The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [101]
He clicks his mouse. “Here’s the other end of the operation.” It’s a roomful of skinny, suntanned guys in short-sleeved shirts hunched over cheap PCs, row upon row of them: “My floating offshore programmer ranch, the SS Hopper. You’ve probably read about it, haven’t you? Instead of offshoring to Bangalore, I bought an old liner, wired it, and flew in a number of Indian programmers to live on board. It stays outside the coastal limit and with satellite uplinks it might as well be in downtown Miami. Only they’re not, um, actually programming anything. Instead, they’re monitoring the surveillance take from the mascara. Because the Pale Grace™ Bright Eyes® products don’t just link into the transference-contagion glamour, they contain particles nano-engraved with an Icon of Bhaal-She’vra that backdoors them into my surveillance grid. That’s actually the main product of my sixty-nanometer fab line these days, by the way, not the bespoke microprocessors everyone thinks it makes. It’s a very useful similarity hack—anything the wearer can see or hear, my monitors can pick up, and we’ve got flexible batch manufacturing protocols that ensure every single cosmetics product is uniquely coded so we can tell them apart. It’s almost embarrassing how much intelligence you can gather from this sweep, especially as Eileen’s affiliates are running a loyalty scheme that encourages users to register their identity with us at time of sale for free samples, so that we know who they are.”
I’m boggling already. “Are you telling me you’ve turned your cosmetics company into some kind of occult ubiquitous surveillance operation? Is that what this is?”
“Yup, that’s about the size of it.” Billington nods smugly. “Of course, it’s expensive—but we manage to just about break even on a twenty buck tube of mascara, so it works out all right in the end. And it’s less obvious than using several million zombie seabirds.” He clears his throat. “Anyway, that’s by way of demonstrating to you that you can run, but you can’t hide. Now, to explain why you shouldn’t run . . .”
He flicks to the next slide, and it’s not a photograph, it’s a live surveillance take from a camera somewhere. I’m pretty sure it’s aboard this very ship. It’s Ramona, of course. She’s sprawling across a double bed in a stateroom, out cold. “Here’s Ms. Random. I figure you know by now that you don’t get to talk to her without my say-so. You need to know three things about her. Firstly, if I’ve got you, I can make her do anything I want—and vice versa. You’ve figured that out? Excellent.”
He pauses for a few seconds while I force myself to stop trying to break the arms of my chair. “There’s no need for that, Mr. Howard. No harm will come to either of you unless you force my hand. You’re here because I need her to do a little job for me, one relating to the recovery of the alien artifact—and I need her willing cooperation. So that’s item two out of the way. Item three, I gather you’ve met Mr. McMurray? Good. It might interest you to know that he’s a specialist in controlling entities like Ramona’s succubus, or Johanna’s necrophage. I could threaten to hurt you if she tries to resist, but I always find that positive incentivization works much better than the big stick on employees: so I’m going to offer her a deal. If you and Ms. Random cooperate fully, I’ll have Mr. McMurray see if he can permanently separate her from her little helper. As he was part of the team who invoked and bound it to her in the first place . . . well, what do you think she’ll say to that?”
I pick up my water glass and drain it, hoping for something, anything, to occur to me that’ll show me a way out. Billington may not have tried to figure out my price, but I’m pretty sure he’s got Ramona’s. “What’s the