there anymore. Her numbers all rang dead.
The apartment building had once been a pleasant, middle-class sort of place, with a red awning and a niche for a doorman. Now it had become more run down, the awning's edges frayed, one pane of lobby glass broken out and replaced with a sheet of cardboard. The doorman was long gone.
It seemed to Lawrence that this fate had befallen many of the City's buildings. They reminded him of the buildings he'd seen in Belgrade one time, when he'd been sent out to brief a gang of outsource programmers his boss had hired — neglected for years, indifferently patched by residents who had limited access to materials.
It was the dinner hour, and a steady trickle of people were letting themselves into Anja's old building. Lawrence watched a couple of them enter the building and noticed something wonderful and sad: as they approached the building, their faces were the hard masks of city-dwellers, not meeting anyone's eye, clipping along at a fast pace that said, 'Don't screw with me. ' But once they passed the threshold of their building and the door closed behind them, their whole affect changed. They slumped, they smiled at one another, they leaned against the mailboxes and set down their bags and took off their hats and fluffed their hair and turned back into people.
He remembered that feeling from his life before, the sense of having two faces: the one he showed to the world and the one that he reserved for home. In the Order, he only wore one face, one that he knew in exquisite detail.
He approached the door now, and his pan started to throb ominously, letting him know that he was enduring hostile probes. The building wanted to know who he was and what business he had there, and it was attempting to fingerprint everything about him from his pan to his gait to his face.
He took up a position by the door and dialed back the pan's response to a dull pulse. He waited for a few minutes until one of the residents came down: a middle-aged man with a dog, a little sickly-looking schnauzer with grey in its muzzle.
'Can I help you?' the man said, from the other side of the security door, not unlatching it.
'I'm looking for Anja Krotoski,' he said. 'I'm trying to track down her brother. '
The man looked him up and down. 'Please step away from the door. '
He took a few steps back. 'Does Ms. Krotoski still live here?'
The man considered. 'I'm sorry, sir, I can't help you. ' He waited for Lawrence to react.
'You don't know, or you can't help me?'
'Don't wait under this awning. The police come if anyone waits under this awning for more than three minutes. '
The man opened the door and walked away with his dog.
His phone rang before the next resident arrived. He cocked his head to answer it, then remembered that his lifelogger was dead and dug in his jacket for a mic. There was one at his wrist pulse-points used by the health array. He unvelcroed it and held it to his mouth.
'Hello?'
'It's Gerta, boyo. Wanted to know how your Anomaly was going. '
'Not good,' he said. 'I'm at the sister's place and they don't want to talk to me. '
'You're walking up to strangers and asking them about one of their neighbors, huh?'
He winced. 'Put it that way, yeah, OK, I understand why this doesn't work. But Gerta, I feel like Rip Van Winkle here. I keep putting my foot in it. It's so different. '
'People are people, Lawrence. Every bad behavior and every good one lurks within us. They were all there when you were in the world — in different proportion, with different triggers. But all there. You know yourself very well. Can you observe the people around you with the same keen attention?'
He felt slightly put upon. 'that's what I'm trying—'
'Then you'll get there eventually. What, you're in a hurry?'
Well, no. He didn't have any kind of timeline. Some people chased Anomalies for
Gerta clucked. 'Don't give in to the agoraphobia, Lawrence. Hang in there. You haven't even heard my news yet, and you're already ready to give up?'
'What news? And I'm not giving up, just want to sleep in my own bed—'
'The entry checkpoints, Lawrence. You cannot do this job if you're going to spend four hours a day in security queues. Anyway, the news.
'It wasn't the first time he did it. I've been running the logs back three years and I've found at least a dozen streams that he tampered with. Each time he used a different technique. This was the first time we caught him. Used some pretty subtle tripwires when he did it, so he'd know if anyone ever caught on. Must have spent his whole life living on edge, waiting for that moment, waiting to bug out. Must have been a hard life. '
'What was he doing? Spying?'
'Most assuredly,' Gerta said. 'But for whom? For the enemy? the Securitat?'
They'd considered going to the Securitat with the information, but why bother? the Order did business with the Securitat, but tried never to interact with them on any other terms. The Securitat and the Order had an implicit understanding: so long as the Order was performing excellent data-analysis, it didn't have to fret the kind of overt scrutiny that prevailed in the real world. Undoubtedly, the Securitat kept satellite eyes, data-snoopers, wiretaps, millimeter radar and every other conceivable surveillance trained on each Campus in the world, but at the end of the day, they were just badly socialized geeks who'd left the world, and useful geeks at that. The Securitat treated the Order the way that Lawrence's old bosses treated the company sysadmins: expendable geeks who no one cared about — so long as nothing went wrong.
No, there was no sense in telling the Securitat about the sixty-eight bytes.
'Why would the Securitat poison its own data-streams?'
'You know that when the Soviets pulled out of Finland, they found forty
There were Securitat vans on the street around him, going past every now and again, eerily silent engines, playing their cheerful music. He stepped back into shadow, then thought better of it and stood under a pool of light.
'OK, so it was a habit. How do I find him? No one in the sister's building will talk to me. '
'You need to put them at their ease. Tell them the truth, that often works. '
'You know how people feel about the Order out here?' He thought of Posy. 'I don't know if the truth is going to work here. '
'You've been in the order for sixteen years. You're not just some fumble-tongued outcast anymore. Go talk to them. '
'But—'
'Go, Lawrence. Go. You're a smart guy, you'll figure it out. '
He went. Residents were coming home every few minutes now, carrying grocery bags, walking dogs, or dragging their tired feet. He almost approached a young woman, then figured that she wouldn't want to talk to a strange man on the street at night. He picked a guy in his thirties, wearing jeans and a huge old vintage coat that looked like it had come off the eastern front.
''Scuse me,' he said. 'I'm trying to find someone who used to live here. '
The guy stopped and looked Lawrence up and down. He had a handsome sweater on underneath his coat, design-y and cosmopolitan, the kind of thing that made Lawrence think of Milan or Paris. Lawrence was keenly aware of his generic Order-issued suit, a brown, rumpled, ill-fitting thing, topped with a polymer coat that, while warm, hardly flattered.
'Good luck with that,' he said, then started to move past.
'Please,' Lawrence said. 'I'm — I'm not used to how things are around here. There's probably some way I could ask you this that would put you at your ease, but I don't know what it is. I'm not good with people. But I really need to find this person, she used to live here. '
The man stopped, looked at him again. He seemed to recognize something in Lawrence, or maybe it was that he was disarmed by Lawrence's honesty.
'Why would you want to do that?'
