The Pedestal (11 page)

“I did some plunking around yesterday after you left. And I found some interesting stuff.”

“Like what?” I probe. He moves with lightning speed that I can’t begin to follow, and until he arrives at wherever he’s headed, I’m just begging for motion sickness.

“Like, remember how Mitzy’s profile ID was cross-contaminated on the nexus?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, I followed the other profile ID to see who it belonged to, and I think I’m on to something.”

At our backs, Ryan interrupts our conversation. “C’mon, Tim. We don’t have time for this nonsense.”

I turn to look at him like he’s on drugs.

“We have a new contract to spec out this week,” he explains. “I need you both completely focused if we’re gonna hit deadline.”

A new contract? Oh, man.
Good thing I’m in high gear right now. But wait: “Is it a rush job?” I demand, because if not, it can wait five minutes, as far as I’m concerned.

“Aren’t they all?” Tim snipes from the side of his mouth.

“Cool it, Tim. You guys can play detective on your own time.”

I give Tim an exasperated grimace, as if to say,
What the heck crawled up his rear?
Tim shrugs and grumbles, “To be continued. The nexus-master has spoken.”

Ryan rolls his eyes and says, “Stop calling me that, man.” But the corners of his lips are tugging into a smile he can’t quite keep at bay.

To be continued
turns out to be the next afternoon, and then only when the swell of my impatience compels me to skip lunch and corner Tim in the racks. Unfortunately, by then Tim has inexplicably switched teams.

“You know what, Wil?” he says with forced—and completely unconvincing—flippancy, “I don’t know what I got all excited about. I’m pretty sure it was just a truncation error or something.”

 I reward this flip-flop with as much venom as a glance can inject. When that alone doesn’t prod further explanation from him, I launch a full-fledged examination. “But you said that kind of error can’t happen on the nexus without help from a human. You said that someone had to have intentionally overwritten the data.”

Tim’s ears are beginning to flush red.
Good.

“Yeah, I know what I said, and I’m sorry for getting you all bent out of shape.” He smiles sheepishly and buries his hands deep into his pockets. “Turns out it was nothing.”

I stare at him with my mouth working silently, like a fish in the throes of death. My thoughts wander to old crime television—
Matlock
,
Murder She Wrote
,
Perry Mason
—trying to remember what you’re supposed to do when someone turns your witness. Unless I’m misreading the cues, this is the part where I’m supposed to badger him until he jumps from his seat and exclaims,
Yeah, I did it; and he had it coming, too!

“I don’t believe this, Tim!” I bark. “What the heck’s gotten into you?”

Tim, who’s never seen me lose my temper before—even in this artificial context—is understandably taken aback. “Nothing, man. Jeez, don’t make a huge thing out of this. It was just a misunderstanding, that’s all.” His eyes wander toward the back of the room, and I have a sneaking suspicion that Ryan’s standing by unseen, overseeing this little scene like the director of a really scrappy play.

It seems a change of tactics is in order. Lowering my voice, I place a gentle hand on Tim’s shoulder. “What’s going on here, buddy?” I’m trying to project an air of protectiveness, like I’m the only person on the planet he can talk to openly—I know, I’m impressive: from bad cop to good cop within thirty seconds. Tim’s eyes are a little bloodshot, and they widen at my touch. I notice his mouth is twitching just a tinge.

I can’t speak for Matlock or Ms. Fletcher, but I feel certain that Perry Mason would be proud: I’ve about got this perp cracked.

Unfortunately, he’s cracking in a way I wasn’t shooting for. “Back off, Wil,” he snaps, shrugging off my hand like it’s dripping fire. His nostrils are flaring, fingers curling into puny fists at his side. “You gotta let it go, all right?”

I’m speechless. He may be a good guy—my friend, in fact—but he has his limits just like anyone else. And just like anyone who has just stepped past his, I can tell that Tim feels guardedly remorseful for losing his cool.

But that doesn’t mean he’s changing his story.

“Listen, I’ve got a lot of work to do,” Tim pleads. “And so do you, you know?”

I shake my head in disbelief and direct my feet toward the door.

“Wilson,” Tim yelps. I turn my head and stop in midstride. His face is pained, torn. “Sorry, man. Don’t mean to be rude or anything.” He looks appropriately deflated, considering that he’s just let down a buddy in need. I really don’t have any idea what’s at play here, but I’m not exactly brimming with sympathy.

“Whatever, Tim.”

I rip off my earplugs and blast out the door without another word.

