If I ever get rich, I’ll buy a new one, but that’s not exactly a high priority. Leaning back, I propped my feet on the bookcase that doubled as a credenza and stared through what passed for my window on the world.
It really was a window, although the little daylight it yielded came from a ventilation shaft that provided even less ventilation than light. What it did offer was a view of the opposite wall, built eons ago of honest-to-goodness bricks. If we ever get the earthquake the doomsayers fret about, all those bricks will probably peel off and tumble below in a giant pile that will make me glad I’m on the fourth floor, even if half the time I have to walk up because the elevator’s on the fritz or just too damn slow. Life sucks, but hey, if it all comes crashing down, I’d rather be on top of the pile than under it.
Some people work crossword puzzles when they have nothing better to do. Me, I count bricks. The trick is to get the same number twice in a row. Some days, I can kill hours before I manage it. Yesterday, I’d tallied 413 on the first attempt and 415 on the second before getting two repeats of 416. Today I had a slightly different angle, so the number would be different.
I was on my third recount—something on the order of 435 seemed to be today’s tally—when there came a knock on the door.
I don’t get many visitors. Most of my clients are referred by Lorencz Biggle, where a few of the survivors do what they can to help keep me from starving. But those referrals are always preceded by phone calls, and the phone hadn’t been disconnected—yet. This had to be someone who’d tracked me down from what little advertising I could afford.
Walk-ins rarely amounted to much, but still, it paid to look like I had other work.
“Just a moment,” I called.
I scritched my chair back into alignment with the desk, woke up the computer, and was pulling a couple of files from a drawer when my client lost patience and walked in.
My first thought was that she looked out of place—and not just because she was a she. Plenty of women venture into Old Town, though usually not in snappy business suits or carrying those discreetly elegant attaché cases that are the first and most useless purchases of on-the-make junior attorneys.
Even in the financial district, her attire would have rung false. I’d served a stint on Lorencz Biggle’s hiring committee, and there’s a big difference between the jobseeker and the jobholder. This woman had dressed to impress, but the jacket, blouse, and black leather pumps were no more natural to her than being in Old Town. The ensemble was too perfect—as though she’d gotten it from a store clerk whose idea of lawyers was based solely on vid shows—but her hair flowed across her shoulders in a fetching style that mixed poorly with the crisp formality of her wardrobe. She was older than my fledgling attorneys—somewhere in her thirties, with body language that spoke of self-assurance, and poise that clashed with the job-interview attire.
Whatever she normally did, she’d been doing it long enough to take it for granted that she was good at it, but the business power suit wasn’t part of it. I wondered why she felt the need to impress the likes of me. Not that I was in a position to be picky.
“Mr. Copley?” Her voice was another conundrum: crisp, self-assured, polite—but, like the hair, too feminine for executive-standard. I was reminded of Marion’s computer-geek friends, happiest in blue jeans and running shoes, but sometimes forced into greater formality for a wedding or the theater. She was rather pretty in a dark-skinned brunette manner—which, I admit, has always been my type.
I pushed aside the still-unopened files in a move I hoped rang more true than her attire. “Call me Alex.”
Her handshake was firm but damp, producing an odd, almost electric tingle as our flesh met. Highly disconcerting. Was I so starved for female attention that a handshake was giving me the shivers? I suppressed an urge to wipe my palm on my pants leg, and gradually the tingle diminished. “What can I do for you?”
“I have a problem,” she said, “but first, what’s your billing rate?”
It’s one of those things people usually wonder about, though normally they’re not so forthright. Again, I sized up the power suit and attaché case. Whatever message she intended to convey, she was making no effort to look poor.
“I usually charge $195 per hour plus expenses. But I can come down a bit for an interesting case.”
It was one of those great lines that’s sort-of true. That had been my minimum rate in my Lorencz Biggle days, and I’d done a lot more billing then than now, so the “usually” was almost accurate. Almost being the operative word. It was also the type of figure that ought to impress someone masquerading as a high-priced whatever-she-thought-she-was. Early in my PI days, I’d learned that you can more easily lose a client by citing a too-low rate than a too-high one because it makes them think you’re incompetent. When they gasp and start for the door, you can always offer a discount. Then they think you’re being generous.
