Mind Over Ship

Mission Accomplished

With her skin mission accomplished, Saul and Tia waving good-bye and her rental car lifting off from their sod-paved airstrip, Andrea gave her tired body up to the plush comfort of her seat pod. But she didn’t return to her always room; the real Alaskan panorama outside her windows was too disturbing to ignore. Mountain range on top of mountain range in every direction as far as the eye could see.

Meanwhile, the six-month term of their quarantine world passed, and the pocket world had not imploded. Perhaps the datapin Zoranna had sent Jaspersen was harmless after all.

What do you think? E-P said. Break quarantine and open it?

That was what Andrea wanted to do. It was probably safe, and her curiosity was high, but a nagging sense of caution made her say, “No, let it run another six months. In the meantime, are you able to make me a new Jaspersen sim and sidebob here?”

Two phantoms appeared in her car and struggled to orient themselves. The sim looked at her, then outside the window, then back at her and said, “Myr Tiekel, what is the meaning of this? How did you — ?” The true purpose of her visit dawned on it then, and it thundered, “This is a gross violation of my privacy. I will sue you. I will bring you to ruin for this. This is criminal. This is —”

“Oh, please,” she said, “spare me the drama.” Andrea tuned the Jaspersen sim out and asked the sidebob what was on Alblaitor’s datapin.

“It contains detailed, proprietary financial statements of Applied People,” the sidebob said. “And it outlines the broad terms of a possible sale. It’s an intriguing offer.”

Andrea wiped them both away and said, “Now bring me a set of Zorannas.”

The pair of Zorannas appeared where the Jaspersens had been, and E-P warned, Allow us to remind you, Alblaitor has never sat for a preffing session and these constructs are only inferential.

Why remind her? Was E-P losing confidence in its work? “They’ll do,” she said, and when the pair of Zorannas had oriented themselves, the sim said, “Andrea, what is the meaning of this?”

“I wanted to know why you’d be willing to sell your company to Saul Jaspersen.”

“Jaspersen? I would never sell to him.” The sidebob agreed with the sim, and Andrea wiped them away.

“This doesn’t track,” she said. “Are you sure the pin came from Zoranna?”

From her hands to his, we’re highly confident of it.

Andrea sat back as her car crossed the Copper River Valley below. Count on Jaspersen to reside beyond the reach of modern infrastructure, nearly four hundred kilometers from the nearest Slipstream station in Wasilla. Knife-edge ridges plummeted to ice-carved gullies. Water seeped from every cranny. Everything below timberline was a deep, vital green. Few signs of humans, no roads or power lines, no towers or relay stations, no strip mines, no forest clearings, and no flat places for her car to put down in case of emergency. She fretted for the continued purr of its engines.

After a while the car left the wilderness and entered a busy traffic corridor in a narrow valley. The second six-month term inside the quarantine space elapsed with no sign of trouble.

“Can we communicate with my sim?” she asked.

Not without breaking quarantine.

Andrea wasn’t ready to do that, but neither could she let the mystery go. At the Wasilla tube station, she transferred from her taxi to her private Slipstream car. After the glory of the raw Alaskan landscape, the claustrophobic Slipstream tube was so bland that she returned to her always room. The room would make the four-hour trip tolerable at least, though her bones longed for the buoyant relief of her tank. “What if we went around the Jaspersen interface altogether and decoded and analyzed the pin ourselves?”

Assuming it didn’t blow up, it could take months of realtime to decrypt it in quarantine. It’s a very strong cipher.

“Can’t you use the E-Pluribus processors?”

That would require taking our quantum lattice off E-Pluribus preffing work and quarantining it. That could seriously disrupt our core business. Is your sense of danger that great?

“I don’t know. Better safe than sorry.”

If something went wrong, we could lose the processors.

“Better than losing everything.”

So E-P constructed a second quarantine space, this one containing an Andrea sim, the datapin clone, decoder algorithms, and three of the world’s most powerful quantum processors. The lights came up in E-Pluribus preffing suites all over the UD, and patrons were asked to stand by during technical difficulties.

THE CAR WAS approaching the Bay Area when the quarantined processors went into standby mode. That meant the cipher had been broken. One of the processors started up again as the Andrea sim inside the quarantine space analyzed the data on the pin.

Andrea, meanwhile, waited in her always room, taking comfort in its well-ordered space. Outside her window, the sun was already setting.

After a half hour of sporadic activity, the processor cycled off and on three times — her sim’s signal for all clear. At the same time she could feel the jostling of the Slipstream car as it rose from the intercontinental tube and joined the Bay Area traffic grid.

“Break quarantine and open a text channel to my proxy,” she said. Soon a message came through:

BOOBY TRAP SET FOR JASPERSEN, NOT US. CLUMSY,

LOW-TECH SLEIGHT-OF-HAND. DATAPIN FILLED WITH

PROPRIETARY FINANCIAL RECORDS,

AS JASPERSEN SIDEBOB SAID.

PAINTED FALSE PICTURE OF APPLIED PEOPLE

FINANCIAL WORTH MUCH ROSIER THAN JUSTIFIED.

APPLIED PEOPLE BARGAIN OF THE CENTURY.

NUMBERS RIGGED TO CHANGE BACK TO

AUDITED VALUES AFTER SALE COMPLETE

LEAVE NO TRACE OF DUPLICITY.

DIFFICULT FOR FORENSIC SLEUTH

TO PROVE OTHERWISE.

“Amazing,” Andrea said.

We agree, E-P said. Alblaitor thought she could sell Applied People to Jaspersen for far more than we would have paid, and it would have bankrupted him. Who knows, considering his lack of technical sophistication, it might have worked.

“All our careful planning upset by a simple bait and switch.”

Do you feel it safe now to reintegrate the processors into the E-Pluribus lattice?

Andrea thought about it. All her suspicions had melted away. There was no disconnect after all: Zoranna Alblaitor was acting true to her character. “Yes, it’s safe.”

She could feel the tube car’s deceleration, and her sense of satisfaction was increased by the knowledge that she was less than twenty minutes away from her tank. She was about to leave her always room when she heard a strange sizzling sound behind her. She turned to see a thin yellow stain creeping up a corner of the room and spreading out across the walls.

“What is that?”