Rusted Chrome

by Karlos Allen

Day One

part 2 of 4

It had stopped raining by the time he got back to the office. His stomach reminded him that it was lunch time. He grabbed a sandwich and coffee and sat down at his desk. Fitting the cap back on, he went online.

The office was the same. He heard a faint rhythmic clicking noise from the other side of his door. ‘Margie’, his AI, must be online and have something for him. It wasn’t urgent otherwise she’d be knocking. He sat down in the chair, put his feet up and poured a drink.

What looked like whiskey online was coffee in the real world and he knew that to everyone else he would seem to be staring into space and drinking coffee. He took another drink, feeling the burn gather in his stomach. Finally, feeling up to it, he called Margie.

The door opened and she poked her head in. “Yes, Mr. O’Leary?”

A lot of the other officers, he knew, had chosen younger, hotter-looking avatars for their AI’s. He preferred the middle-aged intelligent look. Besides, he didn’t need that kind of distraction.

“Margie, there was a... power outage this morning. It seems to have hit all over town. How do you feel?”

“I did feel a little funny this morning, Mr.. O’Leary. I thought maybe it was a cold, but it could have just been hot flashes.” Margie was permanently on the verge of menopause. “I’m feeling much better now though.”

“Are there any other problems on the Web?”

Margie looked faintly scandalized. The Web wasn’t supposed to exist here, the entire illusion depended on everyone pretending that this was the real world and that Margie was a real person.

“I’m sorry, Margie. Have there been any incidents or problems in town?”

“Now that you mention it, the phones did go out for a few minutes this morning. The local station still isn’t working and Ma Bell has had to re-route all of our calls through a long-distance trunk line. They did promise they will reverse any long-distance charges, though.”

O’Leary leaned back in his desk and sipped his drink reflectively. One of the problems with pretending that this was a 1940’s detective story was trying to translate modern technology into terms that fit the illusion. He thought he could translate this one though: if the phone system stood for the Web, the local station would mean one of the local server farms that boosted and rerouted the packets that people were accessing.

“Get me the manager of that station, will you Margie? I need to ask him some questions.”

“Of course, Mr. O’Leary.”

She disappeared back into the outer office. A few minute later the phone rang on his desk. He picked it up and when he did, part of his desk lit up to display the video, with the manager’s name scrolling across the bottom. This was one of those concessions to modern technology that had to be squeezed into the illusion. He wondered what Margie thought of these. Or did she know it was all a game, one that allowed him to process the flood of information that was the Web?

Tien Yuan’s avatar looked harried; that was a bad sign. “What can I do for you, Detective?”

“I won’t take much of your time, sir. Have you been able to find out what happened online this morning?”

He looked frustrated. “No, most of my employees are in the hospital right now, I’m trying to scrape together off-duty techs, but most of them practically live online so you can imagine how rough it’s been. I’ve managed to get some remotes into the area to give us a rough idea of what is up. We think there was some overheating in the coolant systems; several of the server racks were destroyed.”

“Destroyed? You mean physically?”

“Yeah. Physically. You want to see the video?”

“Sure.”

The manager’s avatar was replaced by a remote’s-eye view of the server stack. Row after row of racks passed. Then the remote moved to the next room and O’Leary got to see the damage. It was wall-to-wall twisted metal and plastic. He saw several places where electrical fires must have started. There was nothing there but heaps of foam. The remote moved to the middle of the room and stopped, hovering. The view panned slowly around the room covering everything.

“This came from a coolant blast?”

“That’s the theory. There isn’t anything else that could possibly have done it.”

“Well, you’re the expert of course. Frankly, it looks like a bomb went off in there. Have you had any threats or attempted sabotage?”

Tien laughed. “Constantly! We fend off thousands of virus and worm attacks every hour! We have firewalls so thick that it’s a wonder legitimate signals get through.”

“What about real-world attacks?”

“Real-world? Why would anybody want to attack us in the real world? The amount of damage to the Web as a whole would be next to nothing. We experienced a brief signal loss this morning, but had full access back within minutes. That was with my techs seizing all over the place.”

“Precisely, everybody who was working through those servers was affected. We had an IT tech killed over here.”

“Killed? That’s not possible.”

“It wasn’t directly from the attack. He had some cables in his hands when he seized. He was strangled.”

“Oh.” Tien looked relieved. “I see. I can’t help that, Detective. The End User License Agreement for Mental Interface specifically states that you should not be doing anything physical while online.”

“I’m not trying to establish liability, Tien. I’m investigating a possible crime. I’d like to have permission to send a forensics remote to go over that room. I’d have a bomb tech tele-operating it.”

“I don’t know, we need to get this cleaned up...”

O’Leary played his hole card. “I don’t need a warrant to search publicly accessed areas, Tien. I’m just asking permission out of respect for what you’re dealing with there.”

Tien’s avatar faded slightly as it tried to keep up with his shifting emotions. O’Leary could imagine his real expression. “All right, Detective. Please make it quick, I have work to do.”

