Marlowe and the Spacewoman (20 page)

The man froze, then slowly turned to Nina.  “Did you say vinyl?”

“Yes.”

“As in record?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a store that sells records?”

“Well, probably not anymore.  This was a long time ago.”

“You’ve actually listened to music on vinyl?”

“Once or twice.”

The man just stood with his jaw hanging down.  It would have hit the floor, but his gut interrupted the journey.  Marlowe was waiting for him to drop to his knees and grovel before Nina.

“What…what did it sound like?”

“You know,” interrupted Marlowe, “we aren’t actually here to look at CDs.  We’re looking for Huggy Bear.”

The man pulled his revering eyes away from Nina and squinted at Marlowe.  “I’m Huggy Bear.  What did you need?”

“The name’s Marlowe, and we’re trying to find a computer that can read this disk.”  Marlowe reached into a pocket, searched around, then reached into another, repeating the process.  He began patting down his trench coat, even removing his hat and looking inside.

“A computer to read this,” said Nina, handing over the disk from her ship.  

Marlowe stopped his searching and blushed slightly.

Huggy Bear looked like he was verging on cardiac arrest as he held the disk.  His hands were trembling, and he looked utterly flummoxed.  “Wh…where did you get this?”

“From my space ship.”

“From your…your space ship?”

Marlowe found himself filled with an overwhelming urge to fidget.  The nano probes were unable to compensate as his level of impatience was just too high.  “I hate to interrupt your religious experience here, but do you have something that can read this?  It’s very important, and we’re on a deadline.”

Huggy Bear ignored Marlowe.  “Wow, I haven’t seen one of these in…well, ever.  Well, once, in a catalog, but never in real life.  Is it authentic?”

Nina nodded, a sly gesture as she studied Huggy Bear through half closed eyes.  “Oh, yes, it’s real.”

“What’s on it?”  He was starting to notice Nina’s physical presence at this point, spending only half his time staring at the disk, and the other half appreciating her.

Nina leaned towards Huggy Bear, winking over his shoulder to Marlowe.  “If you’ve got a computer that can read it, I’ll show you.”

Huggy Bear jogged over to the shop entrance, flipped a switch that dimmed the red ‘Open’ sign, and practically fell over himself returning to Nina.

“Yeah, I can probably find something to read that.  Follow me.”

Imbued with a sense of self-importance, he strode to the back of the store, his shoulders back and his head high, Nina and Marlowe in tow.  To Marlowe, it seemed more of a waddle, but the bearing was certainly confident.

“I knew, someday, someone would come along who would appreciate my collection.  Mom said it was junk, kicked me out when I refused to throw it away, but that pain and hassle was all worth it for this moment.  My moment.  My collection’s moment.”

They reached a poorly hung wooden door that creaked as Huggy Bear pushed it open.  A dimly lit staircase led down into dank-smelling darkness.

“Careful, now, watch your step.”

Huggy Bear started down.

“Do you have a light?” asked Marlowe.

“Use your implant,” retorted Huggy Bear huffily.

“I don’t have one,” piped in Nina.

Marlowe, who had kicked his low light filter on, saw Huggy Bear stop with a start.  “You don’t have one?”

“Nope.”

“Gee, I don’t know if there’s a light or not.  I’ve never had to use it.”

Marlowe had already started searching the walls for switches.  He found one, closed his left eye, and flipped it.  A pale, sickly light flickered on in the stairwell.

“Oh, I guess I do have one.”

The stairs were clear until they got to the bottom.  There, the last three steps were covered with haphazardly stacked electronic components.  Some of the piles were leaning dangerously.  The floor didn’t fair much better.  Like the shelves of CDs upstairs, the computers and associated equipment formed a maze of barely navigable pathways.  Marlowe took in the collection: one half-assembled chassis after another, each bristling with non-organic PC boards and wires, brightly colored laptops, ancient external PDIs, and other devices strange and unfamiliar.  Against one wall was a smooth, featureless system with a small gray rectangle set in the middle.  A label set above a glowing red dome read ‘AL 900’, but he couldn’t make out the entire text due to dust.  Marlowe had the unsettling feeling that the dome was somehow watching them.  Some of the dusty piles were taller than Marlowe, leaning precariously this way and that.  Two piles had actually leaned over into each other, forming an unstable electronic arch.

