Year's Best Scifi 7 Part 20

"We appreciate your cooperation." With that his visitor turned and strode swiftly from the garage.

Barbara peered dubiously from Justin's living-room 3-V at the stack of hundred-dollar bills before him. The session was doubly encrypted, using his key and hers. The computational load from double decryption made the image jerky.

"I could use a little more input here," he said: "This payoff is from TSC?"

"My visitor hinted as much, without making it explicit. I don't know that I believe it, though. The mystery is in ISI's clandestine use of the radio parts."

"Are there any hard facts beside the money?"

Alicia's long-ago annoyance at Justin's career change had come partially from the loss of a kindred spirit. Well, he may have decided not to program, let alone hack, for a living, but he'd never lost the knack. The security system in his apartment complex had proven to be no match for his skills.

Justin scanned backward through the garage's surveillance records to an earlier time that evening. His subterfuge in the garage hadn't worked: the thug's face was shadowed by the brim of the hat, his features indistinct. "Mr. X here is a fact, just not a useful one."

"I'm not so sure. Maybe I can do something with that. Send me copies?" She hummed to herself, toggling between the digital frames of his visitor. "I have software that can probably clean up the images."

To his puzzled look she explained, "You know I teach media studies at UCLA. Sometimes I recover old film, dusty reels no one has seen in decades, stuff that's shown up in Hollywood estate sales. That kind of old film is generally in horrible shape. Allie did up some image-enhancement software to my specs. Give me a sec."

The humming resumed, ending after a while in a satisfied, "Ah." She transferred an enhanced image file to Justin's workstation. The face of Justin's caller, slightly blurry but now fairly distinct, popped onto his 3-V.

"Good work." He studied the face, far clearer than it had been live in the dark garage. Would TSC care if their contract with Alicia became public? He saw no reason why they should. "Maybe it's time to play a hunch.

"Computer, log onto the ISI intranet. Download the group directory for the security department. See if the enhancement from the apartment security system matches anyone there."

His suspect's face was still shadowed and blurry, so he wasn't surprised that the search took a while.

He wasn't surprised either to learn that his visitor worked for Michael Zhang.

"There are too many odd circ.u.mstances surrounding Allie's death. I can't believe it's an accident,"

Barbara said. "I don't know if we can be sure of that yet. What seems clear is that she had discovered something very embarra.s.sing, if not illegal, at ISI. Something major. Even if Alicia's death was due only to a traffic accident, these people at ISI, whoever they are, still want to keep their actions secret."

"What actions?"

He shrugged. "I'm working on that."

5.

So what was going on at ISI?

That wasn't an easy question. It was a big company, with hundreds, maybe thousands, of projects under way at any time. Justin couldn't possibly be aware of all of them, and surely Alicia had recognized that.

What Alicia had known with precision was the type of work he did at ISI: xenotechnomics. He pondered the technologies that the various ETs had disclosed, and how ISI might best leverage them. He tried to infer from what was already known what else of value the ETs might have, and then helped lobby the ICU to order that. He tried to antic.i.p.ate ET responses, to get a jump on compet.i.tors who were more pa.s.sively awaiting the next years-long interstellar messaging cycle.

Huge sums were involved in being first to market with new ET technologies, and in knowing ahead of time what markets to vacate because ET tech was about to make them obsolete. There was also gamesmans.h.i.+p: can you get the ICU to order specific technologies that ISI might be able to exploit faster than its compet.i.tors?

What did ISI secretly ordering TSC radio receivers have to do with any of this?

Sigh. For absence of a better idea, he fell back onto one of his basic principles: if it can't hurt, try it.

He was the only xenotechnomist at ISI, but he didn't exactly work alone. He worked routinely with a number of artificial intelligences-AIs. What with his computer-science background, before (as Alicia put it) he'd turned to the dark side, Justin had implemented several personal AIs. Maybe one of them would see what he was missing.

Only none of the AIs knew any more about ISI's interest in radio receivers than did Justin. d.a.m.n. To be thorough, he had them run self-diagnostics. All were fine. To be even more thorough, he made a final check. Every system he had ever built maintained a transaction history file, simply good programming practice in case of a system crash or subtle bug. As long as the programs ran smoothly, he had no need to check these files. He hadn't looked at some of the logs for years.

Perhaps he should have looked sooner.

