All That We See or Seem, page 28
Julia put on a long-sleeved blue wool shirt and a pair of khaki-colored hiking pants, with a fleece snap-neck pullover layered on for warmth. Merino wool socks, light hiking boots, and a waterproof backpack completed her outfit.
She exited her room, locked it behind her, and got the electric bike out of the trunk of her rental car. Silent as a puff of smoke, she rode out of the parking lot and headed west.
*
The isolation of the ride was comforting. She had not been prepared—though she should have been—for how much she stood out in this very white part of the country. The looks some people in town gave her made her tense, surfaced feelings and memories that she would rather not deal with.
She rode along Silver Sage Valley Road, heading due west from the reservoir. After pedaling through corn and alfalfa fields for nearly an hour, she turned south onto a one-lane road simply numbered 161 until the fields became sagebrush, and she turned west again until the road faded to dirt and then barely more than a trail. The southernmost lava field of the Craters of the Moon National Preserve loomed in the distance, but just short of that field was an imposing squat structure that blotted out the stars near the horizon.
She checked the coordinates on her GPS: 42°45'05"N 113°08'11"W.
Just go.
It was only after she had awakened from the nightmare, screaming, that she finally understood how to read the message in the safe-deposit drawer.
The amount of money found inside the drawer wasn’t equal to the sum of the bright orange transfers on Elli’s spreadsheet. That was deliberate. Whoever found the spreadsheet would assume that Elli was simply stealing from the Prince, squirreling money away somewhere, but an insignificant amount in the grand scheme of things. They would have missed the real meaning.
But someone who just counted up the money in the drawer would have missed the point as well.
Instead, one had to notice that the money was sorted by denomination—rubber-banded stacks of hundreds, twenties, singles, as well as rolls of coins. However, some of the bundles were placed with the obverse side up, and others with the reverse side up. (In the case of the rolls of coins, the text on the side of the paper provided the orientation). Why?
Even the low-resolution photos taken by Julia’s sensepin were enough, with advanced photogrammetry, to allow her to ascertain the number of bills or coins in each stack and roll. When the obverse and reverse bills and coins were separately tallied up, two numbers resulted: $4,245.05 and $11,308.11.
Taping the rolls of coins and stacks of bills to the bottom of the drawer was both a red herring and a hint—Elli must have loved that. It showed that position was important, but not the positions of the stacks and rolls themselves.
Just go. The message wasn’t what, but where.
One was the latitude, and the other the longitude. The money in the safe-deposit box was an X that marked a spot.
This was the secret that Elli had hidden from everyone, and Julia believed that it was where she must go if she wanted to bring down the Prince.
Just go.
*
Julia found a stand of thick sagebrush with a depression behind it, possibly a collapsed lava tube. It was big enough to conceal her figure when lying down as well as the folded-up electric bike. In the open terrain of the sagebrush grassland, this was as good a hiding spot as she was going to find.
Lying face up behind the sagebrush, she cautiously held up her sensepin with one arm so that the camera peeked out over the top. She examined the camera’s view of the building through her fusion vision glasses.
The building, constructed on a square plan, was about thirty feet tall and five hundred feet wide on each side. There were virtually no windows in any of the walls. With its tan color and featureless profile, it seemed to merge into the landscape. There was only a small parking lot in front, and a tall chain-link fence surrounded the whole complex. The only gate in the fence opened onto a service road that ran north for several miles until it joined Silver Sage Valley Road going back to American Falls.
The publicly available information described the building as a data center, owned and operated by Idaho Standard Computing Solutions, a private Delaware corporation. Digging by datahounds revealed that through layers of holding companies and limited partnerships that managed to cleverly circumvent the foreign ownership reporting rules, ISCS was ultimately controlled by Princely Sum Trading Company, operating out of Hong Kong SAR. Ownership beyond that was too obscure for Talos and Julia to trace, but she had a good guess.
She deployed Puck in its spider form. Skittering about on its eight legs, the drone dashed from sagebrush to sagebrush, mimicking a foraging animal while slowly and erratically approaching the building. Julia hoped that whatever detection algorithm the compound’s exterior surveillance cameras used wouldn’t pick it out as unusual.
Once Puck got close enough, it would change its movement pattern to gradually circle the building, photographing it from every angle before returning to Julia. Completing the circuit would take hours and leave Julia open to the view of any flying drones if the data center conducted counter-surveillance. However, given the lack of cover, Julia couldn’t think of a better way to gather intel.
At dawn, about thirty cars pulled into the parking lot—more than she expected for the operating staff of a data center this size. Since Puck was near the chain-link fence at that point, Julia had it take close-up photos of each person who got out of a car. She would wait until she got back to the motel to check their public records.
As the temperature rose throughout the morning, she kept herself hydrated. It was tough to remain concealed behind the brush, which was only two or three feet tall, and she prayed that the repellent she had gotten at the sporting goods store was effective—the last thing she needed was to be surprised by a rattlesnake or scorpion.