But my visitor merely gazed at me. Her eyes swept the office, taking in the desk, the unopened folders, the brick-view window. When she looked back, I’d have sworn she was puzzled. “Really?” She looked around again. “Even in today’s economy?”
She had me with that one. But her attire said money wasn’t an object to her, so I wasn’t going to let it stand in my way, either. “Yes.”
For a PI, lying is an important job skill. It’s not that I’m inherently dishonest; it’s just that sometimes it pays to preserve wriggle room. But now, my cheeks burned and I found myself sweating.
She smiled tightly. “I don’t think so. Could you work for, say $95 per hour?”
“That’s kind of low,” I said, but the sweating and blushing continued.
“In fact, I bet you’d work for $45.”
This was the oddest negotiation I’d ever been part of. When she’d suggested $95, my heart had leapt because I’d figured we’d wind up somewhere in the middle, and if the job was big enough to be worth haggling about, it was going to be enough for me to deal with Trevor and the phone company and a few other things, as well. Offering $95, then dropping yet again was the weirdest tactic I’d ever heard of.
“That’s really low,” I said.
“But would you do it?”
I gulped. How could I get her back into triple digits? “No,” I said, and again found myself blushing and sweating.
“I thought so.” She made it sound as though I’d accepted. “But I’ll give you $1,600 a day, with the understanding that overtime is on you. No nanos, though. I’d rather do it the old-fashioned way.”
I nodded encouragingly. In theory, an exchange of nanos would work to both our benefits, forcing me to perform and her to pay. But unless you want to go completely black market, there end up being records of payments, extensions, and releases. She wouldn’t be the first client to prefer cash.
“No problem, but I’ll need an advance.”
“Of course. What do you say to a week’s pay as a retainer, with additional installments as you do the work?”
What I’d say was something on the order of “Halleluiah!” but I wanted to preserve what was left of my dignity. “That sounds fair,” I said, and for once, I didn’t blush.
“More than fair, since you would have taken $45. But before I tell you how I know that, how good are you at keeping secrets?”
“Very.” That’s something else that comes with the Lorencz Biggle background. Every attorney learns early on the importance of client trust.
Again, she made me feel as though I were under a microscope. Then she smiled, and for a moment, I might have been seeing a trace of whatever lay behind the falsely corporate exterior. Something warmer and a bit more playful. Or maybe she was just happy she could trust me—though I was baffled why she believed that when she hadn’t believed the $95. Maybe she was simply a nice girl, about to get divorced and tired of acting tough. Yeah, right. A rich nice girl, looking for a way to stick it to her husband. Then I squelched the thought. I couldn’t afford to cast my only client in Marion’s image.
Divorces are another arena in which lawyers have suffered: nanos add new meaning to the term “iron-clad prenuptial.” But in many cases, all that’s done is shift the battleground from the lawyer’s office to the streets. To the extent I have a bread-and-butter business, it’s staking out soon-to-be-divorced husbands or wives in the hope of finding evidence for a court order neutralizing the nuptial nano. It’s easy work because cheating spouses can be incredibly sloppy. Maybe tempting fate is part of the lure or maybe they’re like teenagers and really don’t think anything nasty could happen to them. Either way, it’s fun to watch their faces when they’re confronted with the evidence and realize they have old-fashioned, expensive legal fights on their hands. Just like I do, though in my case it’s because Marion’s and my marriage predated nanos.
“Anything you tell me is completely confidential,” I added.
“I know.” The smile vanished and she was again the faux-whatever. She snapped open her briefcase and pulled out a prepaid credit chit. “Is your computer set to read these?”
“Yes. But don’t you want to tell me what this is about, first?”
“Not until I have you on retainer. Just in case you were playing word games with me about confidentiality.” She gave me the barest hint of the smile. “Like you must have been about your ‘usual’ fee.”
I logged onto the banking web, then let her plug the chit into my computer’s credit-acceptance slot. She used her own keypad to authorize the deduction from what must have been a sizeable balance, and milliseconds later, $11,200 was in my account.
“That’s seven days,” she said. “Until this is over, you’re working for me every day. Report at least once a week, never lie to me again, and you get another week in advance each time, until we’re done or one or the other of us gives up. If, after I’ve explained it, you don’t want the case, you can return the retainer—minus a suitable sum for the next few minutes. Are you okay with that?”
I nodded, mesmerized by that $11,200 figure and the thought of more, just like it. “Normally, the consultation’s free,” I managed to say.
