The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue (24 page)

Gene looked intrigued.

“
Explain,
please.”

They looked at each other and grinned,
but Parsons took it as a matter of course.

Francine already liked the guy and
thought he might do well in the unit.

No problemo.

His weird accents, occasionally thrown
in, and out-of-decade slang terms brought a certain spontaneous
charm to working with him in the field.

“
Your hot and sexy,
three-point-eight million dollar robot girl, uh, Gene, has
embezzled herself a tidy little dowry. Out of the household
accounts.”

“
What!”

Francine nodded sagely.

Olympia had been reluctant to send the
data, but on the advice her her lawyer, she had no choice. The
insurance company was insisting and she was trapped. Parsons for
one would like to see the look on her face next year sometime, when
they went to renew their household policy.

Yeah, fuck, eh.

Who says there is no God?

“
And if you look at the
time-line, it all fits nicely. Not only that, but it looks as if
our girl Betty bugged out at a convenient time. See, she’s given
herself a few days head start. But she knew, knowing their
accounting system as well as she did, that the year-end balance
would catch all of this.”

“
And the Cartiers have to
do their income taxes.” Gene nodded.

“
True. But they do that
separately. No, it’s just a quarterly thing, and since they moved
into that residence during the month of June, that is when their
year-end balance would strike. Ah, the thirtieth of
June.”

“
Ah. Okay. I get
you.”

“
Here’s where it gets a
little sick. Betty also had access—possibly still has, access to
all sorts of other information. Financial information—”

Gene gaped a bit.

“
What…kind of financial
information?”

“
It’s not just the
household, but anyone who dealt with the household. Suppliers, bank
account numbers, just imagine with her capabilities. She has
partials on all of them. She might not be able to hack the big-box
PIN numbers. But she might be able to figure it out, you know, some
other way around the problem, just by studying the outer
layers.”

And they all knew what a sieve the
internet was in terms of prohibited information, not to mention
under-the radar private networks.

Gene’s mind boggled.

He wondered about Betty
Blue.

It was a good question,
really.

But he wondered just exactly how much
she knew.

Even more so, he wondered just exactly
what she thought of all this.

Seriously, robots (or to be more
technically accurate, cyborgs) were supposed to be incapable of
insanity. They were supposed to be incapable of
irrationality.

She must have something going on in
her head. There had to be some little thing that her manufacturers
had just plain missed or something.

“
What’s next?”

“
Ah.”

Francine sat up straight.

Parsons went back to their
time-line.

“
Connect the
dots.”

It showed a series of car-thefts,
more-or-less exactly as predicted, once the vector settled down
into a straight line.

“
Nice.”

Gene reached to his belt pouch and
pulled out his device.

A short squirt of something very cold
shot through his gizzard.

“
Holy crap.” He looked up
at them. “But, I do have to call the chief.”

They nodded encouragingly. Make the
call, Gene.

Chapter Sixteen

SimTech security chief Letitia Bennett
was working in her office when the call came through from Edwin,
supervising Plan Nine activities down in the classrooms.

“
What’s up, Edwin?”
Informality with junior employees was one of her
strengths.

They loved her for it.

“
Bingo. I think we’ve
nailed it.”

“
Oh, really.”

“
Yes. We have confirmed
they are creating new IDs and credit cards. So far they have not
been reported for fraud.”

“
How is that
possible?”

“
Because they’ve been
paying them off just as quickly—wirelessly, electronically, from a
host of identities.”

Letitia sat up, and had to stop
herself from reaching for the icon showing Boyd’s desk.

She hesitated.

“
Go on—please.”

“
She’s got a shit-load of
bank accounts. We’ve only been able to crack a small number of
them. She’s got a few hundred here, a grand there, ten thousand
somewhere else. It’s a good trick if you want to travel incognito.
With her memory, it’s no challenge. A human crook would almost have
no choice but to keep extensive notes and records. If an account
gets shut down, which hasn’t happened yet, as far as we can
determine, she just tries another. All the retailers want to get
paid, and the bank just wants to see the transaction go through so
they can get the fee. No crimes have been reported. Ergo, no crimes
have been investigated because no crimes have been committed. No
credit numbers banned or blocked or prohibited. The list of bad
things that don’t happen is extensive. They’re off the radar
insofar as that goes.”

“
What about the
IDs?”

He shook his head in awe.

“
Making them up as they go
along, adding in back history and entire family trees. And, as we
well know, her internal capacity is vast—and very, very
quick.”

It was a jolt, all right, but SimTech
had built her—and their own resources were considerable. Now that
they had something to go on, it was only a matter of time. The real
challenge was to nail her first, ahead of the cops, ahead of the
crims, ahead of the competition and the hackers.

“
Interesting!” She had
questions, and Edwin, with his short, thick black hair and bland
face, every inch the professional educator, looked at her with
alert blue eyes of the darkest shade from behind his red,
horn-rimmed, spectacles/Googgs.

She thought for a second. Taken along
with the fact that Betty Blue had been stealing her employer blind,
it made sense. She hadn’t shared that with the Plan Nine team or
their supervisors as there was no real reason to do so. The source
of that data was highly-confidential, but with a secure and private
window inside of Mister Carlson’s head, not to mention every
cop-robot ever made by the firm, it was simple enough.

“
What about the
cars?”

