Neurolink (37 page)

“Elsa, you astonish me.”

“I know it’s wrong, sir. I hope you’re not offended.”

In answer, Dominic hugged her and kissed her brown hair.

Qi elbowed him in the ribs. “Enough sappiness. Let’s check in.”

“Offener’s going,” Elsa said. “He’ll return the van.”

Dominic turned to thank the young man, but Offener was already careening the vehicle away and hurtling toward the tunnel. A man of few words.

Dominic had never patronized a tube lodge before. At the Rest Nest Hotel, guests paid by the hour for cylindrical cubbyholes stacked one on top of another like drawers in a morgue. The tubes were sized to sleep single, double or triple, and they came equipped with bedding, power outlets, small storage bins with sliding doors, and for an extra fee, a Net node. Lockers and coin-operated public bath stalls were available at the lobby level. To reach their tubes on the sixteenth row, Dominic and his party had to climb a ladder. It felt like old times.

Elsa had reserved two contiguous triples with a pass-through window, and she’d filled one of them with computer equipment. “I hope I remembered everything,” she said, pressing a finger to her lips.

Dominic examined the neat stack of peripherals and modular add-ons in matching dark green cases. Very tasteful collection, he thought. “Everything for what?”

“You know, sir. To hack the Ark.”

“But Elsa.” He tried to explain why that plan was no longer viable. If everyone knew he was coming, how could he sneak in? The Ark was the most fiercely guarded databank in the world, and now the NP would throw up even more impregnable blocks. It couldn’t be done.

“We know you can do it, sir. I’ll help.”

But Elsa, what can you do? he started to say. Then he remembered her dogfight with the cop cruisers, her bald-faced lies in the airport, her joke shop scars to hide his palms. Soft-hearted Elsa. He’d underrated her too long.

With a sigh, he folded his long body into the tube with the stylish green computer equipment and picked up a set of cybernails, brand-new in their cellophane packet. He tore the seal and dumped the shiny claws in his palm. “This office maintenance account,” he said, slipping the claws onto his fingertips, “show me.”

Elsa’s eyes gleamed.

They worked for three hours, as measured by the tube-lodge billing meter, which ticked off the minutes on a big round dial mounted to the wall. There was no desk or chair. Elsa positioned the Net node on top of a green case, and Dominic tried sitting lotus fashion for a while, but that hurt his knees. He had to keep shifting, stretching his legs, rearranging his long body in the short space.

He opened a separate browser to monitor market news, and the projection shimmered in the air like a pane of glass reflecting colorful shadows. He programmed an agent to watch for news of the miners, then muted the sound.

Qi asked for some of Dominic’s spare change. Then she slipped out for a bath and came back with wet hair. She brought protein jerky, noodle soup and strong black tea from the vending machines in the lobby, and after their meal, Elsa cleared away the empty food cartons. Neat as a column of figures, that Elsa. Toward the end of the third hour, Dominic’s one good eye went bleary, and he began to calculate how long since he had slept. His senses were off kilter, and he wasn’t making any progress cracking the cross-coded, self-referential shell maze of ZahlenBank’s office maintenance account.

“Meta-mobius, isn’t it?” Elsa tapped her finger against her lips.

“Who set it up?” he asked.

“Sorry, sir. The account was there when I came to the bank. It just popped up on my menu one day. Weird.”

The account concealed its traces with baroque layers of back-loops, but something nagged at Dominic’s senses. Those loops seemed familiar. He scrutinized the binary strings till his eye blurred out of focus. He couldn’t keep going on food and tea. He needed rest.

“Major, by my count, the miners are running out of air now.”

“Maybe not.” Qi rocked back and forth nervously. “It depends on how many new people show up, and whether Millard brings another pump online, and how fast Anzie’s team can brew more alcohol.”

He slumped forward. “A moving target, right.”

“If they floated those windmills, we’d hear about it on the news,” Qi said. “Trust their ingenuity, Nick. Don’t give up yet.”

He shucked off his cybernails and ran fingers through his ragged hair. “I can’t see the screen anymore.”

Elsa said, “Shall I rub your back, sir? I’m trained in shiatsu massage.”

“I’ll handle the massage.” Qi started poking his shoulder blades with her knuckles.

