Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [90]
Mary Abid was working through the day on night watch in a chemical factory in Auckland, NZ. The satellite link didn’t make for fast reflexes, but she didn’t need them; the semi-autonomous robots that she guided around had reflexes of their own, and her main task was to put some human common sense in the loop.
Whatever she was doing, sitting and swivelling in a basic-model telepresence exoskeleton, it involved stretching and switching and sweating and cursing, and something in her sweat or scent or swearing was transmitted to Jordan as a distracting subliminal sexual tension. He barely associated it with the Kurdish woman in the telly-skelly. During the hours he’d been sitting hunched at the Glavkom VR apparatus, spinning an elaborate web of nuance and inference, looking for a trail of silken thread, and looking for Cat, it had been the photograph of Cat on the wall of Moh’s bedroom that Mary’s female pheromones brought unbidden to his mind.
Cat. He’d extracted a patchy biography of her from the Collective’s records. A teenage rebellion against a staid petty-bourgeois background – her parents ran a VR rental franchise on the fringe of Alexandra Port – had led her into a loosely leftist militia. She’d literally bumped into Moh Kohn during the Southall Jihad, worked with the Collective for two, three years until some inextricably intertwined doctrinal/personal dispute had taken her away into a succession of idealistic combat units and one or two of the numerous factions that made up the Left Alliance.
The Left Alliance, unlike the ANR, was taking calls, but Jordan had a distinct impression that they had more pressing matters on their minds. Any people or systems he’d contacted about Cat had simply referred him to the standard cadre-availability databases, all of which had Cat down as damaged goods. The group she was currently in – he’d eventually tracked it down, the Committee for a Social-Ecological Intervention – had been barely willing to acknowledge that she might possibly have had some association with them at some indefinite time in the past.
Of course, as all concerned admitted, if Cat’s current little legal difficulty could only be sorted out…
Jordan felt a rising indignation at what Moh had done to her, much as he could see Moh’s point about the dubious nature of the coalitions that Cat’s political trajectory embraced.
He’d made more progress on the Beulah City/Black Plan connection, or so he hoped.
‘RUN SILK.ROOT?’
The system message floated in front of his eyes like an afterimage. Jordan took a deep breath.
He nodded, chinning Enter.
Hacking into Beulah City’s systems directly had proved difficult. Quite apart from his earlier – and, he now thought, overhasty – action in liquidating his business interests there, a data-security crackdown was evidently in progress. Mrs Lawson, he guessed, was busy. Nevertheless, he retained access rights to a few of the smaller systems which had, so far, not been revoked. This had given him one angle of attack. Next, he had set up a completely spurious trucking company (created with an apparent age, he wryly told himself, like the stars in 4004 BC). As far as one of Modesty’s subsidiaries was now concerned, River Valley Distribution Ltd had an excellent record of deliveries within Norlonto. The phantom details would be discovered at the next audit, but that wasn’t due for another month.
The program now running in SILK.ROOT had Jordan’s virtual company inquiring about the possibility of putting in a bid for more work. It was asking for some background information – just a breakdown of Modesty’s deliveries to British locations in the past month. If he’d set up the right parameters on the systems he had managed to hack into, they’d accept this highly irregular request without a blink.
He found he had his eyes closed, his fingers crossed.
Ping. And there it was, on twenty