“That’s okay. It’s worth it just to find out how you fooled me. Now, tell me, how can $195 be your ‘usual’ fee, when I know you’d take a lot less?”
I thought about trying to dodge the question, but she had me thoroughly unnerved. Besides, with money in the bank, I could afford to be at least vaguely honest.
“Prior life,” I said.
She nodded as though that made perfect sense. “It had to be something like that.”
“So what’s this about?”
She leaned forward in my guest chair and tugged her skirt down toward her knees—one of those “modest” gestures that have the reverse effect of drawing attention to itself. I’ve never been sure whether women know this, and on the off chance they don’t, I’ve never wanted to be the one to enlighten them. With difficulty, I prized my gaze back to her face and waited for her to begin.
“My name is Megan Fordham,” she said. She pronounced it Mee-gan. “I work for a small nanotech company: an outfit called SNS. Once upon a time, that meant Southern NanoSystems, Inc., but now it’s just SNS. Unless you’re an industry insider, I doubt you’ve ever heard of us.”
I shook my head. Nano-providers are like chip manufacturers. There are a few big ones and a host of little ones.
“We make custom nanos,” she continued. “Suppose you wanted one that would produce the symptoms of poison oak. Not just some generic itch, but honest-to-goodness poison oak, medically indistinguishable from the real thing. Why, I haven’t a clue, but we’re the type of company you’d turn to.
“A couple of years ago, we began experimenting with highly time-sensitive nanos: ones you might give to chronically late employees to get them to work on time. The idea was that each time they came to work, they’d use a device like a time clock to reset their nanos for next time. We actually had an asthma nano that worked nicely—you’d start wheezing within about five minutes of schedule. But we never figured out what to do about sick days. Sure, you could use a remote reset for anyone who called in sick—just like the scans the banks use when you pay your mortgage at an ATM . . .”
She continued talking, but her mention of mortgages had reminded me of Trevor. Soon, I either needed to get to an ATM myself or take one of his pills. Briefly, I took inventory of my body. Nothing itched. Nothing ached that didn’t normally ache. For the moment I seemed okay, and I really didn’t want to start gobbling Extension in her presence.
Luckily, another of my skills is tuning out without letting anyone realize it, and I didn’t appear to have missed much.
“. . . not really ill?” she was saying.
The question appeared to be rhetorical, so I grunted and, reassuringly, she continued. “That was the end of that project. But it got us thinking. Was there a way to differentiate phony sick calls from the real thing? When the body is under pressure, it makes chemicals called stress proteins. It also produces various neurological responses, all chemically triggered.
“It didn’t take long to realize we were onto something a lot more valuable than a tardiness nano. What our research was leading to was a lie detector that could be linked to any effectuator we wanted. Combined with an asthma nano, for example, it’s a pretty powerful incentive to tell the truth. The version you got simply makes it easy to tell when someone isn’t.”
“Wait a second. Are you saying you slipped me a nano?”
She ducked her head but didn’t look particularly repentant. “Yeah, I know it’s illegal. The nanos were on my hand when you shook it, and enough to do the job were in your bloodstream by the time you said hello. Want to give back my money?”
“Not yet.”
“I didn’t think so. Besides, what the law is really concerned about is giving harmful nanos without permission. This one didn’t hurt you. All it did was make you flush. I know I told you not to, but go ahead, tell me a lie.”
“Such as?”
“Anything. Tell me it’s raining.”
“It’s pouring.” I said it as calmly as possible, but sweat broke out on my forehead, and again I felt my cheeks redden. “Wow. How long does it last?”
“The flush? Only a few seconds. The nano itself wears off in a few hours, though we could have made it last forever.”
“So you’re telling me you’ve developed a nano-based truth serum.”
“Not a truth serum. A lie detector. A truth serum would force you to speak. This merely shows when you’re lying. And it’s not perfect. A good liar can hide parts of the truth without triggering it—as you did when you told me about your ‘usual’ billing rate. And if you really believe the moon is made of green cheese, it’s going to register as truth. It’s probably also useless on pathological liars.”
“That’s all very interesting, but what’s it got to do with me?”
