before a couple of his killers had died trying to collect it. If it was worth that many people dying for, it must have
Jay snapped his fingers and was suddenly in a brightly lit kitchen, wearing a huge chef’s hat and the associated double-breasted white top.
A bag of flour sat on the countertop. Next to it was a bowl and a sifter.
Carefully he scooped flour from the bag and dumped it into the sifter. A crank turned a wire whisk in the device, brushing only the tiniest particles through a wire mesh set in the bottom and into the bowl, keeping anything else.
The dry, yeasty smell of flour filled the air as he worked.
Straining the stuff through the sifter would give him the closest inspection possible of the data on the disk. This program, unlike the prospector, used more CPU power, tapping into the mainframe and taking up a large portion of Net Force’s available processing power. Word processors on Net Force’s network wouldn’t feel it, but anyone doing anything complicated right now would probably be cursing him.
He paid close attention, inspecting everything that stuck to the bottom of the mesh.
Which was nothing: If it was hiding here, it was microscopic.
He remembered a line he’d read in a newspaper article once, a quote from Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine. “You can only fail if you give up too soon.”
He killed the chef scenario.
Back in his office, Jay blinked. What was he missing here? Could there be something hidden within the pictures on the disk?
He jacked back into VR…
Jay slipped into a viewer program modeled after a movie theater he’d liked as a kid. His shoes stuck and released as he walked on the gummy concrete floor. When he sat, he felt the rough fabric of the old cloth seat against his back.
The disk was full of pictures exactly as advertised — a beautiful old mosque near the sea. A few video clips showed worshippers bowing toward Mecca, kneeling and bowing on beautifully woven prayer rugs, and others showed old-style stitched-photo VR views of various points around the temple.
The program he’d used would have detected any hidden steg-artifacts in the compressed images, and he didn’t see any obvious
Hmm. Maybe that was it. Could there be a slim data-fiche built into the surface of the disk?
Jay killed the scenario—
Back in RW, Jay ejected the disk. He scrutinized the surface, looking for any pits or depressions that could be a disguised interface for a film of nanotransistor RAM. Maybe he’d underestimated the resources of the third world.
It looked as smooth as the proverbial baby’s butt. Not a dimple, a scratch, nothing.
He scanned the disk for the third time.
And finally, it came to him. So simple. So… obvious.
He pulled his hi-res cam from its holster on the side of his ancient flat panel and captured a scan of the ugly dot-matrix label.
He yanked his VR goggles down—
Jay strode into his electronics-lab scenario. Once there, he tapped a console, and the scan of the label appeared as a holoproj in midair.
It was like Poe’s purloined letter, right there in plain sight. The dots making up the border and the lion made an ugly picture, but they served a hidden purpose as well — they filled a two-dimensional data matrix with information.
He smiled, feeling a thrill of pleasure, admiring whoever had come up with the code scheme.
In the late eighties and nineties, programmers had devised ways of storing data by printing it. Primitive UPC barcodes evolved into data structures that were read up-and-down as well as left-and-right. The result was that several pages of data could be stored in a tiny space, looking like nothing so much as a series of dots.
The technology had advanced as printer technology and CCDs had gotten more powerful, and had included basic error corrections that allowed part of the matrix to be lost without loss of information.
As a boy, Jay had had a battered and much-loved Nintendo Gameboy that had featured a card reader. Games were “printed” on the back of the card in 2-D formats and “read” by the handheld. Run the card through the reader, and
Of course no one did that anymore, it was more trouble than it was worth given flashmem and cardware.
Well. Almost no one did it, apparently. So old and hoary, it was like shaving the head of a slave and tattooing a message there, waiting for the hair to grow back, then sending him on his way.
He zoomed the scan and took a closer look. A lot of 2-D codes had been developed, each with different characteristics and different baseline reference points — bullseyes or L-shaped lines used to orient the camera reader. The programmer of this one had been smart. There were no reference points at all. Which made things more difficult — unless he read the code from the exact direction it had been intended to be read from, he’d get nothing.
And that was
Well, well. It looked like this was going to be more interesting than he’d figured. He might even have to
He laughed aloud at that. It was so much more fun if you had to stretch a little now and then.
2
Samuel Walker Cox spared a glance at the timer on the stair-stepper, even though he was sure he had four minutes and a few seconds left before he was done.
The timer, flashing down from twenty-six minutes to zero, read 04:06.
He smiled. The internal clock he carried was still working pretty well for a man in his mid-sixties. Well, all right, to be technically accurate, sixty-six. Even better.
The stair-stepper, which was the top-of-the-line DAL Industries model, was a marvel of hydraulic and electrical engineering. It was essentially a set of endless risers, and worked like a treadmill: You climbed stairs, but you never went anywhere.
