Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross Read Free Book Online Page B

scratching the surface ...
    I'm sorry. Maybe you think I'm being unjustifiably harsh — a presentation graphics program is just a piece of standard office software, after all — but my experience with PowerPoint is, shall we say, nonstandard. Besides, you've probably never had a guy with a shoulder holster and a field ops team backing him up drag you into a stakeout and whip out a laptop, to show you a presentation that begins with a slide stating: THIS BRIEFING WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN FIFTEEN SECONDS. It's usually a sign that things have gone wronger than a very wrong thing indeed, and you are expected to make them go right again, or something doubleplus ungood is going to happen.

    Double-plus ungood indeed.

    "Destiny-entanglement protocol," I mutter, as Pinky fusses around behind me and turns the fat-assed recliner I'm sitting in to face the wardrobe while Boris pokes at his laptop. As protocols go, I've got to admit it's a new one on me. "Would you mind explaining — hey, what's that duct tape for"

    "Sorry, Bob, try not to move, okay? It's just a precaution."

    "Just a — " I reach up with my left hand to give my nose a preemptive scratch while he's busy taping my right arm to the chair. "What's the failure rate on this procedure, and should I have updated my life insurance first"

    "Relax. Is no failure rate." Boris finally gets his laptop to admit that its keyboard exists, and spins it round so I can see the screen. The usual security glyph flickers into view (I think that particular effect is called wheel, eight spokes) and bites me on the bridge of my nose. It's visual cortex hackery to seal my lips. "Failure not an option," repeats Boris.

    The screen wheels again, and — morphs into a video of Angleton. "Hello, Bob," he begins. He's sitting behind his desk like an outtake from Mission: Impossible, which would be a whole lot more plausible if the desk wasn't a cramped, green metal thing with a contraption on top of it that looks like the bastard offspring of a microfiche reader by way of a 1950s mainframe computer terminal. "Sorry about the video briefing, but I had to be in two places at once, and you lost."

    I catch Boris's eye and he pauses the presentation. "How the hell can you call this confidential?" I complain. "It's a video! If it fell into the wrong hands — "

    Boris glances at Brains. "Tell him."

    Brains pulls a gadget out of his goodie bag. "Andy shot it on one of these," he explains. "Solid-state camcorder, runs on MMC cards. Encrypted, and we stuffed a bunch of footage up front to make it look like amateur dramatics. That and the geas field will make anyone who steals it think they've stumbled over the next Blair Witch Project — cute, huh"

    I sigh. If he was a dog he'd be wagging his tail hard enough to dent the furniture. "Okay, roll it." I try to ignore whatever Pinky is doing on the carpet around my feet with a conductive pencil, a ruler, and a breakout box.
    Angleton leans alarmingly towards the camera viewpoint, looming to fill the screen. "I'm sure you've heard of TLA Systems Corporation, Bob, if for no other reason than your complaints about their license management server on the departmental network reached the ears of the Audit committee last July, and I was forced to take preemptive action to divert them from mounting a full-scale investigation."
    Gulp. The Auditors noticed? That wasn't my idea — no wonder Andy seemed pissed off with me. When I'm not running around pretending to be Secret Agent Man and attending committee meetings in Darmstadt, my job's pretty boring: network management is one component of it, and when I saw that blasted license manager trying to dial out to the public internet to complain about Facilities running too many copies of the TLA monitoring client, I cc'd everyone I could think of on the memo — "TLA, as you know — Bob, pay attention at the back, there — was founded in 1979 by Ellis Billington and his partner Ritchie Martin. Ritchie was the