Cheat, page 7
In the end, taking a small sip of it, Mason found that it tasted just about like he’d expected. That being like a mouthful of fat.
Without pausing he pulled up a recipe on the float screen in front of him. It had a neural interface, thanks to an imbed that he’d designed for himself which sped things up so much that using anything else was insane. It tracked his movements as he walked to the other room, and set up his food assembler to make some ice cream. The only difference was that he wanted to plug the new fat substitute into place. That meant filling one of the under the counter containers with the stuff.
While that ran up a full batch, he headed back into his office, his screen moving ahead of him, going transparent as he moved, so he’d be less likely to trip.
Normally, after doing something like that he would have rewarded himself for a job well done by a trip into VR. Today he headed back to his workspace, and actually set up the needed order of operations for the disassembler. At the same time he started printing out copies of the heat capture nano set. The thermo-electric one, since having more on hand wouldn’t hurt anything. Then, and only after that, did he remember that he had a batch of ice cream sitting in the other room.
“The lunch of the strong!” The ice cream tasted like vanilla. Nothing else in particular. Just like good, fairly high end, ice cream.
“Full of vitamins and minerals though, so your kids won’t get scurvy.” Talking to himself was a poor habit. It would have been if anyone else was around at any rate.
Something that Sam had mentioned hit him, so he tried making several other things, too. Crackers, some doughnuts, and a butter substitute. It was strange, what worked and what failed utterly. It had to do with the heat levels needed. The doughnuts all had a strong taste of metal to them. A powerful flavor of it. The crackers were fine though. That was because of the way they’d been assembled, he realized. The process for those didn’t actually cook the food, just gave the appearance of it.
The butter substitute was actually good. It held its shape on a warm counter, and if he’d done the math right, it wouldn’t go bad for weeks. The carbon was in the spots where oxygen needed to be in order to make the lipids go rancid.
It worked so well he made up several fake nut butters, too. They were close enough he couldn’t tell the difference. That wasn’t saying much, given that he normally ate fake foods. It kind of lent itself to a skewed palate after a while.
He pushed himself like that for the whole day, then had to spend his evening doing the work that he should have been getting to for Strome and Bunker earlier. His actual job. For the people that paid him money to goof around with print designs. In this case he was supposed to be making an alternative design for running shoes. It wasn’t hard to make shoes, and no one thought it was. No, his job was to do it in a fashion that would give S&B a way to produce them without infringing on, or having to pay for, anyone else’s copyright. Technically he could have done that for himself, and then sold the plans, but it had been their idea. They had some kind of idea for it, and Mason simply didn’t.
As strange as it seemed, he spent about six hours staring at his float screen as he walked around his place, looking at everything that had ever been put into a running shoe. Then in about thirty minutes he came up with a new design that no one had ever thought of before. It wasn’t really hard, though the nano sized “comfort bubbles” that he’d invented for the soles were pretty much wasted space. They should lower the weight of the things, and leave them more flexible.
It took two tests runs to get through it, because he was sleepy enough when it came down to it that he made a stupid mistake, and printed it backwards. As if gravity wouldn’t be part of the equation?
It was funny, so he redid it, and let them just sit there on his work bench as he moved to get into bed. They were shoes, but it made sense to test things first. Which he could do in the morning. He didn’t do his best work when he was tired. No one really did.
The next day was quieter, and while he worked out in VR, he also loaded a program that made it seem like a hot actress was giving him a blowjob. One from about eighty years before that someone had put on a catalog on the net. It cost him three dollars to download, but was pretty good, as far as the interactions went. They all felt real.
Alyson here was cute, but really friendly, too. It made him feel like she actually cared about him, when she got to her knees.
Then he cleaned up and was able to get to work without bothering to cuddle for half an hour or listen to her go on about how hard her life was. It probably meant he was a horrible lover, if not a bad person. On the great side, that didn’t matter.
Virt women just didn’t care. They weren’t programmed to.
Mason got the shoe information in after he did a basic test on them. It was funny, but the soles were actually stronger by about fifty percent than they should have been. It was probably the arrangement of air bubbles. The things were light, too, as he’d thought they would be. They were sized to him, so he put them on, and was wearing them when a knock came at the front door.
He expected the police, even if there was no reason in the whole world for that to happen, so when he saw the three people in suits he figured they were on to him already. It would be about the disassembler. Watch had probably worked out what he was trying to do.
He pulled the door open, and tried not to seem creepy, or like he was running. Not even if they were going to hit him in the face.
“Mr. Sims? I’m Henry Stodermier. Ms. Horn asked us to inquire about the relationship that you’re developing? She said that she’d connect with you before we got here.”
He was about to answer when he realized that Sam hadn’t called him. That could be a simple oversight however. If he sent these people away, and they were the cops, or feds, then they might be suspicious, since they clearly knew something.
If they turned out to be lawyers or whatever, even if they did look like VR police detectives, then him making a big deal out of it would seem insane. Suspicious too.