Late morning, a delivery truck drove up to the complex and was allowed to pass through the gate. It drove around to the back, where it backed up to a loading dock. Later, when Puck finally made it back to recharge, Julia swiped through the pictures and saw a grocery store logo on some of the crates being unloaded. It struck her as odd for a data center to be taking in so much food, and perishables at that.
No one left the data center at noon. Either everyone had brought a bagged lunch, or there was a cafeteria inside.
For the rest of the day, the only vehicles that entered the compound were for mail and parcel delivery. A few times, she saw workers coming out the front door for a cigarette break. Otherwise, there was no visible activity at all.
Around four, the swing shift arrived to relieve the morning shift. After the flurry of cars coming and going, the same pattern persisted as in the morning, with the only visible activity being smoke breaks by a few workers.
A couple of hours after nightfall, a large trailer truck rumbled down the service road, entered the gate, and pulled up to the loading dock. Taking a risk, Julia had Puck scurry up to the fence to get a closer look, only to find out that workers had put up screens around the dock to make it impossible to see what was being unloaded. Half an hour later, the truck pulled out.
No other vehicles approached for the rest of the evening.
Shortly after midnight, with the graveyard shift coming in and the night chill settling, Julia stood up and stretched, unobserved. Well out of the view of any cameras inside the bubble of light around the data center, she unfolded her bike in darkness and rode away under the stars.
*
Back at the motel, Julia went to bed right away and slept dreamlessly.
After she woke up with the chirping birds, she went for a run, showered, and ate a hearty breakfast of eggs and toast at a nearby diner. Then she began to go through the data she had gathered yesterday.
Talos cleaned up the blurry shots of data center workers from afar and sent out a pack of datahounds. Most of the workers checked out as technicians or engineers. A couple were transplants with degrees from out of state; most were locals. Jobs at the data center paid well and were highly desirable, at least judging by the social media feeds.
But some of the workers didn’t fit.
Both the morning shift and the swing shift included men who didn’t have technical backgrounds. Some had criminal histories; some were ex-military or law enforcement. A few, moreover, had no social media presence at all. There were certainly legitimate reasons why someone—herself, for example—wouldn’t want to be on social media, but it was suspicious.
She considered checking in black-market facial ID databases but decided against it in the end. Some of these black-market databases actually made money by hosting fake profiles of people who didn’t want to be found and alerted them when there were queries for them. Julia didn’t want to risk putting the Prince or his people on guard.
One of these social-media-less faces stood out further from the rest. The man didn’t arrive in a car in the morning, and he was still at the complex by the time Julia left. She suspected that he lived on-site. The only reason Puck got a picture of him was because he was on the dock supervising the unloading of the grocery truck.
When Talos presented his enhanced picture to Julia, she felt every muscle in her body tense up.
She was staring into the face of a very familiar predator: Victor.
FORTY-ONE
Victor was bored. Bored enough to be watching a game show about finding hidden treasure. I’d be good at finding hidden treasure, he thought. I have a logical mind.
But he didn’t feel much pleasure in that declaration. A logical mind didn’t necessarily lead to professional satisfaction.
Yes, after that horrible waste of a spring chasing the dream weaver woman and her feckless lawyer husband, he was finally back to doing what he loved: farming.
But unlike the farms in Asia, which offered a lot more amenities, he had to keep a much lower profile here. Spending twenty-four hours a day, six days a week inside a windowless building, and then finding yourself in the middle of nowhere in a hick town on the one day you had off—this was not a life for human beings. You might be better off in prison.
Sure, the Prince had appealed to Victor’s vanity by telling him he couldn’t trust anyone else to run this place. It was so crucial to his empire, the linchpin, really. And Victor was being paid handsomely. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that his life was wasting away inside this concrete bunker.
He cracked his knuckles, paused the game show, and switched to the video feeds from the farm. The crops were doing well. It was like watching wheat grow.
God, he was bored!
At least the Prince was no longer bothering him about that “hacker” girl. After Victor had burned down her apartment, the girl had hightailed it to New York City and then disappeared, no doubt hoping to lose herself in the crowd. That was fine with Victor. Let her hide in the dirt like the wriggly worm she was.
The computer on his desk beeped, popping up a notification. He sat up, alert and interested.
Something was finally happening.
*
“You consider yourself clever,” Victor said, “Isabella. It’s always Isabella the intellectual. With her math degree.”
The woman he addressed sat on a chair on the other side of his gray metal desk. Two standing men bracketed her, each easily twice her weight. She said nothing.
Truth be told, he hadn’t known her name until thirty seconds ago—but he enjoyed toying with people by making them think that he knew them intimately; it added to his power over them. He was mocking her “C.V.,” the form that everyone was required to fill out with their skills upon intake—the Prince had insisted on calling the form that, no surprise. Isabella had noted that she had gone to college (some online thing). Fat lot of good that did her. She was terrible at following directions.
“You tried to send a message.”