“I was getting to that.” She tugged again at the skirt, though as far as I could tell, she was showing no more leg than before. “Our lead scientist is Darryl Marnier.” She pronounced the first name as Darr’l and the last in the French manner, as Mar-nee-ay. Must be a Southern thing, though for all I knew, the “southern” in SNS meant California. “Or maybe I should say he was our lead scientist. He’s vanished. I’m hoping you can track him down.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, thinking about the nano and what I could and could not get away with promising. I’d done my share of missing persons work, but it was mostly heir searches or hunts for runaway kids—depressing work because all too often I wasn’t doing the parents any favor. Hi, here’s your drug addict back. You owe me another $500. See you again, next time she runs away. Contrary to what you see on the vid, PIs don’t get many chances to hunt for adults who want to stay disappeared.
Still, how hard could it be? It’s almost impossible to live without generating a gazillion electronic footprints. With the nano reading my mood, though, I didn’t want to sound too optimistic.
Fortunately, uh-huh appeared to be truthful enough.
She paused a heartbeat, then continued. “I’m worried about him. We were coworkers and . . . friends.” She blushed, and I realized that the nano must work both ways. How intriguing. She tugged yet again at the skirt and I decided not to embarrass her by pressing for details. Senior researcher Darryl. Beautiful whatever-she-was. I could connect the dots. I’d seen it often enough in my divorce work.
“Married?” I asked.
She looked puzzled. “No. I’m single.”
“Not you. Him.”
She shook her head. “I told you, we were just friends.” But she blushed again, and sweat was beading her brow. I tried to feel sympathy, but having been the victim of the truth gizmo, what I felt was vicious delight. Still, she was paying me a lot of money, so I again let her off the hook.
“What I meant was, is there anyone other than you who’d miss him?”
She was still blushing, but composed herself nicely. “Well, the whole company does. That’s why I’m here. The project can’t proceed without him, and the president, Graham”—she pronounced it Gram—”figured I’d be extra-motivated to find him.” The blush deepened and I wondered why she didn’t just come out and tell me they were lovers. Did she really think I’d care?
“But you already have a perfectly good truth nano.”
“Sure. And we can clone as much of it as we want. But Darryl never made an antidote and wherever he went, he took his lab notes with him.”
“Why don’t you just reverse engineer an antidote?”
“Because Darryl used a 96-bit encryption code.” She read my look, sighed, and leaned back. “Look, you know how nanos work, right? Each has two codes, one for Extension, the other for Fulfillment. Sometimes three, if it’s for a recurring obligation that you want to be able to reset without terminating.”
“Like a rent nano,” I said, my mind again wandering to Trevor’s little envelope.
“Right.” She hesitated, probably trying to assess how stupid I was.
I tried to look smart, but in her field, the answer undoubtedly was very dumb.
“Most nanos use a 24-bit code,” she said. “That means there are about 16 million possibilities—good enough for most uses, but not for something you really, really want to protect. Darryl’s code allows something like 1020 times as many possibilities. It would take forever to reverse engineer.”
“So you’re saying the nano’s worthless without the code?”
“No. There are uses for which an antidote isn’t necessary. We were going to call our product the NanoGraph and start by test-marketing it as a replacement for the polygraph. But our first big market would have been for trials. You know, ‘I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—’”
“‘—so help me, nano.’”
Again, a hint of the smile softened the corners of her mouth. “Something like that. You were a lawyer. You can see the value of it.”
I certainly could. Lying witnesses are one of the banes of the profession. Though sadly, a truth nano would put yet more lawyers (and PIs) out of business, because you wouldn’t need as much trial preparation. On cross-examination, you could do a lot with a single, all-purpose question: Is there anything important you failed to mention?
“So why do you need Darryl?” I hated to ask—what if I talked her out of hiring me?—but the more I understood, the better were my chances of finding him.
“You mean why do I want the antidote?” No trace of a blush. Either the nano was already wearing off, or she’d worded the answer carefully enough to steer it away from whatever extracurricular relationship they might have had. “It’s not needed for formal settings like polygraphs or trials. But there are a lot of . . . let’s call them informal settings, in which it would be nice if the questioner were more free to . . . tweak . . . the truth—and where the nano might have to be administered in ways that make it likely both people would be infected.”
“Like you and me?”