Still, he hadn’t gotten the call, and a good chunk of his life was spent in simulations of different things. Some of them were even spy oriented, which meant that he was practically an expert, as long as the people he went up against followed the rules of games closely enough.
“Um, sorry? I’m Mason Sims, but I don’t know anyone named Horn. I don’t think. Are you from Strome and Bunker? I sent in the shoe design in earlier.” He held his right foot out, and pointed his toe, while turning it a bit so they could see his work. “They’re pretty comfortable. A little warm maybe, but I can fix that. They’ll get their own CR though, so that works.”
Playing dumb wasn’t a thing he did well, but apparently it was good enough for the moment.
The man in front, Stodermier, gave him a look that said he kind of wanted to start kicking Mason’s skinny little ass about then. He took that to be a good sign.
“Lexi Horn? We’re supposed to go over the deal you two have?” The fellow made a mistake then, trying to come in, uninvited.
It would have been one, if Mason were tough and able to kick ass. Since he wasn’t that kind of guy, he waved the other two inside as well.
“Come on in then. I don’t know who you mean. I’m not…” He spread his hands, because Mason didn’t have anything to add. If he didn’t know who it was, like he was claiming than saying anything would be a risk.
You didn’t wax poetic about people you’d never met.
The hard looking woman, with too little makeup to cover the fact that she had been born a man, her blonde hair pulled back in an unflattering way made a sound that was kind of grunty.
“Lexi Horn? The actress? We know that you had her over here last night. Tell us all about it.”
That got the fake lawyer man in the front to narrow his eyes.
“Why do I even bring you on these things, Bridger? Every time I make you promise to keep your mouth shut, and every single fucking time you fuck it up.”
Mason looked from one to the other, then spoke to the last man, who was a bit chubbier than the other two, but smiled at him.
“I don’t suppose you know what this is all about?”
The guy shook his head then, and glared a bit at the others with a hard little grin.
“We were told that someone had tracked Lexi Horn here the other day, and that her biomarkers stayed the night. It’s a big story, if we can get it before everyone else has it. So, are you doing her, or what? It’s okay to lie and say you are when you aren’t. We get paid that way, too.”
“Oh. Um, no? Let me see the biomarker prints though? Maybe I can explain what’s going on here. Probably not, but it relates to what I do for a living. That kind of data, I mean. I can probably read it.”
The people seemed a bit frustrated, but he was given the data, after he called his float screen over with a thought. The woman whistled a little when she saw it.
“Damn. If I had an Argent Prime auto I could sell it and buy one of those for myself. Sweet.”
It was, but he didn’t cover that he’d built it himself.
Instead he just started to analyze the data they gave him, then, after feeding them some ice cream, he smiled.
Then lied through his teeth.
Chapter five
“I see it… Right here. Look at this distortion.” Mason pointed at the screen that floated about five feet up in the air, directly in front of him. It used a combination of fans and electrostatics to do the work, but since the air was really still at the moment was completely silent. It didn’t weigh much, so didn’t need the extra stabilization. That made it seem like it was hovering using magic, which was the point.
Short of pointing at it and telling the three empty suits staring that he, and he alone, was the high lord of all things tech, there was no better way to let them know how right Mason was.
Not that he was telling the truth.
“See that? Someone had a massive distortion field going. My bet is that it was on purpose.” Then he overlaid the readings on his own building, the Claremont, from an outside perspective view.
Watching it run through time it was really clear that whoever had been watching had gotten things exactly right. When Lexi went to sleep on his sofa, he pretended to be shocked by it and laughed. It was phony, but the people with him seemed to buy it well enough.
“Okay, that’s it! Duh. Te even mentioned something like that.”
“Te?” This was the lead man speaking. His gray hair was slightly slicked back, as if to parody what real business people and lawyers would have been wearing. The blue clothing was about right, but didn’t fit him very well.
Mason nodded, and pretended to be sending data to the screen while pointing. To make it seem real, he zoomed in on the scene. It was dramatic, if not perfectly helpful.
“Yeah. I had a buddy of mine, Sam, sleeping over the other night. Te… Don’t let this out, but he’s actually a man, a gender-neutral though, anyway, he’d told me that he’d gotten a job as a decoy, but wouldn’t explain the idea. That does explain the expensive imbed te had. I’d wondered. I mean, most of the time when te wants something like that he comes to me for it. You know, for the reach around discount? Not that we do that. He’s really strict about the whole gen-neu thing. I mean te is.” Because everyone knew that whole third gender pronoun thing was a pain in the ass to use all the time. If he’d done it right it would, hopefully, confuse these people enough to throw them off a little.
It was the lady, Lizzy, that spoke then, cursing a bit.
“Fucking eggs! We have to sort out decoys now? What the hell is next?”
Mason knew that one, actually.
The system that the person watching Sam had used for tracking was kind of a blind one. The man, or woman, had driven around the city looking for specific bio-markers. Combinations of heat signatures, infrasound patterns generated by heartbeats and blood flow patterns. Plus electrical information that was given off by inskin computers and phones. The trick wasn’t that hard, and held about fifteen or twenty different things that would be as good at telling who a person was at a distance as fingerprints would have been.