“Oh my,” said House excitedly, “I think that’s a ZX-81.  And a Lisa.  Can that be a Lisa?  And, ooh, over there, I think that’s an Octane.  I wonder if we’re related.”

“Let’s see,” Huggy Bear muttered, “we’re looking at about a hundred years old.  The OCD-4000, maybe.  That would be over here, I think.”  He led them to an electronics rack that covered the back wall.  “This was a particularly difficult system to put together.  Took me years of trolling in the swap meets, slipping out of the City to other cities to get parts.  But I built it.  NASA used to use these things.”

Nina smiled.  “No, NASA predates this computer.  The FSEP used them, though.”

“I don’t think so.  I should know, I’ve done A LOT of research on this.”

Marlowe just shook his head.  “Does it work?”

“Of course!  This is Huggy Bear’s collection, after all.  Nothing makes it into my collection until it works.”

“Then would you please load the disk.”

“Oh, that’s right!”  Huggy Bear turned on the computer and put the disk in the drive.  “It takes a while to boot.  That what old computers do when you turn them on.  Boot.”

“Oh, how droll,” whispered House into Marlowe’s ear.  “One word from you, I could hack into his bank accounts and bankrupt him.  One word.”

Marlowe resisted the temptation and said nothing.

Huggy Bear had plopped himself down on the floor in front of the computer.  “This here,” he said, holding up a flat surface with buttons on it, “is a keyboard.  That’s the old way of entering data into a computer.”

“Believe it or not,” said Marlowe gruffly, “we’ve seen keyboards before.  They’re not entirely extinct yet.”

“Actually, this particular system used voice recognition,” said Nina.

Huggy Bear stared at her with a mixture of awe and hatred on his face.  “Well, yes, you’re right, but I couldn’t get that to work.  So I built the keyboard interface from scratch.  Myself.  I like the tactile sensation of using a keyboard.  It was quite an effort.”

“How quaint,” muttered Marlowe under his breath.

“That was two words,” whispered House.  “Can I?”

“No,” uttered Marlowe.

“Hmm.  Just as well.  I pulled up his credit report.  Applying for that private investigator’s license turns out to have had some benefits after all.  Based on his score, I’m guessing there’s not much to bankrupt, actually.  Sinking way too much money into his business, I daresay.”

“House, knock it off!”  Marlowe hissed a little louder than he had intended.

Huggy Bear looked up sharply from the floor.  “I’m sorry, do you have something else you’d rather be doing?”

Marlowe’s nano probes headed off a tide of blood rushing to his face, preventing an embarrassing blush.  “No, sorry, just an insecure computer at home.  You know how that goes.”

“Yeah,” said Huggy Bear as he nodded sympathetically, “I do.”

House was indignant.  “Insecure?  Really, how could you?  If my continued existence wasn’t tied to your finances, I’d bankrupt you.  Though you’re little better off than our computer buffoon here.”

Huggy Bear pounded away on the keyboard with his stubby fingers.  The drive with the disk hummed and whirred, but not nearly as ominously as the system in Nina’s ship.  Pretty soon a monitor buried in the rack flickered to life and text appeared on it.  Huggy Bear typed a couple of letters and the text changed, forming columns on the screen.

“Image files.  A lot of them.  Let’s see, what is that command to view images again?”

“Try ‘imgview’,” said Nina.

“Yeah, that’s it.”  Reverence had crept into his voice again. He typed some more, and pictures popped up on the screen.  Each opened up in some sort of frame, which Huggy Bear clicked on and moved around with a small device on the floor next to the keyboard that manipulated a pointer on the screen.  Marlowe positioned himself better for capturing the images in his PDI.  Pictures of strange, alien landscapes with a gas giant filling most of the sky.  Pictures of the interior of some sort of ship, with different people in them.  There were only three people in the all the pictures, and none of them were Nina.