“Among others.” She didn’t say police interrogations, but it didn’t take much imagination to see how much the police might love such a thing. Would it be permissible under the Fifth Amendment? An effective, painless lie detector would raise interesting questions about why we have a right against self-incrimination. It’s one thing to let the guilty clam up because we don’t want the police beating confessions out of those who might be innocent. But do criminals really need an absolute right to their secrets? Part of me—the part that had been tricked into revealing my lowest, cut-rate fee—thought privacy was important. But another part liked the idea of being able to probe other people’s secrets. And with the nano, you could ask at random whether people were terrorists or child molesters and immediately catch the ones who were.
“So why not just redesign it with different codes?” I asked.
Her sigh suggested that I’d fallen on the technological-intelligence scale from very dumb to whatever lies below. “That’s not possible. Nanos are comprised of two pieces: the detector and the effectuator. On most, the detector’s not much more than a molecular clock, but for security reasons, you always make sure that it and the fulfillment codes are inextricably linked. That way, someone can’t just clone your nano and peel off the codes. Unfortunately, it also means you can’t peel off the detector from the codes. With the NanoGraph, the detector’s the important part, and only Darryl knows how it works. Bottom line: you can modify the effectuator all you want, but you have to know the codes to do anything else.”
Megan and I had a lot more details to go over, but there was one question she would be expecting me to ask, whether I wanted to or not. “Why me? There are a lot of other PIs out there.”
“What makes you think you’re the first I tried? Maybe you’re just the first to meet my requirements.”
“And those are?”
“Oh, several. You came well recommended.”
I made a mental note to thank Lorencz Biggle.
“You’re a smooth talker, but not so smooth you can evade the nano. Also, I know you really will keep things confidential. You wouldn’t believe how many of your competitors flunked that one. Maybe they just blab to their wives or girlfriends, but I’d rather they didn’t. As I understand it, you have neither, right?”
“Correct,” I said, then remembered the nano. “Well technically, I’m still married. But we’re not on ‘blabbing’ terms.”
“Good enough. I want to find Darryl, but I don’t want to risk one of our competitors getting wind of the project.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d said I, not we. Maybe Megan was a bit more than Darryl’s lab assistant. Maybe she was the boss and he the beautiful assistant. Who just happened to be the brains behind the project? Nah. More likely they were peers and I’d been led astray by her looks and the fact that every time their relationship had come up she’d lied about something or other. I’d presumed it was just their romantic involvement, but was she clever enough to use an obvious lie as a smokescreen for a not-so-obvious one? Not that it mattered. It was a neat way to trick the nano, which wouldn’t care whether you were telling one lie or a hundred, but if by holding back, she made my job more difficult, my fee would simply be that much larger. I could live with that.
Megan unsnapped her briefcase and handed me a small glass vial. “A sample. You might find it useful. A drop or two is all you need.”
She spent another hour filling me in on details, but when she finally departed, my first job was to deal with my nanos. That required a trip to the credit clinic because even Trevor isn’t naïve enough to allow his codes to be accessed by a non-secure machine.
Before leaving, I took one of his pills, just to be on the safe side, then dumped the envelope in a drawer. Damned if I knew the shelf life of his brand of Extension—it was another of those things I really didn’t want to learn by experiment—but that didn’t mean it made sense to throw away the pills.
As always at month’s end, there was a line at the credit clinic, but eventually I reached the auto-tech machine, keyed a payment to Trevor’s account, and stuck my arm into the machine’s maw while the bank transferred the funds.
Transaction completed, the screen flashed a moment later. Thank you for using Credit Central. Please wait while we extend your compliance-assurance nanobots. The ATM hummed to itself, flashed a series of status lights, and did whatever it does to reset my nanos so I don’t have to worry about them for another month.
Except that I was going to worry. Hell, I was worried already. I paused, my arm still in the machine, even though it was now wishing me a good day.
“Hey man,” a voice behind me said. “You wanna move it?”
“Just a moment.”
Ignoring the ensuing theatrical sigh, I queried for a description of the nano and was informed it was mock ringworm, ten percent body coverage, six weeks’ duration, intensity just below true medical emergency.
I tried to imagine ringworm as a near “medical emergency,” and shuddered.
But I didn’t have to live in dread. For the first time in months, I was solvent. The rent had dented my newfound lucre but I had a lot left, and it looked like that was just the beginning.