For instance, with a good enough sensor, it was possible to trace the main veins and arteries in a body using heat. That pattern was specific to only one person. Unless someone actually faked it. Mason had never even thought about it before, but it seemed that the paparazzi and their friends had. It was a clever trick. Even better, they could listen to heartbeats from about a hundred meters away, and follow a person that way. Each person was constantly shouting to the world who they were, if you knew how to listen correctly.
The idea was both a vast invasion of privacy, and made cameras seem a bit tame, suddenly. Without breaking a single rule or law, people could follow you anywhere. Well, possibly not below ground, but if they got a lock on you once, then they could pass the info to their friends, and have a hundred or more people walking and riding around. Each looking for signs of a host of important people that might be in their city or town.
So, clearly, the next thing to come would be using an imbed set to distort and change those things at random for Sam. It wasn’t going to be easy to come up with it all either. The heat signature changes could be done by using thermal traps, and changing the patterns on the release, but how was he going to modify infrasound? Very low sound waves traveled vast distances compared to the ones in the audio range. It would take some doing to come up with the right thing that way.
Luckily these three weren’t all that savvy as to what could be done with the existent technology.
Henry Stodermier glared at him, like he was lying, and tried to look hard and mean. It kind of worked, but made him seem a lot less like a lawyer than his act was supposed to. Then, he’d never claimed to be one of those. Mason had just seen the suits and jumped to his own conclusions. These were obviously net vultures.
Circling around the scene of what they thought was a story, hoping for bits of rotted information to fall to them. It sounded delicious.
“That’s not possible. We didn’t put out that app to have our prey get wise to it this quick. The boss is going to love this. Damn. Well, sorry about the trouble then, Sims.” He looked a bit sly then, and opened his hands expansively. “I don’t suppose we could talk to your pal? Te’s getting paid to run interference isn’t a great story, but it’s something that might fill some screen time.”
Shrugging, Mason moved toward the still open door. He’d left it that way in case he’d needed to scream for help. Lizzy and Henry both seemed pretty tough, and that probably meant that the shlubby fellow was carrying ten illegal weapons. If they’d started to beat the truth out of him, Mason would have been screaming about his impending rape as loud as he could. With the door open, Watch would have picked up on it, most likely.
They weren’t allowed to set their sensors to listen to what you were saying directly, but if you projected anything beyond your walls, or left a door open, that was perfectly legal. It felt funny to use the government that way, when he was planning to shut them down, but for the time being he needed to utilize what would work.
Plus, it wasn’t like he hated them. The government was, in the end, just made up of people. Mason just couldn’t get the image of what some of them had done to Lewis Rhyse out of his head. That was all.
Moving to the door, summoning the three with a come here gesture, Mason decided to tell the truth. Not the whole truth, but the made up one that he wanted the others to believe.
“I don’t know? Probably not. I don’t know how things like that work, but if it was me I’d make my employees sign a non-disclosure agreement. Then pay them better than you can afford to, so that they won’t expose the system.” It was practically common sense, but the three people suddenly were all staring at him, like he was telling them something important.
Henry nearly growled as they all went out the front door.
“Oh? That’s what you’d do, is it?”
He nodded, trying to play innocent.
“Yeah. It makes sense. I can ask though. Stodermier? I can have Sam get in touch with you if te wants to make a bit of extra cash?”
There was a dark and slow nod then, and a tiny headshake.
“Not a lot, but some. Times are hard, for most. We can’t afford to pay too much.” Then he wandered off, into the rust colored hallway. It had been repainted about six months before, so still seemed clean and fresh, but it was an ugly color.
As the door closed, Mason muttered to himself, trying to play spy still. If he were in that kind of world, and one where people came to his door pretending to be paparazzi counted as suspicious in his book, then he needed to hold to the whole story really tightly for a while.
“Sam, what the fudge are you getting up to?”
Then he cleaned up the dishes that he’d served the ice cream in, and smiled. That had really worked well. It was good, and didn’t seem like a multi-vitamin tab. If he laced the food with other things he could use it for a lot, without anyone knowing about it. If he were a creep, that was.
Being that he wasn’t one of those, or no more of one than most people, he moved to his work room, and started to map out an imbed system that would alter various biomarkers on command. At first the idea of making it random, just to scramble things had seemed right, but then it occurred to him that while Sam might not want people to know te was Lexi, Lexi would want to seem like herself when in public. Otherwise people would just catch on and start using some other means to track her.
For the next day and a half he worked on that, interspersing his S&B project modifications. The new shoes needed heat releasing vents on them, he’d discovered after wearing them around for a bit. They were insulated, due to the nano bubbles, which acted like little heat traps. That let him put in three different sets of information all of which changed the things a bit, giving the company even more copyright options. It was nice enough work that his boss, Stacy, sent a message telling him what a good boy he was.