One of his AIs did first-pa.s.s translations of messages from ETs. Over the decades, the intelligent species in the nearby solar systems had developed and continued to evolve a common trade language. It was very efficient at conveying mathematically or physically based information, less capable with regard to more abstract concepts like commercial terms. Most people found the language a nuisance to read and write.

"Decode" was, to his mind, still experimental. Certainly its automated translations were often quite curious, and needed his critical review. Justin had made no attempt to keep Decode a secret-it was just something he had written to work more efficiently. On the other hand, he'd not considered it ready for use by anyone other than himself. So who was this Kyle Fletcher whose name was all over Decode's history log?

He queried the company's on-line directory for the name. There were no matches. A consultant then, or a very recent hire. Only one way to find out surrept.i.tiously came to mind. Even in death, Alicia seemed determined to keep him involved in hacking.

When you know you are under surveillance, you don't hack from your office or your home. Justin hit an ATM for cash, bought a calling card with cash at a convenience store three klicks away, then drove to the airport. He used the calling card to rent an hour on one of the net kiosks that catered to travelers. Hewas glad to see that the rent-a-computer had a keyboard, in part because he didn't care to articulate what he was up to, in part because the airport was so noisy.

One of computing's periodic crises, what Justin's father insisted on calling "Y2K, the sequel," had occurred earlier in Justin's career, on January 18, 2038. The venerable Unix operating system measured time's pa.s.sage by counting the seconds from the onset of 1970-and on Unix Doomsday the seconds counter of the oldest Unix versions had run out of bits and rolled over to zero. The fear was that old Unix applications software would think the date was once more New Year's Day, 1970.

Like the Y2K crisis before it, Unix Doomsday had, for a while, briefly preempted some of the attention of virtually everyone who could spell "computer." At the height of the panic, Justin had been drafted to help validate some of ISI's fixes. In support of this temporary but urgent a.s.signment, he'd been given sysadmin privileges. As sysadmin, he'd encountered several trap doors built into applications-gaping security holes that enabled the vendors to troubleshoot and upgrade their products remotely, over the net. The sysadmin pa.s.sword would surely have been changed many times since then, but Justin suspected that some of the trap doors were still there. He certainly hoped so.

He started with a payroll application that had provided an external interface to an outside paycheck service. No luck: the program must have been updated or replaced. He tried again with a system that he remembered had something to do with scheduling employee travel. That time he succeeded.

Once he had penetrated an ISI mainframe application at the maintenance programmer level, it was easy to gain access to other apps. Kyle Fletcher didn't show up in recruitment records, so he couldn't be a recent hire.

Fletcher did appear on an invoice in ISI's accounts payable. The consultancy doing the billing was not TSC ... Justin wasn't lucky enough to have that sort of closure.

Fingers flying, he kept drilling down through linked files. At the end of the process, he'd encountered two interesting facts. First, Fletcher was a technology consultant with expertise in several fields, but notably in nanotech research. Second, the requester on the purchase order for Fletcher was the head of ISI security. Mike Zhang again.

ISI had for years shunned investments in nanotech. The company's executives had made it clear that they considered nanotech a laboratory curiosity, too fragile and unpredictable for commercial use. They'd coldly rejected Justin's periodic recommendations for pilot projects that might help nanotech graduate into production.

So why hadn't he been told of the renewed interest in nanotech? Why would security retain the consultant? And why was Fletcher secretly using Justin's ET translation program?

Ignoring the inexplicable security connection, Fletcher could conceivably be practicing with the Decode AI to prepare for an alien message. The TSC radio receivers that Alicia had been tracing could be of use in hearing an alien message.

It was the secrecy that was so puzzling. Even the most tightly focused ET signal beam became widely dispersed over interstellar distances. Such beam-casts could be received across the whole solar system.

For that matter, listening to ET didn't take supersensitive receivers, just a bunch of satellite dishes in an array. That had been true even at first contact, in his parents' time. So, if an incoming ET message couldn't be a secret, why would ISI want to keep their one xenotechnomics expert-himself-out of the loop?

The more Justin learned, the thicker the fog he was trying to penetrate.

6.

On the suborbital hop to visit his parents in Geneva, Justin had time to review more of Alicia's files.