“
The cars were stolen,
used as briefly as possible, and then abandoned where they wouldn’t
be found too quickly.” He glanced at his notes and then over his
shoulder, giving someone, presumably their team, a smile and a nod.
“The one where they tumbled it down an overgrown ravine was
classic. She knew exactly where she was going on that one. When
they stole a car, it was from one of several sources. Our team has
some good imaginations. Yet we’ve confirmed enough of these. They
stole from high-theft areas, information freely available from any
number of sources. Betty could access that, under a false IP. They
stole cars from folks who were not using them or out of contact.
One was camping, one family was on a canoe trip, one was from
someone sleeping in the very motel-room it was stolen from…er,
outside of.”

“
Okay.”

He went on. Some of the trips were
very short, which implied extensive knowledge and
planning.

“
One car was taken from a
used car lot. It was a Saturday night. It was a small town, and the
vehicle was taken from a back row—not the shiny, big-ticket items
lined up along the street. It was just a beater no one was
interested in.” They were long gone, the vehicle already abandoned
before the crime was even reported.

“
Hmn.”

“
One of them was an old
car, a valuable antique. That was in a storage unit. The owner
didn’t know it was gone until the police contacted them.” That car
went about forty kilometres and was abandoned according to the
available records.

“
So. It can be done
then—”

“
Yes. If you had access to
reams of personal data, data of the most obscure and trivial kind,
quite frankly, you could run circles around the system. And if you
had time and resources to sift through it.” What might be difficult
for one human being would be child’s play to one such as
Betty.

She had more questions.

“
But going from one
jurisdiction to another, using public roads—how are they doing
that?”

“
Ah. Yes.” Edwin took a
breath, again consulting his notes. “Surprisingly, there are long
stretches of secondary roads with no cameras. Some are dirt, some
are clay, and some are not maintained in winter. Hell, some are not
maintained even in summer. Not even product and delivery trackers.
Those are all satellite, right? The real trick is to link the
sections up and stay on them for any distance. But this explains
the remarkably eccentric track they’re leaving.”

He showed one mysterious track, where
a vehicle left a road, drove across a corn-field, and then popped
out onto another secondary road.

According to Edwin, Betty must have
been aware that the next intersection had a camera.

It was only over the course of many
hours, several days in fact, that they had been able to get a
general trend. There was no telling when they might zip off on
another tangent. Since the team were still looking backwards, it
was hard to guess forwards, although fuzzy logic would dictate to
some extent.

Edwin faded in her attention as the
ramifications whirled around and around in her head.

The trail, so far as they had been
able to reconstruct it—once they had the GPS data from recovered
vehicles, (another neat trick, and only slightly illegal) showed an
incredible zigzagging, back and forth, left and right and left and
right again.

“
When they came to a
bottleneck, they simply abandoned the vehicle.”

“…
and then they went
across country?”

“
Yes, Missus Bennett. Or,
they were using phony IDs, including a high-powered chip. Betty
could simply hold it in her hand and maybe, well…all they would
have to do is to interfere with the signal from her own
transponder-chip. Let’s say they can’t shut it off. You can’t cut
it out. You don’t have the skills, right? Just jam it, even though
an alarm might sound somewhere. Once you’re over the wire—slum
folks call it ‘going outlaw,’ they could just walk down the street
until they were past the choke-point and then steal another car.
Bugger off at a high rate of speed while technicians somewhere are
still analyzing what happened.”

While the penalties were high, so were
the stakes. Some folks took the risk. Those were either the really
dangerous ones, foreign and domestic terrorists, psychopaths on a
mission, or folks with a lot to lose. Too many offences were
capital offences these days, but no one was interested in Edwin’s
opinion on that.

In his opinion, it simply drove up
violent crime statistics because there was nothing to be gained by
surrender or cooperation. It was almost as if someone had a vested
interest in promoting crime, and especially violent crime. It was
strange, but the new capital-theft category the Justice System was
now using had really been a mistake in Edwin’s opinion.

He cleared his throat.

“
Mad as it seems, if
you’re nervy enough, you can beat the chip-scanners. One case
involved a person wearing a soft lead wrapper around their foot.
That’s where they’re implanted in Eire. They’re not uniform around
the world, which causes a few headaches when traveling. They had a
fake chip in their hand and approached the reader with their arm
extended. The reading device was presented with one warm body and
one strong signal. In that case, they only needed to get through
the one checkpoint. How long Betty Blue and this Nettles character
can keep it up, is a very good question.”

They were also heading out into far
more open country.

Letitia could hear their young team
members chatting excitedly in the background, still following up
leads and by the sounds of it enjoying the challenge immensely.
They would all be convinced of their future with the company by
this time.

She chose her words.

“
Well. Our criminals, the
subjects, must have some very good skills and
equipment.”

“
Absolutely, Missus
Bennett. It’s not easy to fake IDs, chips and vehicle transponders.
The cars are the easy part, I’m told, but it really is a tough
job—the usual method is to grab the car and chop-shop it within the
minimum time-frame. Ten minutes and off, is their motto, no matter
how many desirable bits and pieces are left behind.”

And if the police didn’t find it
within their own maximum time-frame, too much information was
constantly being poured into the stream. They had to move on. They
wrote a report and forgot about it. Items on their case list were
constantly being ‘depreciated’ in terms of priority. The highest
priorities got dealt with first. There simply wasn’t time to
resolve all of them; and homicide had a higher priority than theft
of a vehicle, or frickin’ vacuum cleaners, or expensive robots that
reportedly walked off on their own.