“Is there any way you could get me the specifications for my targeted occlusions?” Adam waited for her response before daring to raise the possibility of payment. If the request was insulting in itself, offering a bribe would only compound the offense.
“No,” she replied, as unfazed as if he’d wondered aloud whether room service might stretch to shiatsu. “That shit is locked down tight. After last night, it would take me all day to explain homomorphic encryption to you, so you’ll just have to take my word for it: Nobody alive can answer that, even if they wanted to.”
“But I’ve recovered bills from his laptop that mention it,” Adam protested. “So much for Fort fucking Knox!”
Sandra shook her head. “That means that he was careless—and I should probably get someone in account generation to rethink their line items— but Loadstone would have held his hand very, very tightly when it came to spelling out the details. Unless he wrote it down in his personal diary, the information doesn’t exist anymore.”
Adam didn’t think that she was lying to him. “There are things I need to know,” he said simply. “He must have honestly believed that I’d be better off without them—but if he’d lived long enough for me to ask him face to face, I know I could have changed his mind.”
Sandra paused the movie. “Very little software is perfect, least of all when it’s for something as complex as this. If we fail to collect everything we aim to collect …”
“Then you also fail to block everything you aim to block,” Adam concluded. “Which was probably mentioned somewhere in the fine print of his contract, but I’ve been racking my brain for months without finding a single stone that punched a hole in the sieve.”
“What if the stones only got through in fragments, but they can still be put together?”
Adam struggled to interpret this. “Are you telling me to take up repressed memory therapy?”
“No, but I could get you a beta copy of Stitcher on the quiet.”
“Stitcher?”
“It’s a new layer they’ll eventually be offering to every client,” Sandra explained. “It’s in the nature of things, with the current methods, that the side-load will end up with a certain amount of implicit information that’s not in an easily accessible form: thousands of tiny glimpses of memories that were never brought across whole, but which could still be described in detail if you pieced together every partial sighting.”
“So this software could reassemble the shredded page of a notebook that still holds an impression of what was written on the missing page above?”
Sandra said, “For someone with a digital brain, you’re about as last-century as they come.”
Adam gave up trying to harmonize their metaphors. “Will it tell me what I want to know?”
“I have no idea,” Sandra said bluntly. “Among the fragments bearing implicit information—and there will certainly be thousands of them—it will recognize some unpredictable fraction of their associations, and let you follow the new threads that arise. But I don’t know if that will be enough to tell you anything more than the color of the sweater your mother was wearing on your first day of school.”
“Okay.”
Sandra started the movie again. “You really should have joined me in the bar last night,” she said. “I told them I had a friend who could drink any Salvadorian under the table, and they were begging for a chance to bet against you.”
“You’re a sick woman,” Adam chided her. “Maybe next time.”
10.
Reassembled back in California, Adam took his time deciding whether to make one last, algorithmic attempt to push through the veil. If the truth was that the old man had been a murderer, what good would come of knowing it? Adam had no intention of “confessing” the crime to the authorities, and taking his chances with whatever legal outcome the courts might eventually disgorge. He was not a person; he could not be prosecuted or sued, but Loadstone could be ordered to erase every copy of his software, and municipal authorities instructed to place his body in a hydraulic compactor beside unroadworthy cars and unskyworthy drones.
But even if he faced no risk of punishment, he doubted that Colman’s relatives would be better off knowing that what they’d always imagined was a burglary gone wrong had actually been a premeditated ambush. It should not be for him to judge their best interests, of course, but the fact remained that he’d be the one making the decision, and for all the horror he felt about the act itself and the harm that had been done, his empathy for the survivors pushed him entirely in the direction of silence.
So if he did this, it would be for his benefit alone. For the relief of knowing that the old man had simply been a vain, neurotic self-mythologizer who’d tried to leave behind the director’s cut of his life … or for the impetus to disown him completely, to torch his legacy in every way he could and set out on a life of his own.
Adam asked Sandra to meet him at Caesar’s Diner. He slid a small parcel of cash onto her seat, and she slipped a memory stick into his hand.
“What do I do with this?” he asked.
“Just because you can’t see all your ports in the bathroom mirror doesn’t mean they’re not there.” She wrote a sequence of words on a napkin and passed it to Adam; it read like “Jabberwocky” mistranscribed by someone on very bad drugs. “Four times, and that will take the side of your neck off without putting you to sleep.”
“Why is that even possible?”
“You have no idea how many Easter eggs you’re carrying.”
“And then what?”
“Plug it in, and it will do the rest. You won’t be paralyzed, you won’t lose consciousness. But it will work best if you lie down in the dark and close your eyes. When you’re done, just pull it out. Working the skin panel back into
