Protocol 7 by Armen Gharabegian Read Free Book Online Page B

going on behind the young man’s smile.
    He thought about it, but only for a moment. “…Of course,” he said. “Come in.”
    He still had the pad and pencil in his hand, the list of names visible. He flipped to a clean sheet, wrote swiftly, and then showed it to the young man as he came in, and Fae locked the door behind him remotely.
    Simon wrote back:

    NO, CAN YOU?

    Andrew read the words and nodded enthusiastically. For the next three minutes, Simon watched in silent amazement as the young man pulled a variety of small devices from a wide array of pockets and belt loops, moving from room to room, making faces and tapping walls.
    Finally they were back in the study, and he put the last device away. “I don’t suppose you have a console I could use? Something connected to your AI?”
    “Of course he has,” Fae’s voice answered. “And the name is ‘Fae.’”
    Andrew grinned. “Fae it is, then,” he said. “A pleasure to meet you. Now that console…?”
    Simon showed him to his desk and got out of the way as the young man plopped himself into the chair and let his fingers fly across the virtual keyboard.
    After a few keystrokes and a muttered word, the bubbling darkness in the holo-display congealed into a churning black-and-white cloud of static—monochromatic digital bees in a hive.
    “That little app your AI built was lovely,” Andrew said. “Very clever.”
    “Why thank you,” Fae said. She sounded thoroughly charmed.
    “But unfortunately, it just makes a ‘hole’ in the sound-map. A few too many of those, and the uberprograms will notice, wonder what you’re hiding.” He continued to type madly as he spoke, as if his fingers were completely connected to his brain. “Let’s try this instead—my own little recipe. Not just a security shield; this actually samples the voices in the room and reconstructs a non-volatile conversation to replace the real audio for any listening device, local or remote. Algorithm-proof. You’d have to be a real, live person, and a truly suspicious one, to know we aren’t just having a pint and shooting the shit.”
    Simon nodded, very satisfied. “Good,” he said. “That was the kind of thing that I was hoping to get from Hayden, but—”
    Andrew stopped typing and looked up for the first time. “Hayden’s scared,” he said. “There’s something going on at the college—someone’s stealing data, leaking conversations, even sabotaging research experiments. It’s driving him crazy, and he doesn’t dare let something like…this, like what you showed us, into the place until he figures out what’s going on.”
    It took a moment for Simon to process all that…but it made sense. Perfect sense.
    “All right, then,” he said. “Good to know.”
    Andrew’s grin grew wider. “It’s true!” he said. “That’s why I popped ‘round!”
    I need this man, Simon realized. Rather badly. “Look,” he said aloud, “I’m thinking of taking a trip—quite a long trip, actually. But it’s one I will want to take in complete privacy—complete, Andrew. No one can know where I am, how I’m getting there, or what my destination is—not anywhere along the way.”
    The young scientist nodded; he didn’t even seem surprised. “Air travel?”
    Simon shrugged “By air, by rail, by sea, by private vehicle and public trans, whatever…it could be anything. Everything.”
    Andrew made a thinking-face. “Okay…” he said. “You know how hard that is, right? You’re talking about hiding from or faking out analog snoops like the eyes-down satellites, and dumb digitals like the metro CCTV systems, not to mention much smarter private security cams, and the entire Google-sphere, and AI/GPS, and—”
    Simon put up a hand. “I get it. It’s hard. The questions to you are: can it be done, and can you do it?”
    Andrew gave that crooked smile again. “One question in two parts with only one answer: if it can be done, I can do it. In fact, I’m one of the very