What if I went on the pre-payment plan? I’d have to check my lease to see how many months I’d have to pay in advance—probably at least six—but if I did, I could be rid of Trevor’s nanos forever. No more arm in the slot. No more wondering what would happen if the damn thing malfunctioned and reset the little beasts for next Monday rather than next month. That isn’t supposed to be possible, but I really hate having to trust so much to a machine.
Missing-persons work is mostly computer drudgery. For years it’s been possible to track people via credit card charges, phone records, EasyPay toll passes—anything that leaves a swath across the cyber landscape. Getting that information isn’t a matter of skill, it’s connections—as in what databases can you access, officially or otherwise?
Thanks to my divorce work, my access is pretty good. Early on, I’d realized that as long as I was underemployed, it behooved me to take whatever work came my way—especially because there are forms of payment more valuable in the long run than money. There’s nothing like helping a cop fleece his stockbroker wife to get you access to some dreamy databases. And my clients have included not only police officers, but folks in some very interesting bureaucracies. I suspect Lorencz Biggle sends them to me to improve my value for some of their messier divorce cases. Maybe referring Megan was a form of thanks.
One reason she fetched up at my office, rather than half a continent away, was that Darryl began his escape by flying here, twelve days ago. Megan herself had traced him this far, via a contact in Homeland Security, for whom her company had once done “some work.” She’d not specified what type of specialty nano Homeland Security might want, and I was just as happy not to know.
Darryl had taken vacation leave and bought a round-trip ticket with a return that would have brought him home last Sunday. He’d checked two bags, boarded the morning nonstop, and (needless to say) not come back. Megan must have been instantly suspicious, because the first day he missed work was when she discovered the missing notes. If he had friends or relatives here, she didn’t know of them.
Her Homeland Security agent must have had access to a lot more data than he’d shared, but he hadn’t been willing to go very far out on a limb for her. My clients owe me their financial lives, and I’m not averse to reminding them of it.
It helped that Megan either had a key to Darryl’s home or had broken in and searched his files. Either way, she’d provided me with a list of his bankcards, etc. She’d even given me his customer loyalty numbers for two grocery chains, a movie theater, and a bookstore. (Don’t laugh; I once caught a runaway kid when he cashed in his CineTower viewer points for a free movie and popcorn.)
Except for buying a return ticket he never intended to use, Darryl made no attempt to disguise his airline trip. But once he was on the plane and done with security checks, he’d started covering his tracks. I started by searching for a car rental, then for any use of his bankcards or cell phone, but pulled a blank.
That complicated matters, but bankcards and cell phones are fairly easy to avoid using, at least in the short run. Nanos are a different matter. Even if you know they produce electronic traces on the ATM, there are payments that even the most desperate fugitive isn’t likely to ignore.
The hard part is getting access to the ATM records. The cops simply ask. Folks like me use worms. Back when Marion and I were on better terms, she knew people who knew people who could create such things. They’re a violation of U.S. privacy laws, but that’s not an issue offshore, and I can keep my hands clean, at least in theory, by simply asking for a report and pretending I don’t know how it’s created.
Getting a report on Darryl and setting up an alert cost me $1,000. Hopefully, Megan would reimburse me. For an extra $300 of my own, I asked for a quickie report on Megan herself because she was obviously keeping at least one secret and there might be more.
By 6:30, I was ready to call it a day. You can only do so much computer work in one sitting and remain sane. Darryl’s electronic trail, if it existed, would still be there tomorrow.
I’m not proud of what I did next. Marion’s job involves long hours, but she’s a morning person, not an evening one. It’s one of those differences that seem inconsequential until you’ve been married a few years. Then you realize that neither of you is ever going to change and that trying to arrange your schedules to meet in the middle simply means you’re both miserable. Me, I’m still going strong at midnight. Marion has trouble keeping her eyes open after 9:30.
All of which is a convoluted way of saying it was now late enough she should be home from work.
Her new home is in Bill’s Landing, one of the most notoriously you-can’t-get-there-from-here sections of town. I have no idea what kind of riverboats once docked there, but now it’s a re-gentrifying residential district rising up the bluff behind a narrow floodplain. Every time I have to go there, I find myself too far up the hill, staring at tiers of chimneys and wondering how the hell you’re supposed to get down there without levitating.