“Are you in any of these pictures?”

“I don’t think so.  I was the photographer.”

“I’m not sure this helps us, then.  And even if you were in them, these are really low res, primitive images.  They’d be easy to fake.”

“Damn.  I really thought that disk would help.”

“Maybe it will, but not on its own.  Those images certainly don’t disprove your claim.  We’ll have to find more, though.  There’s got to be a way to prove beyond argument who you are.”

“If only the Internet was still around.  I was a bit of a celeb on that before we left.”

“What did you say?” The question had issued forth from Huggy Bear’s mouth in a raspy, barely audible gasp.

“I said it’s too bad the Internet doesn’t exist anymore.  The Odyssey I mission got a lot of coverage, as well as a murder investigation on the International Space Station that I was involved in.  I helped catch the killer.”  She sighed.  “I met Brett during that fiasco.  I’d forgotten about him.”  She sighed again.  “But there was definitely a lot of pictures of me and other people from that time period.”

Huggy Bear looked sharply to the left and right, then grabbed Nina by the shoulders.  “You know about the Internet?”  His voice had taken on a new level of intensity.

“It was only an integrated part of my life until a few years ago.”

“You know about the Internet!”

“Yes, she knows about the Internet.  She just told you she did.  But I don’t know about it, so will someone please fill me in?”

Huggy Bear ignored Marlowe.  “You know about the Internet.  Wow.  You are like, my goddess.  I haven’t met anyone else in the City who knows about the Internet.”

“What does it matter,” asked Nina.  “It doesn’t exist anymore.”

Huggy Bear gasped.  “You mean, you don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“You don’t know?  You really don’t know!?”

“What don’t I know,” asked Nina, the muscles in her neck becoming taut.  

If Huggy Bear didn’t tell her what she didn’t know real soon now, Marlowe was pretty sure she’d beat it out of him.  And that promised not to be pleasant.  For Huggy Bear.  Marlowe, on the other hand, found himself secretly looking forward to such an outcome.

Huggy Bear lowered his voice until it was nearly inaudible.  Marlowe had to kick up the amplification on his ear implants.  “The Internet still exists.  Nothing like its heyday, but it still exists.”

Nina pulled Huggy Bear’s hands off her shoulders and turned to Marlowe.  “If we can get on the Internet, we might be able to find pictures of me from the past.  Would that help?”

“With everything else we’ve collected, it might be enough to give my brother an excuse to spare your life.”

Nina turned back to Huggy Bear.   “I need to get on the Internet.  Can you help me with that, Huggy Bear?”

Huggy Bear swelled up with pride.  “Yeah, I can help.  But you have to swear never to tell anyone else how you got on.”

Nina nodded solemnly.  “We swear.  How do we get onto the Net?”

“You called it the Net!  That is so cool!”

Now Nina grappled onto Huggy Bear’s shoulders, although with a little more vigor and less care for comfort than Huggy Bear had exercised.  He visibly wilted, a grimace of agony etched across his face. “How, Huggy Bear?”

Huggy Bear squirmed and wriggled, trying to break free of Nina’s vice-like grip.  To little avail.  “Well, we need to go to the outskirts of the City.  Do either of you have a car?  I don’t have one, and I hate the bus.”

CHAPTER 12

CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

They’d been in the Studebaker for twenty minutes, Huggy Bear chatting incoherently the whole time, pausing just long enough to instruct the car where to turn and when.  He was leaning forward over the seat, practically ear to ear with Nina.  When Marlowe tried to break into the conversation, the hacker just steamrolled over him with his mouth.  If this internet thing didn’t pan out, the annoying man would have a long walk back to the shop after this expedition, most likely with a few bruises.  And maybe a broken bone or two.