Most of her clients were Earth-based, but she had several with offices in Earth-orbiting habitats, four headquartered on the Moon, and one each on Mars and in the Belt. Each time a client folder pa.s.sed muster as noncontroversial, he would send out a notification of Alicia's demise, with request for final payment as appropriate. Sad though this work was, it was a welcome change from the sleuthing in whichhe had become so unexpectedly mired.

His parents were loitering in their car at the s.p.a.ceport arrivals area, and they whisked across town to his childhood home. "We're so sad about Alicia," were the first words from Mom's mouth. "Sorry we couldn't get to the funeral."

"I appreciate it. Thanks for sending the flowers, too; that meant a lot to her sister. I understand that you being there wasn't practical. So how was your trip?"

They took the hint that he didn't want to talk about Alicia. "The Moon's an amazing place to visit. We have a few hundred pictures that your father promised to inflict on you. Very nice hotel at Tycho City, too." Discussion of their dream vacation occupied the rest of the drive.

Justin tossed his travel bag into his old room, then started s.h.i.+fting cans in the pantry in search of a snack.

"Quit foraging," called Dad from the living room. "There's finger food on the coffee table, and you know where the bar is. We'll go out for dinner in a bit, though what with the time-zone difference, you're free to call it lunch."

He joined his parents. Munching on yogurt-covered pretzels, he glanced around the living room. Same old furniture. Same spectacular view of Lake Geneva. Lots of familiar framed photos and downloaded digital art, mostly of planets and moons spanning the solar system, plus not a few shots of Mom and/or Dad with renowned personages.

That wasn't fair. Mom and Dad were themselves famous-it was just hard to think of one's own parents in that way. Bridget Satterswaithe, not yet Matthews, had been Secretary-General of the International Telecommunications Union, the ITU, when humanity detected the initial message from the Leos and learned that we were not alone. She'd been tapped to form the Interstellar Commerce Union, a new UN agency, and been the ICU's first Secretary-General. Dean Matthews had ping-ponged between lead-technologist roles at aeros.p.a.ce and telecomm companies and senior positions at the ITU and ICU.

Both elder Matthews still occasionally consulted for the ICU.

Amid the familiar images were some new ones. Justin gravitated toward a striking view of Jupiter with several of its moons in transit. For years, that large display unit had been dedicated to previews of the lunar vacation. "Your next jaunt?"

"One can dream," answered his mother. "These things take years of planning."

Jupiter and years of planning.... As he stared at the little marble that was Europa, the room seemed to recede.

ISI was the original winner of the base operations contract for Europa from the United Nations Aeronautics and s.p.a.ce Administration. The proposal from ISI had been so much lower than any other bidder that it had been a minor scandal within the company; Justin could never figure out why someone had wanted the UNASA contract that badly. ISI had serviced the base's environmental systems; flown shuttles between Earth and Europa with supplies and for staff rotations, managed the Earth/Europa comm link as a subset of the corporate interplanetary net; and overseen a fleet of robotic Jupiter probes.

UNASA-funded scientists ran the labs at the base, researched Europa itself, and did most of the on-site data a.n.a.lysis.

A few years later, and just as inexplicably, ISI had asked for way too much when the UNASA contract was up for a recompete. Solar Services Corporation had held the contract for Europa base ever since. Almost to a man, the ISI staff on Europa had accepted the winner's employment offers-princely retention bonuses cost SSC much less than they would have paid to send new staff halfway across the solar system.

The ISI security goon in Justin's garage had posed as another company's representative. Was ISI's seemingly inexplicable bidding strategy toward the Europa base contract an elaborate way to plant disavowable staff on Europa? If so, might that long-range ploy relate somehow to the mysterious Kyle Fletcher and the multi-year nature of interstellar trade?

What had seemed to be unrelated facts started to form a pattern. On Earth, there was no need for especially sensitive components to build an ET radio receiver: collections of standard direct-to-home 3-V satellite dishes worked fine. Components like the ones Alicia had been tracing were designed for thelargest radio telescopes. Hooked into an interplanetary dish antenna, though, a TSC receiver might well be the best way on Europa to listen clandestinely to ETs.

Who would pay attention to a few no doubt innocently labeled electronics modules on a Europa resupply s.h.i.+p? Upgrading the base's ninety-meter radio dish could be done quietly. That would certainly be less obvious than distributing an array of small antennas across the Europan landscape and doing the integration testing. Upgrading of the receiver electronics could be done with little risk of detection from UNASA scientists at the base.