Marion’s apartment occupies the ground floor of one of the most inaccessible Victorian monstrosities in the neighborhood. I reached it eventually and found her car in the street, which has enough parking rules to keep the sign manufacturers in business for the foreseeable future.
So far, nobody’s come up with a way to add nanos to parking enforcement, but as I pulled to the curb near a sign reading, “2-hour limit or Zone F Residential Permit 7 a.m.-6 p.m.,” it crossed my mind that this was only because nonconsensual nanos were outlawed. If Darryl’s truth nano opened the door for others, a parking ticket might someday be accompanied by a nano on your door handle, with the ticket serving double-duty as a warning. Hi, you owe $40 for overstaying your meter and, by the way, you’ve been infected with a nano that will make your fingernails drop off if you don’t pay within a week. Oh, joy.
Not that my present plan gave me any right to complain.
Getting Marion to shake hands was the tough part. Even among enemies, the handshake is a strongly engrained custom, but divorce trumps social convention and she left me standing long enough with my hand out that eventually I pulled it back.
“My lawyer said not to talk to you,” she said, starting to close the door.
“Wait.” Gambling, I reached out and grabbed her wrist. “I just want to understand.”
She pulled free, then, discovering the moisture and the tingle from whatever it was that carried the nano through your skin, wiped her hand on her jeans. Too late, but dermal contact was an awkward means of delivering the nano. Megan really needed to find a better way, like dissolving it in cologne. Of course, then you’d wind up infecting everyone within breathing distance.
“I’m not here to talk about the property settlement,” I said, remembering at the last moment that the nano worked both ways and I had to be scrupulously honest or I’d wind up blushing and sweating myself. Luckily, talking property hadn’t been my primary goal and I had a split second to decide I didn’t really want to do it at all.
“What else is there to talk about?” she asked.
“I just want to understand what went wrong.”
“Oh, Alex, we’ve been through this a thousand times.”
“Yes, but this time I’m prepared to really listen. Was there really nobody else?”
“You’ve asked that before.”
“I know. Just tell me the truth. I promise I’ll believe.”
She stared at me long enough I was sure she was going to refuse. Then she sighed. “No. Not then, not ever. The problem was that too much of the time there wasn’t you, either.”
No sweating, no blush. Not at all what I’d hoped for. “What does that mean?”
She sighed again. “How many times are you going to ask that?”
“This is the last, I promise.” If you’d asked me, I couldn’t have told you whether I meant it, but the seconds ticked by and I wasn’t sweating, and presumably not blushing. Nano as self-lie detector. How interesting. Let’s put the psychologists out of business along with the lawyers.
“Okay,” she said. “But it’s nothing new. When I married you, we were both pretty committed to our jobs and didn’t have a lot of time for each other. But at least when we were together, you were witty, fun, alive. Then the recession hit and you lost your job. I kept telling you it didn’t matter, that you could do anything you wanted: write the great American novel, make good art, make bad art, whatever. But all you did was rant against nanos. Somewhere along the line, that obsession started meaning more to you than I did.”
I drew breath to speak, but Marion beat me to it. “Let me finish. This is the point where you always say that this isn’t so, that you always loved me, etc., etc. Maybe you thought you did, but you forgot what it meant. You weren’t you anymore.”
“People change.”
“Yeah. But you changed into someone I didn’t want to be around. I kept telling you, but you wouldn’t listen. At first, you just talked about feeling useless. Then you became useless. You wouldn’t lift a finger around the house. You’d never been a great lover, but after a while, you didn’t even try. Then you started that PI business, which would have been okay, except look at what you wound up doing: mostly it’s just helping your old law buddies screw rich people in divorce cases. Well, now you’re getting a taste of your own medicine. You deserve whatever my lawyer can do to you.
“Goodbye, Alex. Don’t come here again. You don’t care about anyone but yourself, and you never will. Maybe you never did.”
And with that, she shut the door. There had never been a blush, never a bead of sweat. I didn’t know how much of what she said was true, but she definitely believed it.
When I got back to the car, I found a canary yellow envelope stuck under the windshield wiper. The officer had checked a box labeled “Other parking violations, described below,” then scribbled, “section 137 (f), Thurs., $53,” which wasn’t very informative.
I walked up and down the block until I found a sign reading, “No parking this side, first Thursday each month, street sweeping.” Damn this neighborhood. Damn Marion. Damn Megan and her nano. Damn everything…
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