Jebediah sat stonily in his seat next to Huggy Bear, staring out the window and muttering under his breath.  He’d initially been alarmed when Huggy Bear got in, mouthing to Marlowe, “What if he recognizes me?”  But Huggy Bear hadn’t recognized the former head of the City, and Marlowe harbored a strong suspicion this lack of recognition mightily annoyed his father.

While annoying his father was a point in Huggy Bear’s favor, it was not enough to compensate for his otherwise general unpleasantness.  Sadly, he was currently their only lead, so Marlowe struggled valiantly to find his mental happy place and endure the drive.  It didn’t help that he still had the sense they were being followed.  He looked in the rear view mirror, which revealed nothing, and checked the radar, which only returned a faint echo that matched the signature of a flock of birds.  Of course, Marlowe couldn’t rule out a stealth jet; that was the type of radar signature it would leave and it was possible Obedere was interested enough in their progress to deploy one.  But sensing something there and not being able to verify it galled Marlowe.  It was like an itch behind his eyeball; it didn’t go away and nothing he did to alleviate it worked.

They were northwest of the downtown area, in a rundown industrial section.  They were passing the sewage treatment plants, and the smell reminded Marlowe of the dumpster he’d been standing behind during that business with Toulene and her fake identity.  The nasal filters were completely overwhelmed.

Nina, nose pinched and breathing through her mouth, coughed.  “Ugh, this is worse than Coalinga.”

“What?” asked Marlowe.

“A city in southern California where they have, had, a lot of cows.”

Huggy Bear barked out another command, seemingly oblivious to the smell, before returning to his tirade on old video storage standards - something about VHS versus Beta.  All completely alien to Marlowe, though Nina occasionally nodded understandingly.  “Turn left down that service road.”

Marlowe felt a twinge of concern as he followed the direction of Huggy Bear’s pointing finger.  “But that takes us to the old abandoned sewage treatment plant.”

This time Huggy Bear paused in his diatribe and actually responded to Marlowe.  “Don’t worry, it’s completely deserted and perfectly safe.”

“That’s what I’m worried about. I don’t like deserted places.  They always have somebody or something that isn’t supposed to be there…being there.”

“Do you want to get on the Net or not?  Then turn left.”

Marlowe nodded to the car, which turned left.

The plant was actually not much to look at.  This was due primarily to the fact the plant resided underground.  The only thing they could see from the car was the entrance - a hole in the ground, about a meter in diameter rimmed with rusted steel, and with a red and rickety-looking ladder thrust out of it at a slight angle.  They clambered out of the car, Huggy Bear putting on a backpack he’d insisted on bringing from his store.  Marlowe discretely pulled his illegal gun out of the glove box, which eased his severe misgivings down to serious concern.

“Coming, Father?”

Jebediah remained seated in the car.  He shook his head violently.  “You’ll be with that inane chatterbox the whole way, right?”

Marlowe checked to see if Huggy Bear had overheard the less than complimentary remark.  The man was already at the underground entrance, hopping up and down impatiently.  “Unfortunately, yes.”

“Then I’ll just stay here in the car.  Continued exposure to that man will drive me crazy, and I won’t be responsible for my actions after that.”

Marlowe held his tongue.  He surveyed the flat, empty expanse around them.  “OK, just try to stay out of trouble.  Shouldn’t be too hard out here.”

“Trouble’s my middle name,” said Jebediah earnestly.  “Had it legally changed the second year I was…out of office.”

This did not make Marlowe feel any better.  Still, Huggy Bear had progressed from hopping to whining noisily about getting a move on, so Marlowe reluctantly left his father to his own devices.  “Keep an eye on him, please,” he subvocalized to the car.  “Do not leave this site without me.  Understood?”

The car subvocalized an affirmative honk back.

Huggy Bear climbed down first, followed by Nina and Marlowe.  They descended five meters to the bottom of a small chamber with steel walls and a steel floor.  A round, corroded  hatch was set in the center of the floor.  Huggy Bear opened a small panel next to the hatch, revealing a black hand crank.  He started to turn it, and with each revolution, both Huggy Bear and the hatch let out a groan, and the hatch opened a little.  Nina maneuvered herself over to the crank and relieved the hacker.