“Actually,” he said, “I’d like you to look at this code, Major. The way it kinks back on itself, it puts me in mind of the miners’ broadcast Remember how the signal echoed back and forth through all those servers?”

“Hoo-hoo, kinky code. Sounds like my kind of fun.” Qi pushed him out of the way and sat cross-legged in front of the Net node. “Rest for a minute. I’ll take a crack at this Ark of yours.”

Elsa opened a pass-through window into the next tube. “Climb through here, sir. I’ve made your bed.”

“Elsa, you stick with me,” Qi said. “I may need your help.”

Qi didn’t look at either of them. She bent over the holographic interface and squinted at the icons with a serious expression. When her blue-black hair fell across her face, she pursed her lips and blew it away. Then she started humming. Dominic watched her cybernails flick through the light matrix, and he experienced an unreasonable desire to kiss her nose.

“She’s right, Elsa. You’ll make faster progress together,” he said.

When Qi cast him a sideways look, he winked. Then he tumbled through the window into the next tube and fell asleep.

He woke to the smell of tea and fumbled for the cup in the darkness. He found it steaming on a molded plastic shelf recessed in the wall. How much time had passed? His luminous watch read 2339 hours. Nearly midnight. He pictured Benito lying in darkness, choking for air, and he rattled open the pass-through window.

“We’ve found something, sir.” Elsa bounced over to help him crawl through.

“You’re right about this kinky code,” Qi said. Her face sagged with fatigue, but her ink black eyes blazed. “Whoever rerouted that broadcast left the same autograph on this office maintenance account. It’s a beautiful piece of work. Either someone inside the bank helped the miners, or someone outside the bank diddled your books. I’ll lay odds it’s the same someone. My old boss, Gig.”

“I had the same thought,” Dominic said. “But why?”

“The point is, sir,” Elsa sounded breathless, “we found a way
in
.”

He set down his styrofoam teacup. “Into the Ark?”

Elsa nodded vigorously. Qi twisted off her cybernails and dropped them in his hand. With a broad grin, he shook them like dice and let the ladies blow on them for luck.

He worked another long session, well into the small hours of the morning, clicking through ranks and files of glowing holographic symbols. Having only one eye interfered with his concentration, but he ignored the tension headache and kept searching. The office maintenance account linked into every operational center in the Ark. There was no end to its cunning. He followed the pathways and deciphered strings of arcane programming that sometimes led to cul-de-sacs, sometimes to brave new worlds of creative accounting.

He couldn’t gauge the passing hours, but he knew precisely how many muscles in his lower back began to ache and how sandy his eye felt every time he blinked. Elsa and Qi hovered at his shoulders and offered suggestions, some of them useful. Elsa blotted his forehead with a linen handkerchief, and not to be outdone, Qi rolfed his shoulders. At last, he broke through the final firewall and gained access to his personal accounts.

His assets were not merely frozen. They were gone. Every account in his name showed a zero balance. The NP had transferred his money elsewhere.

“That’s theft!” He shoved the node so hard, it bounced and fell on its side. He gazed from Elsa to Qi, then back to Elsa. He opened and closed his hands, and the cybernails made small red dents in his palms. “The primacy of account ownership is our bank’s most sacred policy.”

“The Neural Profile issued a new set of rules, sir. Last week.”

“Yes, but if we violate the principle of account ownership—even once,” Dominic stared at the cylindrical plastic walls, “who will trust our bank again?”

“Everybody’s irate about it,” Elsa said.

“That bit-brain’s destroying my bank!” Dominic rammed his fist against the sleep tube wall. Then he seized the Net node and reactivated the interface that had gone dormant when he knocked it over. He started flicking through the code again, and his cybernails clicked together with a sound like ringing steel.

“What are you doing, sir?”

“Composing a poem, Elsa.” Dominic clicked away, stringing new code together, unconsciously working his jaw. “Just a few unrhymed couplets of poetic justice.”

Breaking into the Ark had been difficult. The rest was a stroll in the mall. Inside the office maintenance account, he wrote a program to tap ZahlenBank’s profit stream and levy small fees, bare shavings of copper from every cent of markup that passed through the operational centers. On the directory, he labeled it VST, for value-subtracted tax, his private joke. Then he set up an automatic schedule to sweep the money into a new alias account. For account holder name, he wrote: Tooksook & Associates. In seconds, the new account began to fill.

