Realms of Light

Chapter Seven

A casino cop was waiting for me in the elevator,ready to escort me out of the Ginza. She didn’t seem particularlyhostile about it; I wasn’t being thrown out, IRC was just keepingan eye on me.

I couldn’t blame them. After all, I had triedto steal one of their employees. This wasn’t about that welsheryears ago; this was about ’Chan. I went peacefully.

As I walked I thought matters over, andwondered whether I really had any business here at all. Mis’ Wu andthe office AI had seemed pretty confident that they could keep myfather alive and well in his tank after the sun rose, and maybethey could. Up until Grandfather Nakada had made his pitch, I’dbeen perfectly willing to leave Dad in their hands. I tried toremember just why it had seemed so urgent to get him and ’Chanout.

Well, ’Chan-he did need to get out. Iknew how to do it, too, though I hadn’t said so where IRC couldhear me. I’d need to do it quickly, and it would leave a mess forNakada to clean up, but I didn’t see that as a real problem.

The need for speed did mean I had to leave ituntil last.

I had come to Nightside City with three jobsto run-get ’Chan out, get Dad out, and see what I could learn aboutNakada’s assassin. As I told ’Chan, I hadn’t really thought I wouldget anywhere with that third one, but unless I thought of a betteralgorithm I had to leave ’Chan until last, and getting my fatherout wasn’t running smooth, so maybe I should take a look at theNakada case.

’Chan thought Yoshio Nakada was dead. Thatwas interesting. Did everyone on Epimetheus think so? I wanted acom. My wrist terminal didn’t have enough screen space for some ofwhat I wanted to do, and I didn’t entirely trust the systems on theship-the ship was Nakada property, and even if it was old Yoshio’spersonal yacht, that didn’t mean his family couldn’t have tamperedwith it. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to be doing, but Ididn’t think it was all going to be stuff I wanted the entireNakada clan to know.

I tapped for a cab before I was even out thedoor of the Ginza, and one was waiting for me, door open, when Ireached the street. I gave my cop escort a friendly wave, thenclimbed into the cab and told it, “Juarez.”

The old neighborhood had dropped a few bitssince I left, and it was easy to see why-sunlight was glinting fromthe upper floors of the taller buildings, which just lookedwrong. The streets were mostly empty. I guessed some peoplehad already managed to get off-planet somehow, but that most werecrowding over to Eastside, deeper into the shadow of the craterwall.

The door of my old building let me in, noquestions asked-as I suspected, the landlord hadn’t bothered towipe my access. After all, I’d left Epimetheus, and why in thegalaxy would I ever come back? No reason to worry about me.

But here I was, all the same. I went up theone flight to my office.

It was just as I’d last seen it. I walked inand sat down at my desk, and it was as if I’d never left.

Except I had left. I’d wiped most ofmy files before I left, so I knew I couldn’t just plug back in andride the wire. I’d brought copies of my office software, but Ididn’t have any of the local updates, and I hadn’t kept all thedata I’d had when I lived here. I hadn’t thought I would ever needit. I could get on the nets, I could function, but I wouldn’t haveeverything I used to have.

On the other hand, I had stuff now I’d neverhad before. I had some access codes Grandfather Nakada gave me. Ihad information about how Nakada Enterprises was set up here. And Ihad a spaceship waiting for me at the port.

I booted up my desk, fed in the software I’dbrought with me, and ran a few checks. When I was satisfied, Ijacked in and started to dig.

’Chan had been right. The stories about howold Yoshio Nakada had died in his sleep, reportedly on the samenight he was actually attacked, were all over the nets, and therewere rumors that it hadn’t been a natural death. People didn’tbelieve that his symbiotes would have let him die without settingoff a dozen alarms.

They didn’t know what I knew, that he gavethe dream enhancer partial override authority that got it past hisdefenses. Hell, they didn’t know a dream enhancer had anything todo with it; they just didn’t believe he could die of natural causeswithout warning.

And of course, I knew something else no oneon Epimetheus knew. I knew that old Nakada was still alive andwell.

At least, he had been when I left Prometheus,and if he’d died since then it would be an even bigger story on thenets. Dying twice isn’t exactly an everyday event even for thespectacularly rich.

So why did everyone in Nightside City thinkhe was dead?

