Freedom Incorporated (60 page)

She wasn’t angry anymore.
She was over that. The anger had given way to
acceptance.

Nathan’s
fingers were shaking, just one of the many physical manifestations
of his extreme anxiety. The doctors had warned him to change his
lifestyle if he wanted to see 30.
Huh…
30?
He shook his head, or thought he did,
his muscles hadn’t actually responded. He was a statue, his
fantasies dancing only in his mind. And his rigidity had affected
his bodily functions.
I’ll be lucky to
reach 28,
he thought, despite being three
weeks shy of his birthday.

“
Is it really
worth all this?”

Nathan didn’t answer. He
didn’t hear the question. And even if he had, he was too paralysed
by indecision to answer anyway. He didn’t know what to think or do
anymore.

We’re all
fucked.

*

Saturday, September 18,
2066

23
:
19
Sydney, Australia

The records vault was
both the pride and the scourge of the Parramatta office. It
burrowed six floors beneath street level and stretched for hundreds
of metres in every direction. But, embarrassingly, they were
running out of space. Not that Simon was surprised when he thought
of how much data the vault housed. It wasn’t actually a single
vault, there were many vaults within vaults, simultaneously
catering for different access requirements and minimising the
potential impact of a fire.

It was quiet at night. A
handful of uniformed officers lounged lazily at the counter and
nodded greeting to Simon as he passed, glancing only casually at
Dan before lowering their eyes to their scintillating game of
cards. Detectives often had late-night flashes of insight and came
to the office to test a theory.

They shuffled to the
elevator in silence. The government, always frugal, expected its
employees to use obsolete elevators and stairs rather than riding
portals around the building. The first elevator descended only one
floor; a special elevator would take them to the vault.

A metallic ding signalled
their arrival and the elevator opened to a short corridor with a
polished titanium door at the far end. The Department had opted for
an old-fashioned entrance because some bureaucrats believed
PortaNet could override microchip restriction circuits and smuggle
people inside unnoticed. In truth, they could. But PortaNet’s line
of security products depended on word not escaping.

A high-powered wall
mounted scanner to the right of the door controlled the lock. It
logged everyone who entered and exited. Simon theatrically raised
his arms while it deciphered the details on his chip and the
attached computer recorded his name. A hiss of compressed gas
seeped from the vault when the lock clanked free and the first door
swung ponderously ajar. It opened to a small chamber where a second
scanner intended to sweep them. They had to seal themselves in
before the final check would commence. Simon had authority to
access the vault, but the automated security system required
reassurance that nobody was coercing him and that nobody would rush
in uninvited once the door was open.

The blue tinged light
reflecting from the walls of their metal tomb gave the vault a
sterile feel. The second scan began, or so the monitor reported. It
took nearly a minute because the computer had to verify Dan – or,
more to the point, Mr Tedman Kennedy – wasn’t on a black list of
suspected troublemakers.

Simon staggered on weak
ankles when he saw the name on the display. “What the…?”

“
I can
explain,” Dan said quickly.

“
I would hope
so.”

The system found no
excuse to bar them access and the inner door opened with another
hiss of gas. It’d been a long time since Dan had been in the
archives and he felt mildly nostalgic – it hadn’t changed much. “I
don’t want to announce my presence to Esteban. I know he’s trying
to track me.”

“
So you had
surgery?” He looked aghast. “You can’t do that.”

“
Sure I can,”
Dan retorted. “I already have.”

“
Then you’ll
have to get a legitimate chip reimplanted.”

Dan adamantly shook his
head. “Not until this is over.” He eyed his friend with a guarded
expression. “What’re you going to do? Alert a chipping squad? I
need to sneak up on him and I can’t do that with my
chip.”

Simon felt his blood
sugar level plummet. It was late, past his usual bedtime, and he
wasn’t in the mood for arguing. Besides, he didn’t think it was
wise to argue, he might say something he’d later regret. Instead,
he dipped a hand into his pocket, unwrapped a Nutri-Bar, and bit
off a huge chunk.

Police protocol dictated
that administrative staff must complete a network backup every
night and store it in the vault. It wasn’t such a problem after the
Department had spent money on crystal-cubes, but bulkier media
stuffed older areas of the vault to the brim. Some very old records
were on tape and laserdiscs that nobody had the equipment to read
anymore. And vault management had dedicated two entire floors to
paper records. An infestation of paper-lice was steadily eating
them and the records were essentially useless, having no reliable
catalogue. But the law said the Department must keep them for a
hundred years, so there they were, stacked in boxes from floor to
ceiling. An environmental control system maintained optimum
temperature and humidity to minimise the breakdown of storage media
and inevitable loss of data.

It was a giant cross.
Long corridors stretched in four directions, inviting them to
explore the nether-regions of the information superstore. Two
elevators at inconvenient locations ferried passengers to lower
levels where they were even less likely to find what they sought.
Computers with crystal-cube readers were in most vaults so that
investigators would have no excuse to remove media. Police, it
seemed, had gathered notoriety for forgetting to return
things.

“
Now where?”
Dan asked.

Simon shrugged. Still
crunching on his bar, he mumbled around the mouthful, “Check the
directory.”

The vault door closed
behind them with a resounding rumble, jarring their nerves. When
Dan was finished watching it, he strode to the terminals, which
officers used to locate desired records in the expanse of useless
data. One terminal had an ‘out of order’ sticker slapped
haphazardly across the screen, but the other one responded to his
request. “Vault-1D,” he said. “According to this.”

“
This way.”
Simon felt less jittery and far less crabby now that his stomach
had something to digest. “Just down here.”

