Gene Mapper by Taiyo Fujii Read Free Book Online

should go ahead with the data I had to see what I could get.
    First I had to find a salvager.



3    Internet Diver
    My call tone beeped again. It was late afternoon of the following day. The sun was turning the rear wall of my “conference room” a warm gold. The next appointment was a salvager who went by the handle of Ya-God-Oh. His screen name was an attempt at Japanese, at least.
    My call for salvagers generated a few dozen responses. I winnowed the field to five after checking track records and specialties. All the candidates used handles, unlike the mappers I was used to dealing with. I didn’t care what they called themselves if they could do the job, but this morning’s conversations with Bull’s-eye and Jackpot 7 had pretty much wasted my time. I’d had more than enough hacker bullshit for one day.
    Why did these guys spend so much time harping on the tools they used? The old Internet was fenced with cyber razor wire to keep it from contaminating TrueNet, but you didn’t have to be a genius to get onto it. What was left of it depended on which country or even which city you were in, but from Tokyo you could still reach old servers through any Meshnet wireless node run by Anonymous.
    Bull’s-eye was completely full of himself. “Leave it to me, old buddy. Give me the search term and I’ll track down whatever it is you want. What was it again? Right, DNA. Find it for sure. For sure, no problem. Give me the model number or some unique ID. There’s a cache somewhere. I can get it for you. Just give me a week or so.”
    If all I needed was to input search terms to a zombie server and fetch something from a twenty-year-old cache, I didn’t need a salvager. What I needed was a hell of a lot more complicated. I needed a specialist, not a script-kiddie.
    Ya-God-Oh claimed to have some background in genetic engineering. I wasn’t sure what to believe, but he had to be better than the two guys I interviewed that morning.
    “I’ve been waiting for your call. I’ll be recording, if you don’t mind.”
    I was sitting across from a dog.
    He had a red bandanna around his neck. Big and brown. Golden retriever? His front paws were on the table. He looked slowly around the room and smiled, if that was possible for a dog.
    At first I thought, This can’t be Ya-God-Oh . An assistant? Maybe an agent. Still, I was amazed by the resolution. I go out of my way to make my stage presentable, but this dog made it look like a cheap video game. The rendering was astonishing. At first I almost thought I might be looking at an actual canine in RealVu, but the long golden fur, with the tip of each hair glowing in the sunlight, was waving gently in the breeze from the air conditioner. If the fur was complying with my physics settings, this had to be an avatar. Maybe a commercial setup like Zucca’s could hit this level of realism, but I didn’t know it was possible to render so many frames per second in my environment. If he was sending his assistant with an avatar this good, I wondered if my system would choke when he showed up.
    The dog noticed the flashing AGREE button on the table and tapped it with a paw. He looked up and smiled.
    “Nice to meet you, Mamoru. My name is Yagodo. If you want to tape, go ahead. Sorry for the unorthodox avatar. I hope it won’t be a problem.”
    With their mouths open, dogs tend to look like they’re smiling anyway, but I had a feeling the man on the other side of the stage was actually grinning. So this was Yagodo’s avatar, and that’s how his name was pronounced. I’d heard about nonhuman avatars—animals, cartoon characters—used by some members of Anonymous and every one of the No ID fundamentalists who refuse to even connect to TrueNet.
    I’d been hoping to avoid one of those types. It looked like I’d drawn another low card. This was worse than empty bragging about hacker tools. Yagodo was spoofing me—in a job interview no less. He had to be fake.
    My avatar concealed my