“Allow me, please.”  She turned the crank, spinning it at three times Huggy Bear’s rate while excreting one third the sweat.  The hatch creaked and protested as it jerkily slid aside.  Huggy Bear looked a little embarrassed.

“She’s been living the last year or so under one and a half gees, so her superior strength is to be expected,” said Marlowe in an effort to comfort the crestfallen hacker.  It didn’t work.

Huggy Bear descended another ladder below the now open hatch.  Down they climbed, and Marlowe started worrying about how much work and personal effort the climb back up would require.  He started to sweat just pondering it.

Down, down, down, deep into the bowels of the earth.  The ladder had a tendency to wobble, which Marlowe found disconcerting.  Finally they reached the bottom.  The trio found themselves at the end of a long corridor that stretched out as far as the eye could see.  The floor was a brown-encrusted metallic mesh with darkly stained concrete visible below it.  Every five meters, a drain was set into the floor.  The walls formed an inverted concrete U over their heads.  Surprisingly, recessed lighting in the ceiling illuminated the entire corridor.

“The plant is shut down, but still has power,” explained Huggy Bear.  “I tapped into the mains to get the lights back.  They only come on when the hatch upstairs opens, so as to not draw a noticeable amount of power.  Can’t have the City Municipal Power Service noticing unauthorized power drains, now can we?”

Marlowe leaned down with his hands on his knees, his chest heaving.  “Now will you explain to us why we had to come way out in the middle of nowhere into the heart of a terrible, terrible stink, to get on this Internet thing?”

Huggy Bear answered between his own labored huffing and puffing.  “Because years ago, the City banned it.  Way back when the Big Fed fell, the RIAA started sending delegates to all the cities and convinced them to shut down the Net.”

“The RIAA?”

Nina, observing both men’s obvious signs of fatigue and rolling her eyes, fielded this question.  “Recording Industry Association of America.  They were a monopoly that controlled the music industry.”

“Still control it,” said Huggy Bear.  “Anyway, they didn’t want people downloading music for free, and since there was no Big Fed, they couldn’t go after people in just one court system anymore.  So they decided that rather than sue people in different cities with different laws and legal procedures, they would just get all the cities to shut off their access to the Internet.  It worked; they threatened military action or sent a little money to the right people, or both, and one by one the cities cut their physical access to the Net.”

They started down the long passage.

“But that doesn’t make sense,” said Nina.  “The Internet was decentralized.  If one hub went down, everything just rerouted to another hub.”

“Maybe a hundred years ago,” said Huggy Bear, “but once KFC bought all of the ISPs in North America, it was relatively easy to shut it off.  Fortunately for us, some independent systems outside the mainstream are still up.”

“KFC bought the internet?  As in Kentucky Fried-”

“Shh,” said Huggy Bear, eyes wide.  “Don’t say the full name!  They have ears everywhere!”

Nina still looked confused.  “But why would KFC buy-”

“It isn’t safe to talk about,” said Huggy Bear in a whisper, looking furtively over his shoulder.  “Please, just let it go.”

“Wait a sec,” interrupted Marlowe.  “First off, enough with KFC, it’s making me hungry.  Second, what in the City is the Internet?  I’ve never heard of it before today.  If the City made it illegal, I’d at least know about it.”

Huggy Bear shook his head.  “It’s not illegal.  It’s verboten.  No laws, because a law banning something is an advertisement for the curious.  No, if we get caught down here, we’ll just disappear.”

“Hmm.”  Marlowe was starting to question the probative value of downloading pictures of Nina off the Internet.  If it wasn’t supposed to exist, they might not be able to show people the evidence for fear of being disappeared.  Still, he could at least know for sure in his own mind, which might make smuggling her out of the City easier on his conscience.