“
I know, I
remember,” Dan reminded him. “I used to spend hours down here too,
remember?”

Simon looked sheepish.
“Oh yeah, so you did.”

The light above the
entrance to Vault-1D was flickering erratically. The effect
reminded Simon of a B-grade horror movie as he let the scanner read
his microchip. The Department hadn’t bothered with two-tier
security on inner doors. Vault architects had presumed anybody
capable of passing the first two titanium doors had a legitimate
purpose and was therefore unlikely to force entry into places they
shouldn’t.

An ear-piercing siren
wailed as soon as they opened the door. All inner doors had a
self-locking mechanism that engaged after 20 seconds and the siren
was to remind officers not to leave their fingers anywhere nearby.
Dan put his fingers in his ears. He’d always hated the siren’s
pitch and its ascending urgency grated his back teeth.

Once inside,
and once the siren had stopped, he set to work. He located the
appropriate box and began fishing through thousands of tiny
crystal-cubes. Each was stored in a separate plastic container and
each was capable of holding a snapshot of the Department’s
network.
Isn’t nanotechnology
wonderful,
Dan thought as he rummaged.
Without an adequate budged to secure the network, officials had
mandated the storage of crystal-cube snapshots as the next best
alternative. So, if data went mysteriously missing, someone could
always recover it by scrounging through the archives.

The air in Dan’s lungs
felt heavy as he plugged the correct cube into the reader and
launched the retrieval application. He couldn’t keep the
trepidation from his voice. “I think this is it… yes. Here we
go.”

Simon curiously peered
over his shoulder, swatting absently at a trail of sweat trickling
down his sideburns. “What’re we looking for?”

Dan chewed his lip – he
often did when reading. “I’m not sure yet.” He’d located a record
from the day before Katherine’s murder and a shiver ran down his
spine, accompanied by an overwhelming desire to turn back the
clock. “Look.” He stabbed the screen with a finger. “He was from
Sweden, here for a conference… didn’t have many friends according
to this.”

“
Maybe they
cleansed it before you got a copy.”

“
I doubt it.
He had one friend, a colleague in The Netherlands, see?” He stabbed
the monitor again, hard enough to make the surrounding pixels swirl
with colour and smear a fingerprint on the matte screen. “It was an
angle I never pursued. Nothing indicated…” He trailed off,
unwilling to finish the thought.

“
Are you
thinking what I’m thinking?” Simon asked, hoping he
wasn’t.

“
Yeah, I’ve
never been to Holland. It might be nice.”

Simon sighed deeply,
wondering why he chose such high maintenance friends. “I guess I
should come.” He yawned. “I can sleep next century.”

*

“
Give me your
weapon.” Dan held out his hand.

New South Wales police
didn’t have permission to carry weapons or ammunition out of the
country so Simon reluctantly complied. “I assume your new identity
has clearance?”

“
Yeah.” Dan
added Simon’s pistol to his arsenal.

They strode to the
immigration counter and Simon’s disbelief grew with each weapon Dan
placed in a neat row for tagging. “What’re you… preparing for World
War III or something?”

Dan ignored
him.

“
That’s four
bottles now, chief.” Chuck winked. It was a slow night and
wondering what Dan was doing kept him entertained for
hours.

Chapter
9

How much harm
does a company need to do… before we question its right to
exist?

Slogan for uncommercial
from adbusters.org

Saturday
, September
1
8
, 2066

1
5
:
42
Groningen,
The Netherlands

Hans felt a tingle at the
back of his neck, which set his nerves on edge and made him jumpy.
Kat was complaining about the pile of trash in the kitchen,
unambiguously letting him know how disgusted she was by spraying
the mound with urine and meowing furiously for his attention. He’d
been in the middle of another doomed experiment when the
altercation started.

He lowered his goggles.
“Oh Kat. What’ve you done?”

She looked at him
guiltily and came purring to brush against his leg, supremely proud
of herself for snaring his attention.

“
Oh God, what
a mess.” Hans scratched Kat behind her ears. “You know you’re not
allowed to piss inside, right?”

She purred
louder.

“
Okay, let me
clean up and then I’ll play with you a little.” He used a sponge to
soak up the yellow puddle and rinsed the foul stickiness off his
hands with soap and, when that didn’t remove the smell, a mild
acid. The big bags of trash made a disgusting tacky sound when he
peeled the plastic from his linoleum floor.

He slipped
into his sandshoes, which he always kept beside the door. With
laces tucked inside, he used them as a pair of outdoor
slippers.
My God that’s
gross,
he thought, holding a paper towel
under the bags to stop the sour fluids seeping through and dripping
onto his carpet. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said,
gagging.

Kat looked at him
innocently, sitting delicately on the couch like a grand
lady.

Hans skipped down the
stairs two at a time, hoping to rid himself of his stench-bombs as
quickly as possible. His main concern was the neighbours; he didn’t
want them to know whose trash would be spoiling in the sun all day
Sunday. He felt guilty enough without hearing them
complain.

He tossed the bags onto
the cleft of bricks at the front of his building with an explosive
sigh of relief, staggering back to gulp fresh air. So he was too
distracted to notice two men approaching from his left.

Their words, English
words, startled him. “Excuse me; may we have a few minutes of your
time?”

Fear illuminated him as
his eyes darted over them. One was dark skinned and heavy-set,
wearing neat casual clothes. His shirt was burgundy and his
trousers dark blue, reminding Hans of the bouncers who worked in
the red-light district. The other was a Caucasian, slightly taller
and wearing an outfit that would look natural at a
funeral.