Because they had been told that he was. Areport of his death had been received from American City, back onPrometheus, and it had been verified.

But who had sent that report? Who hadverified it? How was it done?

Most importantly, why was it done? Whydid someone want everyone on Epimetheus to think that Nakada wasdead? Who did it benefit, and in what way? The Nakada familyholdings in Nightside City weren’t that extensive. They did own theNew York-the New York Townhouse Hotel and Gambling Hall-which was amid-range casino in the Trap, catering to both tourists fromoff-planet and miners from elsewhere on the dark side ofEpimetheus.

But that was most of their property here.They owned some unremarkable real estate, and a few smallbusinesses, but nothing else major.

The New York was managed by a man named VijayVo. He had been with the Nakadas forever, and had run the New Yorksince it first opened. He ran it well. There wasn’t a hint that hemight be involved in a plot to murder his employer; the rumors allseemed to take it for granted that the killers, whoever they were,were all on Prometheus. No one had suggested any local ties-butthey didn’t know Grandfather Nakada was only dead on Epimetheus. Idid.

Was Vo a candidate for my assassin?

I didn’t see it. He had been loyal for myentire life and more, he was coming up on an honorable retirementsoon, the New York was presumably going to shut down at sunrise-whywould Vo suddenly turn on Yoshio?

And how would he benefit from the old man’sdeath? He already had a free hand in running the New York, all themore so since Sayuri Nakada got shipped back to Prometheus.

That brought up a possibility-when Sayuri gotsent home, who replaced her as the family’s representative onEpimetheus? I didn’t know, but I thought it would be easy to findout.

It wasn’t quite as simple as I thought. Therehadn’t been any official announcements. I had to poke around alittle.

Officially, no one had. Which did make sense.Sayuri had been sent to Nightside City in the first place largelyto keep her out of the way after she’d made a mess of things backon Prometheus, and she had been given control of everything theNakadas did here except the New York, since that was theonly thing that really mattered. The position she had held had beencreated for her; it wasn’t really necessary. Vijay Vo wasn’t aNakada, but he was still capable of running everything herehimself.

There had been a few visits by one ofYoshio’s granddaughters, though, a woman named Akina Nakada. Shewas Sayuri’s first cousin once removed-not a very closerelationship. She seemed to have been responsible for making sureSayuri hadn’t left any awkward programs running, and also forseeing that no one on Epimetheus realized just how stupid Sayurihad been, or why she got called back to Prometheus.

Did she gain anything from the reportsof Yoshio’s death? Nothing very obvious, certainly.

Sayuri herself wasn’t mentioned anywhere inconnection with the supposed death, and hadn’t set foot onEpimetheus in almost a year. She might have been involved in theattempt to kill her great-grandfather-she wasn’t clever enough tohave done it single-handedly, but she could be part of aconspiracy, perhaps even its instigator-but I couldn’t see anyreason for her to have sent a false report of his death.

There wasn’t an obvious beneficiary. Icouldn’t see any way in which the fake death changed anything inNightside City. Whether Yoshio Nakada was alive or dead, Vijay Voran the New York. Whether Yoshio Nakada was alive or dead, AkinaNakada was just the family’s troubleshooter, not directly involvedin anything of consequence. And Sayuri didn’t have anything to dowith Nightside City anymore.

So what did the alleged death change?It didn’t change anything in law enforcement, since it hadsupposedly taken place on Prometheus and it was officially due tonatural causes, and not a murder at all. It didn’t change anythingfinancially, so far as I could see. It didn’t alter the powerstructure.

I thought at first that it meant anyinstructions Yoshio sent would be ignored, and maybe someone wantedto undercut him on Epimetheus, but I quickly realized that wasbuggy-if instructions got through, even if they weren’t believed orobeyed, that would start an investigation and the whole program,whatever it was, would crash. If someone was trying to prevent theold man from intervening on Epimetheus, faking his death wasexactly the wrong way to go about it. Using whatever software hadfaked the death reports to block the incoming orders madefar more sense.

His actual death would have hadimmense effects, but they would all be back on Prometheus, or inthe struggling little colony on Cass II, or in other systemsentirely. Nothing obvious would change here on Epimetheus-but sofar as I knew, it was only on Epimetheus that he was believed to bedead.

