Up Against It - M. J. Locke [143]
She recapped what she knew, including how Marty’s death seemed connected to the attempt to cover up a meeting in Kovak’s old neighborhood. “From everything you’ve told me,” she said, “he seemed a decent sort, and not easily bribed. The most likely alternative, then, is extortion. Blackmail.”
Harbaugh looked troubled. “If that is true, and you are able to find evidence, then we will want to know.”
“If you will allow me access to the city web to check my e-mail, I may be able to confirm it now,” she said. Harbaugh eyed her speculatively.
“All right. Let’s finish the installation first.” He looked back at the monitor. “And … it’s done.”
Harbaugh removed her ear unit from its slot in the station and handed it back to her; she plugged it in, hooked it back over her ear, and got a bad case of reboot nerves—sparks in her vision, tinnitus, a tingling in her fingers and toes. Then her waveware settled down. She wiggled her hands and feet, twitched muscles here and there; her menus and her heads-up overlay responded as usual. Some shiny new icons appeared in her waveface, beneath her usual suite. A sapient appeared: a luminescent spider with a human face. Harbaugh said, “The program is named Arachnid. It is pretty straightforward. Just follow the instructions that pop up. It records directly from your visual and auditory nerves. You can test the antisurveillance disabler first, if you like, and check your e-mail at the same time.”
“Where is the data stored?” she asked.
“The default is to beam the video to multiple social and news sites throughout the Solar Wave, where it gets scooped up by the Upside-Down folks and folded into ‘Stroiders’ as they do with other tourist and supplemental material. However, under Preferences you can choose whether to livestream it to the wave, or to simply archive it.”
“Is it archived locally, or beamed out onto the Solar wave?”
“It’s stored locally with two remote mirrors. I understand your concern. Since we only have the one trunk line up to the surface, and it is currently under repair, there is a small risk that your recordings could be hacked and deleted before escaping into the Solar wave. But our firewalls are the best there are, and it won’t be long till the transmission cable is repaired. Phocaea owns twenty percent of Upside-Down’s transmission capacity, and we find that sufficient for avoiding destruction of information. You saw for yourself how hard it was to stop the feral from escaping, and that would have been a much, much bigger packet dispersal than we are talking about with snippets of video and audio.”
“It will have to do. Good enough.”
She downloaded her e-mail. She had a message from Masahiro Takei. She opened it, and read: “Here are the files you requested, from three different Uraniaville loci that fit your parameters. Hope they are of use.”
“This may be it, but it will take me a few minutes to review,” she told Harbaugh. “I’ll call you if I find the proof you ask.”
“Take your time.” He stepped out.
She played Takei’s recordings at 4x speed. They were all of a fourteen-minute stretch of time. All three showed different angles on a location at or near a grocery kiosk. The neighborhood in question must not get much mote or mite activity, because there was no sound. All three showed Ivan Kovak shopping at the kiosk, and walking away from the kiosk with his groceries, holding the hand of a little girl, maybe seven or eight, who resembled him. She must have been his daughter.
It was certainly interesting that Kovak showed up in the video. But why go to the trouble of killing Marty over a shot as trivial as this? She put in a call to Masahiro again. To her delight, a bar crawled across her screen, scanning the transmission and confirming it as surveillance-free. She began to understand Sarah’s appreciation of the Viridians.
“Masahiro-san,” she said, “am I remembering correctly that some ‘Stroiders’ subscribers Downside record their experiences while plugged in, and later share them with their buddies?”
“Yes, there are several such sites, as with other commercially