I spend the next half hour locked in my office trying to ferret out something useful from the nexus. Unlike Tim, I have neither the clearance nor the intellectual capacity to manually cross-reference NanoPrint data. The best I can manage on my own is to check up on Mitzy—my Mitzy, not Arthur’s. Looks like a late lunch at a sushi bar in about fifteen minutes; no dinner scheduled yet. No surprise there—I still haven’t gotten around to making dinner plans either. I don’t know why I’m stalking this girl, and I’m feeling more than a little slimy for making excuses. I leave Adrian a meaningless, guilt-driven contact request before heading down to the cafeteria.

I’m still angry with Tim; if I run into him on the elevator, there’s a good chance I might lock him in a sleeper hold until he passes out. And if I’m gonna bother going that far, I might as well leave him with a Spanish moustache for good measure—with permanent ink.

The elevator’s all mine, though. Just me and my problems. Me and my lackluster, nexus-hacking, witness-interrogating self.

Me and my sorry, divided heart.

Ryan and Tim aren’t the only guys I know with liberal access to nexus profiles; they just happen to be the only ones with any obligation to give me the time of day. Following lunch, I make some calls. College professors, former employers and coworkers, fellow alumni—even some dork I met at a conference last year, who I’m pretty sure drank from my water glass during a luncheon—and I get nowhere. Not a single call manages to squeak past a receptionist, one of whom is even bold enough to claim her boss—who dated my college roommate’s little sister, and who still technically owes me ten credits on a lost bet—is out of the country, when his proximity sensors show he’s in the office.

I’m about out of ideas here. Maybe Tim’s right—maybe I should just drop it after all. I mean, what exactly am I hoping to accomplish, anyway? The list that more or less started all of this is out of my hands now, so it’s no longer my problem. Right? Sure, my company is knee-deep in a financial scrapstorm, but that’s hardly unusual in an industry as prolific as ours.

By the end of the day, I’m exhausted and immeasurably frustrated. What I need more than anything is to relax, to give my mind a much-needed—if not well-deserved—rest. Instead, all I can do is think. And the more I do, the more agitated I become. At this point, I’m not sure which is more disconcerting: that Keith so thoughtlessly dragged me into a mess that I’m too much of a simpleton to sort out, or that I was so close to making sense of it, to no avail. Part of me is still wounded that Arthur kept me in the dark, because that same part of me needs to be validated by a third party—to prove that I’m not a complete waste of flesh and energy. I hate that Arthur didn’t feel he could trust me, that I couldn’t handle the truth. Most of all, I hate that he might’ve been right to doubt me.

Adrian agrees that I should try to forget about all this. “Why don’t you just think about me?” she wisely suggests, and she kisses me.

Sold.

It’s Friday. I’m resolute, and after a good night’s sleep, I’m firing on all cylinders, ready to take my life back. I take a flying leap into our new project specs. I spend two solid hours mapping out programmatic components and checking them against our codebank—no reason to duplicate existing functionality if we can avoid it. I’m feeling pretty good about my progress so far—it’s actually a pretty good set of specs: well-constructed, plenty of contingency plans—and about my decision to move on with life.

Until I see it.

Buried in the specs is a flow map of databases—one of which contains NanoPrint profile IDs. My eyes bug for a second as I realize that—in one fatal swoop of fate—I’ve just gained access to the same database tables I failed to identify after many fruitless hours yesterday. I know I should ignore this and get on with the project. Indeed, the sensible side of me demands it. Yet, though I’m completely convinced that no good will come of indulging my morbid curiosity, I simply can’t rein it in.

With a nervous sigh, I begin writing a program—nothing fancy, just some quick and dirty code to export NanoPrint data into a temp database, index the tables for scanning, and run a query for women in the United States with the first name Mitzy. I expect millions, considering the enormity of our population here. I end up with less than one thousand.

I rerun the query several times, adding filters as I go—

>>
Domestic Geography = ′Las Vegas, Nevada′

>>
Minimum Age = ′25′

>>
Maximum Age = ′35′

Et cetera.

—until I’ve narrowed my results down to three. I save their profile IDs to my MentalNotes, feeling confident that one belongs to the woman I’ve begun to think of as
my
Mitzy.

I should get back to my actual job now. I want to, in fact—I was really on a roll. But as it has so many times, my genetic proclivities prevent me from leaving well enough alone. I don’t know what Tim uncovered, but he pretty well told me all I need to know to unearth the truth on my own.

Well, almost.

Through creative querying, I can access schedules and even proximity sensors via the public nexus directory. With a little time, I can even access transaction grids. But the only way to access a person’s records by profile ID is by manually querying the databases. And the only way to do that is by accessing the nexus server matrix directly in the racks. This is turning into some sort of a secret-agent mission, only I lack any of the slick gadgets that give agents their legendary edge. I feel as if I’m gonna be taken out any minute—or, more likely, I’m gonna suffer through some stress-induced diarrhea.