The whole thing was glitched. After all,sooner or later someone from Prometheus who knew Grandfather Nakadawas still alive was going to show up and debug the system, so anychanges in ownership or control or cash flow would be rebooted.Whatever our mysterious gritware wanted, it had to be somethingthat didn’t need to be permanent. I tried to think what that couldbe, and the screen kept coming up blank.

So I almost missed it. I almost just let itgo right past me. Finally, though, a passing mention in one reportbeeped something, and I realized what would be changed by YoshioNakada’s death that would not be changed by illness, or a trip outof the Eta Cassiopeia system, or bankruptcy, or anything else. Istill didn’t see why it could possibly matter, but there was onething that his death brought about.

It meant that his In-The-Event-Of-Death fileswere opened.

Anyone in any sort of high-risk occupationmaintains ITEOD files, of course-all the secrets that you wouldn’twant anyone to know while you’re alive, but which you don’t wantlost if you die. Everyone who might want you dead, everythingyou’ve hidden away that you want your heirs to have, it all goesinto the ITEOD files, tucked away behind the most ferocioussecurity possible. Anyone cruising the net who gets too close tothe ITEOD files gets warned off; try to touch them and you’ll getthe most horrific feedback you’ve ever experienced. Go in on wire,and it’s like monsters screaming inside your brain, like blindinglight and the stench of death. There are layers of software thathate each other guarding it, competing to keep everyone out. Nobodyhas ever cracked an ITEOD file.

But when a death is reported and verified,the file is delivered to the city cops and read by both a human andan artificial intelligence. It doesn’t all become public, but itall comes out from behind the firewalls and encryption.

Did Yoshio Nakada have something in the ITEODfiles in Nightside City, something that someone else wanted abetter chance to hack? He undoubtedly had terabytes of juicygoodness in ITEOD files back on Prometheus, or whatever thePromethean equivalent of ITEOD files was-I hadn’t happened to haveany reason to check out whether cities on Prometheus had the samesystem Nightside City did, but I guessed there was somethingsimilar.

The first question was whether Yoshio Nakadaeven had ITEOD files in Nightside City. He’d never livedhere.

But he had visited here, he had businessinterests here, and he struck me as the kind of person who’d wantoffsite back-ups, so I was guessing he did have somethinghere. And if someone had wanted something in that file, faking theold man’s death was probably the best way to get at it.

If that was the motive for the bogusreports of his death, then was it the would-be assassin who wasresponsible for it?

Whoever reported the death must have knownabout the attempted murder; the supposed death matched the failedassassination perfectly, and I couldn’t buy that as merecoincidence. Did that mean the liar was the assassin?

Not necessarily. It might be someone else whohad been part of the conspiracy, or it might have been someone whofound out after the fact, perhaps while spying on the old man. Butit certainly might be the same guy.

I began to wonder whether I might actuallycrack this after all, and earn my five million bucks, and get ’Chanand our father safely off-planet. Tracing back the fake deathreport might not be possible, since the party responsible wouldhave expected that and would have covered her tracks as well as shepossibly could, but if the motive really was something in the ITEODfiles-and I couldn’t think what else it might be-then I might catchher by checking everyone who had accessed those.

In fact, maybe that was why someone had triedto kill Grandfather Nakada in the first place. Maybe the would-bekiller didn’t really care one way or the other about the old man’sdeath, but was absolutely desperate to get at something in thefiles.

That was, I admitted to myself, unlikely, butI couldn’t rule it out completely.

This was all lovely in theory, but I didn’tyet know whether it had any link to reality. I had someinvestigating to do, and I did it. This didn’t call for anythingfancy; there were public lists of who was included.

Sure enough, Yoshio Nakada had establishedstandard ITEOD files here in Nightside City fifty or sixty yearsago, and they had been updated regularly whenever he visited, andsometimes by encrypted uploads from Prometheus, as well. Thosefiles were turned over to the city cops about an hour after thereport of his death was verified.

I went to take a look at them.

I don’t mean I left my old office; I didn’t.I was still jacked in to my old desk, dancing the nets on wire, andI went looking for the files on the police nets. I didn’t havelegal access, but I’ve never worried much about details likethat.