Just ahead Marlowe could make out what appeared to be some sort of door set into the right side of the corridor.  A very sad, pathetic sort of door; it looked like it was made from badly abused, corrugated tin, and was affixed to the wall by two large, crude hinges.

“Through here,” said Huggy Bear, gesturing to the impromptu door.

“Make that yourself?” asked Nina archly.

“Yup.  Had to cut the hole from this passage to the sewage tank on the other side.  Took me a long time, but considering what lay on the other side, it was worth the effort.”

“Sewage tank?” asked Marlowe, unable to contain his alarm.

“Not to worry, the plant has been abandoned for nearly two decades.  The stuff left in the tank is solid now, and doesn’t have much smell.  It did at first; it was so bad I had to leave the hatches above open to help air the place out.  Took two months before the stench dissipated enough for me to come back down.  Found a couple of skeletons in there too, very disturbing.  I have a feeling-”

“Stop.  There’s no way I’m going in there.”  Marlowe had been lazy and hadn’t changed the nasal filters after the last couple of uses, so there was no way they’d work well enough inside that tank.

“If you want on the Internet, you gotta follow me.”  With that, Huggy Bear vanished through the door.

“Come on, this could be the resolution of my case.  Think of it as an adventure.”  Nina grabbed Marlowe’s hand and tugged him in after her.

“But I’m a PI.  Every day is an adventure.  I’m tired of adventures,” whined Marlowe.  Then he noticed that the smell really wasn’t that bad.  He just tried not to think about what constituted the rough, earthen surface he was walking on.

“It’s over here in the middle of the tank.  There’s a fiber optic cable that’s part of the actual, honest-to-the-Governor Internet.  I spliced in right here.”

Nina reached the spot, Marlowe in reluctant tow.  Huggy Bear had strung some lights up in the tank, so they could see without difficulty.  The spot Huggy Bear hovered over proved to be singularly unimpressive - a hole dug in the dirt, with a piece of cable sticking out of the bottom.

“This is it?  An antique cable sticking out of a mound of dried feces?  This is the famous Internet?”  The trials of the day had forcibly expelled Marlowe from his happy place, and he could not keep the irritation out of his voice.

“Patience!  Trust Huggy Bear, never doubt him.  I’ll just plug us in and we can start looking for those pictures you were talking about.”  Huggy Bear pulled a silver rectangle out of his backpack.  He pressed a button on one edge, and it folded open to reveal an antique LCD display and another one of those keyboard things, only this one was integrated into the device.  He pressed a button by the keyboard and the computer hummed, the screen flickering to life.

“I’m a little confused,” said Marlowe.  “If all the cities disconnected from the Internet, wouldn’t the Internet cease to exist?”

“No, no, no,” said Huggy Bear in the annoyed tone of a teacher dealing with a particularly stupid student.  “Remember, it’s decentralized.  The Internet shrunk when the cities pulled out, but didn’t disappear.  There are a lot machines in the former Union of European States, more than a few pirate systems on this continent, plus a couple of systems in Antarctica.  As long as the network hookups work, all you need to do is plug in and away you go.”

“But if it’s smaller,” said Marlowe, “there’s a good chance what we’re looking for is gone, right?”

“Wrong.”  Huggy Bear was beginning to look like a very annoyed school teacher.  “The system has redundancies built into it, mirror sites duplicating each other all over the world.  If the images you want were originally on a site that was maintained by the Big Fed before it fell, the chances are very good someone somewhere else on the planet has a copy.  No guarantees, of course, but we’ll see.”

Huggy Bear sat on the ground, resting the computer on his lap.  “Now it is a little slow.  It would be a lot faster if there were more network connections, but the RIAA took care of that.  It’s odd, the only computers on the Internet now run on an OS called Linux, but we’ve seen references to other OSes.  Stuff I’ve never heard of, and wouldn’t mean anything to you either.  Amazingly, most of the computers still online aren’t actively maintained; they’re just still on and accessible over the network.  Unbelievable they could build such a rock solid operating system back in those days, but they did.”