“Sir, that’s—that’s—” Elsa sounded stressed.

“Embezzlement.” Dominic said the word aloud. He’d broken the cardinal rule of honor. He’d stolen from ZahlenBank. There was a time when he would have cut off his hand before touching the bank’s money. He squeezed his. eye shut.

Funny, he thought with a bitter smile, how the old lessons still wrung him with shame. What would Father say? That was the question he couldn’t help asking. After all that had happened, Richter Jedes was still the standard by which Dominic measured his worth. The NP claimed Richter programmed his son, but that wasn’t the right word. Richter inspired him with respect. Honor thy father’s values. But Dominic broke the paramount rule. And no matter how honorable his reasons, his heart still ached.

“Sir, that’s ingenious,” Elsa finished her sentence.

Qi punched him in the arm. “Sleek work, Nick-O. Now it’s my turn.”

“What are you doing?”

She shoved him aside and wrenched off one of his cyber-nails. “We can’t leave the miners’ money in ZahlenBank. I know a nice little church in Australia.”

“The South? Oh my.” Elsa bit her finger.

Dominic was stunned. Qi wanted to move the money South? She couldn’t mean that. The South was unsafe. Too scandalized to react, he let her take the rest of his cybernails and put them on her fingers. Australia was full of gangsters and free agents, and Southerners ran their businesses like open-air bazaars. They never took pains to amass wealth for the future. He grabbed her hand. “We don’t know anything about their banking laws.”

“Have you been there?”

“Have you?”

Qi elbowed him away and didn’t answer. Very few Northerners chose to journey across the broiling equatorial latitudes to reach the southern hemisphere. Dominic had always wanted to go, but it was easier to visit the moon than the southern pole. The South was a place of legend, a wild frontier about which Northerners knew very little. Automated agents blocked every southern Net site to prevent the spread of viruses. The South drew Dominic’s curiosity and suspicion in equal measures.

Qi started tapping icons. “If we leave this money at ZahlenBank, sooner or later, your dear old Da will steal it back.”

“But the South.” He shook his head.

“Let me show you something.”

She opened a browser, and a new pane of light shimmered in the air. The heading read, “Perth Church of Constant Necessity.” In the background was a real-time image of the Milky Way, beamed from some orbiting observatory. Dominic browsed the church’s menu: Health, Games, Arts, Shopping, Finance.

“You intend to put money here?” He was flabbergasted.

“Yes, I do,” Qi said.

“This is a Southern site. How did you get past the blocking agents?” Elsa asked.

“My former boss showed me a trick or two.” Qi flicked the icon to Send Deposit Now.

While Dominic watched, the balance in his new alias account began to dwindle away as fast as it appeared. “We didn’t discuss this!”

“I discussed it with the council. They think this is best.”

“Those amateurs! Those lunatics!”

“Those protes. That’s what you mean. Say it!” Qi rose on her knees and faced him with hard fists and blazing Asian eyes. She looked furious and exhausted, and when she punched his chest, it didn’t even hurt.

He caught her in his arms. “You know me better, Qi.” He held her tight and smelled her hair and watched the money disappearing out of the account. “I only meant we should perform due diligence before transferring large sums of money to this wacko Southern church.”

Qi leaned back and examined his face. She made him self-conscious. He wished he still had the eye patch to cover his scars.

She said, “What if I told you this church gave the miners a loan three weeks ago? That’s how they got the new drilling rigs so they could build the colony. How about that?”

“Oh my.” Elsa quietly opened another package of cybernails and started browsing through the Perth site. She said, “They offer watercolor classes.”

“Yeah, and they make loans on pure trust,” Qi said. “Is that duly diligent enough for you, mister executive coin machine?”

“I haven’t used the term ‘prote’ in a long time,” Dominic said. “I’m not the same person. You know that.”

Qi rocked back and forth in his arms. “I guess.”

“You know that,” he said.

This time when she bounced against him for a quick kiss, he was ready. He caught her head between his hands and explored her chapped lips with his tongue. Their teeth clicked together, and he tasted her soft, warm, salty mouth for a long time.

“Goodness,” Elsa said. “They have digital roulette.”

The plastic sleep tube echoed with Qi’s boyish laughter. After a second kiss and a third, she disengaged herself from his arms and crowded next to Elsa. “Click the Shopping icon. Girl, we have stuff to buy.”