Up Against It - M. J. Locke [67]
She looked shocked. “No way! That won’t be enough time!”
“It’ll have to be. We can’t afford to leave this critter on the loose any longer than absolutely necessary.”
“I suppose you have a point. I’ll do what I can in that time frame.” Tania added, “There’s one more thing. We’ve been careful to use highly technical language to discuss this and a lot of veiled Tonal_Z talk to avoid revealing our suspicions to ‘Stroiders’ viewers. Should we continue?”
As Tania spoke, a horrible realization dawned on Jane. The riots … rumors of an infection in their life-support systems …
“What time did you discover the sapient?” Jane asked.
“We began to theorize about it at around nine-thirty or ten this morning. Just after the staff meeting. But we weren’t sure till the early Casper-Dozois results came in around eleven.”
Ten a.m. And the riots had started at eleven-thirty. Just enough time for a once-back-and-forth communication from Earthspace.
She told Tania, “Word is already out.”
“Are you sure? We’ve been careful…”
“Pretty damn sure.” Jane gave Tania a brief version of what had happened in the New Little Austin Mall. “Some tech-savvy ‘Stroiders’ fan Downside must not have been fooled,” Jane finished. “And they passed the word along to someone who lives or works in New Little Austin. The rumor is too close to the truth to be coincidental.”
Tania looked chagrined.
“Oh my God! I had no idea…” She thought for a second. “More likely it was one of the local Upside-Down techs, prepping the transmissions for broadcast. There’s a twelve-hour lag before they beam them to Earth.”
Jane thought it over, and shook her head. “We can’t have you not doing your job just because some Upside-Down geek was second-guessing you. It’s this damn ‘Stroiders’ contract.” She sighed. “I’ll take the matter up with the PM and get back to you with instructions.”
“All right.”
Jane remembered Thomas Harman’s mention of odd computer problems throughout Phocaea. “Oh—do you have someone tracking computer glitches and failures on systems the sapient has access to?”
“No, but we are tracking its activities closely. We have a good handle on what it’s doing.”
“Just in case, I want someone monitoring all anomalous activities. Prepare a broadcast asking people to immediately report to you any bugs or oddities in their waveware’s behavior. I’ll get clearance for you. I want someone compiling all unexplained computer problems and correlating them with your data on the sapient’s activities.”
Tania’s gaze flickered again, in approval. “Good idea. That’ll give us another angle on it. A ‘wetware’ tracking system. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“It’s why they pay me the big bucks.”
Tania laughed.
After Tania and Thondu had left, Jane floated around the room, collecting her thoughts. Her interface was still up; she resisted an impulse to take it down. Ghosts in the machine, she thought. She shivered again. Her breath came out in puffs of fog. BitManSinger. This is very not-good, she thought. But then she realized how it could be turned into an opportunity: one that would solve any number of problems. She called the PM. (There’s no way the sapient can understand me, she reminded herself sternly.)
Thomas Harman intercepted her. “He’s not taking calls.”
“Still?” Jane began to suspect Thomas was playing power games with her; the PM would not keep blocking calls from her at a time like this. She felt a spike of anger that Thomas could be so petty when lives were at stake. She could always call his bluff, but that would only escalate the conflict. She tried a different tack.
“I have important news,” she said. “Extremely important.”
“Oh?” He tried not to appear interested. “Tell it to me and I’ll pass it along.”
“If I do, it’s important that you don’t take this news anywhere until the PM says it’s OK.”
He eyed her. She had him.