Had the Europa dish been upgraded years ago? Was the rush order for parts because an in-use receiver had failed?

"Earth to Justin?"

"Sorry, Mom." He rested an arm across the shoulders of both parents. "You can take the boy out of the office.... Something you guys said helped me sort out a problem I've been wrestling with.

"Let's go eat. By the way, the schnitzel is on me."

The Europan tie-in for the Alicia situation made a sort of sense, but Justin was working more from inference than evidence.

He tossed and turned in his boyhood bed, feet dangling off the end. The only rationale for a clandestine receiving station was the expectation that a secret signal could be received. The xenotechnomist knew better than almost anyone how valuable ET messages could be. Such messages were the sole basis of the interstellar trade in intellectual property directed by the ICU.

If this theory held water, ISI's conspirators had placed an order with one of the ET species for to-be-determined technology. They'd ignored international law to do so. They might even have killed Alicia to protect their secret. It was an awful concept, but the immense profits to be made from xenotechnology made it credible.

Still, he couldn't get past one problem: the other side of the deal. The known ET species practiced a government-to-government trading policy. How could ISI have gotten ET cooperation with its plot?

The collective wisdom of the four known intelligent species had found no loopholes in the Einsteinian light-speed barrier. All interstellar interactions were by radio transmission.

The closest of the ET species was at Alpha Centauri, about four and a half light-years from Earth; a one-way communication between Sol system and the Centaurs took four and a half years. That meant that any unsolicited offer from the Centaurs of new technology was at least four and a half years old.

Suppose that the Centaurs were responding to a secret ISI order, then that illegal request was at least nine years old. If a different set of aliens was involved, the plot had been hatched even longer ago.

Could Justin find evidence that old of the supposed conspiracy?

Lalande Implosion: the regional and industry-specific economic crisis of 2006-2009, during which the price of petroleum collapsed. The crisis was concurrent with, and caused by, the introduction of a practical electrical car. The new electric cars used fuel-cell technology derived from the first-contact message from Lalande 21185 (from the species popularly known as the Leos). Petroleum remains useful as a feedstock for the chemical industry, but production levels and prices never again approached their 2006 levels.

The reduced costs of transportation energy and chemical feedstocks were highly beneficial to most parts of the world economy. Major oil-producing countries and companies were, however, devastated by the rapid and unantic.i.p.ated reduction in demand. In 2010, the United Nations enacted the Protocol on Interstellar Technology Commerce that established the Interstellar Commerce Union and gave it authority over matters of trans-species technology import and export. See related entry, "Proscribed Technology Transfers."

-Internetopedia

Trying to sleep was futile.

Justin left the elder Matthews a note that he had shopping to do-and he did intend to buy someSwiss chocolate while he was here-and headed for the Geneva s.p.a.ceport and its net kiosks for travelers. ISI security had made clear that Justin was under observation, and he had no desire to bring his parents to their attention.

He once again used the compromised ISI employee-travel program to obtain sysadmin privileges. As a faux sysadmin, Justin easily retrieved the archive history of every ISI program in any way related to xenotechnomics. It seemed that the mysterious Kyle Fletcher had a longstanding relations.h.i.+p with ISI: he had used the Encode AI nine years earlier. The audit log pointed to the input file Encode had used and the output file it had produced.

The kiosk's computer, designed for checking e-mail and web-surfing, couldn't begin to handle the files about which Justin was now very curious. Muttering in frustration, he commanded the ISI system to copy the files to a net-based archive he had opened under an a.s.sumed name.

Souvenir candy in hand, he returned to his parents' house. His former bedroom was now normally his father's den; the workstation was more than adequate for his purposes. Trusting to the precautions he had already taken, he went on-line and accessed the talk-to-the-aliens files he'd just copied from ISI.

The xenotechnomist was staring at the screen, mouth actually agape, when his parents walked silently up to him.

"I see two violations of UN protocol just on this screen," said his mother. "I'd sure like to know what's going on."

"That's not even the most interesting part," Justin replied. To the workstation, he added: "Scroll to beginning of file. Display new page every minute." Images flashed. His parents, each with decades of experience in interstellar commerce, read the lingua franca easily.

"Pause display." Bridget Matthews tapped the workstation screen. "My G.o.d. Does that pa.s.sage say what I think it does?"