“Of course, and thank you for your time.”

He hung up the phone while the video faded out.

“Margie!”

She popped her head back in, “Yes, Mr. O’Leary?”

“Get the Metro Police Chief, will you?”

“Of course.”

He waited, and waited, and waited. He was about to call Margie and ask what the problem was when she came back.

“I’m sorry Mr. O’Leary, he doesn’t seem to be answering, do you want me to send him a message?”

That meant he wasn’t online. “No thanks, Margie. I’ll just step out and see if I can run him down. Anybody calls for me, just take a message, will you?”

“You got it.”

O’Leary came back to the real world. The coffee was almost gone, but the sandwich was untouched. He shook his head. He’d forgotten about that. He picked it up and started chewing on it as he headed for the Chief’s office. He wished he’d been online while he was eating it, he could have done with something to cover the taste.

Chief Duyck was just coming out when he got to his door. He looked like someone anticipating getting off for an early tee time. The look was fading to one of resignation when he saw O’Leary.

“Afternoon, Chuck, what can I do for you? I hope it’s not anything too difficult, I was planning on taking off early. It’s been a quiet day.”

“If you don’t count a dead IT tech and half of the force in the hospital or at home on bed rest, Chief.”

“Oh, that. It’s just a network issue. Too bad about the tech. I’ve already started the paperwork on his death benefits. His family won’t have to worry about a thing. The force takes care of its own.” The self-righteous satisfaction on his face made O’Leary itch.

“I talked to the manager of the server farm that was damaged. He let me look at the remote footage. Several racks of servers were destroyed by an explosion.”

“Really? That’s what caused it?” The chief tried hard to look interested, but his eyes kept sliding away to the clock nearby. “What did he say caused the explosion?”

“He said a coolant reservoir must have overheated.”

“Well, he would know.” The chief tried to edge around him.

“It looked like a bomb to me.”

That got the chief’s attention. “A bomb? Are you sure? I need you to be sure on this one Chuck. The last thing we need is Federal Terror Squads running around scaring people.”

“No, sir, I’m not sure. I want to make sure, before I say anything. I know how badly we don’t want Federal investigators here if we don’t need them.” After all, he added to himself, they might decide to look into other things besides bombs. Like police chiefs that prefer playing golf to fighting crime.

“Well, do what you have to do, Chuck. I know you’ll go the extra mile on this, that’s why I promoted you to detective.” The not-so-subtle hint hung in the air.

“So, I have permission to send over a forensics remote with a bomb operator?”

The Chief hesitated, “Weeeell—”

“That’s the first thing the Feds will ask us if they do get involved. If we can present them with data, they’ll start following any leads we show them. It would stop them from wasting their time with a general investigation. Who knows where that could end up?” O’Leary could do not-so-subtle hints, too.

The Chief looked at him sharply, “All right, Detective. But you’d better be right on this one.” He turned and hurried out the door, his golf game obviously ruined. O’Leary looked after him and smiled, the day was starting to look better after all.

Hans from Forensics agreed to send out a remote, giving him an ETA on any data of about two hours, thus leaving him with nothing to do. Grabbing another cup of coffee, he sat down at his desk and went back online. The office was quiet as he carefully hung up his trench coat and pushed his fedora back from his eyes. He never went outside, that was the purpose of the office. A fully realized three-dimensional version of the old desktop, it allowed the data to come to you. Still, he always appeared in the office in hat and coat just as if he’d come in from a rainy afternoon.

Sitting down at the desk, and remembering to pour a drink, he called Margie.

She came in a second later. “Yes, Mr. O’Leary?”

“I need to talk to some people. Could you find out for me who the leaders are of the top three anti-technology movements in the greater Portland area?”

“Of course. Do you want me to include Seattle in that search?”

“Um, no. Not yet anyway. Just all of western Oregon. Focus especially on Portland and Eugene.”

“OK, Mr. O’Leary, I can have that for you in about a minute.” She disappeared back through the door. A few seconds later he heard her voice on the phone. You could never hear the words, of course, just the voice coming through the wall. It sure beat looking at a status bar, though.

About a minute later, she came back. “Actually, there’s really only one person so listed.”

“What? With all of the anti-tech demonstrations and marches and manifestos we see? There’s got to be more than one.”

“Well, if you count student movements, there are. However, they don’t usually have any kind of real structure, and the feds watch them so carefully that they usually don’t last very long either. Once the students realize that any kind of real involvement in a radical group is going to sink their careers before they can start them, they abandon them pretty fast.”

He shrugged in resignation. He hadn’t really wanted to plunge into the student underworld anyway. The combination of naïveté and anger generally gave him the overwhelming urge to grab somebody by the throat while screaming, “Get a LIFE!” Last time he’d done that, it had earned him three weeks’ unpaid administrative leave.

“OK, Margie. Who is it?”

“A Christine Porter. Here’s a file I’ve put together.” She handed him a thin manila folder.

Proceed to part 3...