Fish Swim in the Lake

Part 2.1 | A blue million miles

alphaDana walked up two flights of stairs from Pijai's office.

The fourth floor door was locked. A sign, warning her that only authorized personnel were allowed in, told her to put her face against a blue plastic retina scanner that looked about as clean as a public water fountain.

She leaned over as gingerly as she could, putting her face up to but not against the reader and pressing the big green "scan" button with the heel of her palm. Four plastic clamps shot out, grabbed her head, adjusted it expertly against the scanner, and released. The door buzzed and shot open.

alphaDana staggered into a white enameled waiting room with cracked hemopape chairs, a chipped brown plasteen coffee table and an empty coffee pot. The coffee table was piled high with copies of Maclean's magazine so old they were printed on wood pulp.

At the far end of the room -- maybe three meters -- was a partly plasteeglassed in area for the daten. alphaDana walked over with a handful of magazines and said, "those should be recycled."

The daten, a plumply aging blond with riverlike grooves down his flaccid cheeks, favoured alphaDana with a coldly tolerant stare.

He leaned back to yell into an intercom: "I'm taking my supper break now," and burst past alphaDana in a flurry of white and brown polyester. The door locked behind him.

alphaDana casually looked up at the cameras planted in the light fixtures. Everything she did in here was recorded, yet because everything was recorded, the humans that filtered the recordings could only monitor a tiny fraction of that raw data. As long as she did nothing violent her presence would dissolve like a grain of salt in a teaspoonful stirred into water. Not even what she was doing -- wandering up to the daten's desk and slouching down at the keyboard -- was dangerous enough to notice.

He'd set a brightly kinetic screensaver running on his LCD before he left. There was a Plast-It note on the bottom left-hand corner marked "040302". alphaDana jacked in and uploaded "040302" to the password prompt.

No biometric. Not even a thumbprint. She was unreasonably depressed, but she jacked in further anyhow. The local net was slow and there was data hanging out all over.

Pijai's orders were right out in the open: he wanted a full, decompressed dump of her afternoon's vlogging -- everything she'd seen and recorded to her implant that whole damn afternoon -- and then he wanted it verified as low-level scrubbed from her internal memory before she was released.

That was insane. A full dump on a good uplink took a second per two seconds she'd recorded. On this antique police crap it would take hours longer. The low-level scrub was controlled by the quality and speed of her own hardware, but the verification was again at cop speed. It would probably take nearly as long to examine every cluster as it would to dump it.

"Screw that," alphaDana muttered under her breath. She shoved her jack into Pijai's orders and started revising.

Posted by gtaylor at April 15, 2002 09:07 AM