Spin State - Chris Moriarty [46]
Today’s job was simple: find out who made Sharifi’s wet/dry interface and why. Li might have to do a little hacking to get that information, but she wouldn’t have to stray outside the human datastream—the well-tended paths of corporate and governmental networks. If she was lucky, she wouldn’t even have to risk a trip to Freetown.
She evolved her interface, logged on to the Ring-side data exchange, and accessed a low-security copy of Sharifi’s genome left stranded in an open database after a minor medical procedure four years ago. She checked it against the DNA built into the wire and confirmed that the interface had been customized for Sharifi. Then she cast her net out over the web.
She switched from VR to binary, running on the numbers, diving into the sea of pure code behind streamspace. The shift was like setting off a rocket. Dropping into the numbers freed her from her brain’s spatial perceptions, silenced the tyrannical chattering of her inner ear. More important, it freed up all the processing space that was devoted to generating the simulated sensorium that was the only window into streamspace for the vast majority of human operators. For Li—for any real hacker—dropping into the numbers was like coming home.
She knew in broad terms what she was looking for, even if she didn’t yet know where she would find it. She needed a hit from a big corporate R&D player. The kind of player with enough financial muscle to produce cutting-edge tech with an impossibly long research-to-market horizon—and enough political muscle to risk violating human bioresearch ethics guidelines. But she couldn’t go in through the front door. She needed a fluff file. Something public domain, relatively unguarded. Something she could access without attracting unwanted attention. Something that would let her slip past the corporate gatekeepers.
She caught a promising datastring and hooked on to it, sliding through layered databases like a diver finning through the currents and thermals of a turbulent ocean. The string led her to the public-access page of CanCorp’s Ring-based bioresearch division. CanCorp was one of the four or five multiplanetaries Li thought could have produced Sharifi’s interface—and sure enough a quick and dirty cross-check told her CanCorp was one of Sharifi’s most generous corporate sponsors.
She switched back into VR to follow the string; on the off chance that CanCorp security was monitoring its public site, she wanted to look like an ordinary tourist when she got there. To her annoyance, she was detoured five times on her way. First, a saccharine commercial jingle for some overpriced health snack that tasted like mildew. Then an earnest pitch from the Reformed Church of Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, delivered by an implausibly clear-skinned teenager in a cheap blue suit and a plastic name tag. Then, loaded onto a single and annoyingly persistent banner, a docu-ad about the Heaven’s Gate Gene Therapy Institute, a Ring-generated public-service announcement about a listeria epidemic in the Ring’s NorAm Sector, and a disorienting full-immersion apocalyptic simulation from some computer-literate Interfaither splinter group.
She slid out of the Interfaither sim with jelly legs, a throbbing head, and a serious beef with whoever had decided that they were a bona fide religion entitled to public-access streamtime. When she finally reached the CanCorp page, it didn’t tell her much. But it did have a link to a “work in progress” section on which the division’s researchers (or, more likely, the division’s public relations staff) posted sanitized biographies and dumbed-down descriptions of current research. She ran a new search and pulled streamspace coordinates for three CanCorp researchers.
She hesitated. So far she’d only hit on sparsely monitored public-access