He swung his monitor around to face her. Filling the screen was an enlarged meme featuring GIGI-H, a vocaloid-impersonator growing in popularity. The human singer, wearing a robotic expression with a hint of disdain, was endorsing a primary challenger in a congressional race in Georgia, who was rumored to be more sympathetic than the incumbent to solar cell manufacturers who wanted less regulation. (Truth be told, it was doubtful GIGI-H could even pick out Georgia on a map, but nobody believed that celebrities had any genuine political views anyway. They were just symbols in the perpetual meme wars that all campaigns had become.)
Victor tapped a few keys. The picture on the screen changed, with all the pixels flipped to their complementary hues—or almost all the pixels. A line of white text appeared right across the image: “HELP US. WE ARE IMPRISONED AND FORCED TO WORK.” There was an embedded image right below the text, a blurry photograph taken from inside a moving vehicle, showing a tan landscape populated by sagebrush and rocks.
Isabella glanced at the meme with no expression. “I don’t know anything about that.”
Victor nodded at one of the men. He slapped her across the face twice in quick succession. She yelped from the shock and pain, cowered, and covered her face with her hands, shaking all over.
“I’m not angry that you think you’re so clever,” Victor said. “After all, you are clever. You know English well, and you have technical skills. That is why you’ve been assigned to do something interesting, as opposed to tapping the screen all day like a monkey, like those uneducated boys and girls in the cage.” He stabbed a finger at her across the table. “Though you don’t seem to appreciate your good luck.”
The woman shrank away, whimpering.
“I’m angry because you think I’m dumb. I’m angry because you’re not clever enough to actually understand the position you’re in. Give me the camera.”
The woman didn’t move. One of the men grabbed one of her arms and began to pull her out of the chair. She resisted, trying to stay in the chair, shouting, “Please! Please!”
“Give me the camera,” he repeated.
With a trembling hand, she reached inside her pants, inside her underwear, and retrieved a small object and placed it on the table. It resembled a tube of lipstick.
Victor picked it up and examined it closely. Then he placed it on the ground and stomped on it until all the electronics and plastic had been pulverized.
“There is nothing you can do that we haven’t seen,” said Victor. “We’ve been doing this a long time, all over the world. Cameras are watching you every single second, when you sleep, when you eat, when you shit. Our neuromesh has been trained on all that footage, so it knows every trick those in your position have ever tried. Do you think you are cleverer than my robot?”
The woman shook her head vigorously, trying to appease Victor.
“Also, do you think the AI tools we give you won’t snitch on you when you try something like this? That’s the difference between a robot and you: a robot is smart enough to know never to betray its master. You’ll never get away from here. Do you understand?”
The woman continued to whimper, nodding all the while.
“Normally, I’d lie to you and tell you that you’ll be punished by having the cost of your attempt to get help added to your indenture debt—the salary of these two gentlemen during the two hours when they had to interrupt their day to deal with you, the cost of running the computers to detect your clumsy attempt, the value of the lost hours of productivity from you, and so on.
“But I think we’re past that point now. So here’s the truth: there is no debt; you’ll be here until the day you die. But the days until you die can be almost pleasant if you’re good and very, very painful if you’re bad. Do you understand?”
The woman continued to whimper.
Victor gestured at the man who had slapped her. He pulled Isabella’s hands away from her face and slapped her again. She yelped once more.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes. Yes!”
“Very good,” Victor said. “These two gentlemen are going to take you away now, and they’re going to work with you a little more. You must learn the lesson.”
She screamed and begged for mercy as she was dragged away.
Reluctantly, Victor went back to his game show.
FORTY-TWO
The morning was cool and pleasant.
Julia turned down Vecsey Street and saw that the delivery truck was at the supermarket loading dock, as had been the case two mornings earlier. Two men were carrying crates into the truck: canned food, rice, pasta, fresh produce.
Concealing herself behind a maple, she tapped her sensepin and whispered, “Now.”
About fifty feet down the street, a large branch near the top of another maple broke and crashed to the sidewalk, barely missing a woman, who exclaimed in shock.
People poured out of offices and stores along the street to see what had happened. The two men loading the truck jogged over as well.
Julia ran over to the loading dock as soon as it was clear. She found a wooden crate filled with a bag of rice and sacks of potatoes. Lifting out two of the bags and carrying them over to be hidden behind some shelves, she made room in the crate for herself.
As she crouched down in the space, spider-form Puck, having made its way down from the maple tree unobserved, jumped into the crate with her. She dragged the cover back over the crate.
The two men eventually returned and finished loading the truck. Julia could feel her crate being carried into the truck, and something else was placed on top. She tried to lift the cover; it wouldn’t budge.
No way to back out now. Inside the stifling crate, she breathed slowly to calm her wildly pounding heart.
*
She tried to guess where she was based on the jostling she experienced in the dark.
After what seemed like hours, a series of hard bumps told her that she was along the service road to the compound. The going was so rough that she found it hard to breathe. The truck slowed down, stopped, backed up, and stopped again. During the unloading that followed, her crate was tilted so precipitously on the hand truck that she had to stifle a cry of terror.