I hadn’t made up anything special for thissort of cracking, since ten minutes earlier I hadn’t known I wasgoing to be trying it, but I had my standard collection ofwatchdogs and retrievers, and I put them to work. I cruised thecyberscape around the police nets and launched little exploratoryjabs into the cracks and crannies, and at the same time I wasscrolling through all the public data, looking for anything thatmight seem relevant and incidentally keeping some of the cops’software occupied.

I focused most of my attention on that, butat the same time some little corner of my head had already moved onto the next question about the falsified death report. I had atheory as to why someone sent it, but I didn’t have a clueas to how.

Grandfather Nakada’s floater back onPrometheus had said the old man didn’t trust anyone on his staff inNightside City anymore, and that he believed his family’s softwarehad been seriously compromised. I wondered whether he had actuallybeen in contact with Epimetheus at all. Whoever faked the report ofthe old man’s death had somehow controlled communications betweenthe two planets so completely that nothing and no one contradictedhis story. In fact, he’d faked official verification of theoriginal lie.

That shouldn’t be possible.

A human being couldn’t do it unassisted, Iwas sure of that; some pretty powerful software would be needed tomonitor and control all the communications between Epimetheus andPrometheus well enough to catch any reference to whether YoshioNakada was alive or dead. Software that powerful was more likelythan not to be an intelligence in its own right.

Maybe there really was a conspiracy here, andmaybe some of the conspirators weren’t human.

And there I was, with my brain plugged intothe nets, my consciousness roaming a domain where software was moreat home than we mere mortals, poking into places this theoreticalintelligence probably did not want me poking.

I had just had that unpleasant thought whenone of my retrievers came buzzing back to me to say that it hadfound Yoshio Nakada’s ITEOD files, including the access records,and was fetching me a copy of everything. I just had to keep itactive long enough.

I called my watchdogs in to guard it, let myother retrievers shut down one by one as they reported in, andwaited.

And I saw it coming, saw it and felt it andheard it through the synesthetic web link, I even smelledit, and tasted smoky copper. Something big and blue-black andscreaming was searching for… well, I didn’t really know what itwas searching for, but my best guess was that my retriever haddisturbed it, tripped some sort of warning that had brought thisthing swooping down on me. It felt like hot melting velvet as itflashed past me down into the police records, and smelled ofvinegar and burning styrene.

Three of my watchdogs just vanished, eraseddown to the last bit. I erased the retriever myself, to reduce thechances of being traced, and then got the hell out of there. Ipulled the plug from the back of my neck and was back in my officeon Juarez, sitting in the dark-I hadn’t reactivated the walls orlights, only the desk. The windows faced east, and I had themdimmed but not opaque, so I could still see the seething, squirmingcolors of the Trap, but that was the only light in the room-thedesktop had gone dark.

I rebooted the desk and took a look. Theretriever had downloaded 93% of Yoshio Nakada’s ITEOD files,including the complete access log; the odds were that I had gottenwhatever was there that I wanted to get.

There was a lot there to get; the deskhad partially crashed because it had run out of memory and hadn’tbeen able to swap data offsite fast enough. It would have been fineif I had let it slow down, or if the security had been a bitlooser, but I’d been in a hurry.

What the hell was in there, that took thatmuch memory? That desk could hold a dozen human minds withoutstraining, right down to suppressed childhood memories, butNakada’s files had filled every last gigabyte.

If I could have talked to the old man justthen I would have had some pretty pointed questions to ask, but hewasn’t even on the same planet, and communications between the twowere not to be trusted.

I had some other questions I didn’t thinkNakada could have answered. For one, what was that thing thatchased me off? That wasn’t standard cop security. That wasn’tanything I had ever seen before. I didn’t know what it would havedone to me if I’d let it, and I didn’t want to find out. I’d hadhostile software in my brain before, and had no interest inrepeating the experience.

Did the cops even know it was there? To havethe effect it did that thing must have huge bandwidth; it would behard to miss. Whoever programmed it hadn’t been going for subtlety.But if the cops knew it was there, wouldn’t they do something aboutit?

Had it been prowling the nets at random? Wasit guarding the old man’s ITEOD file? Had it been looking for me?It might be doing any of those, or it might be something elseentirely. Maybe I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.Maybe it was guarding something else, or chasing someone else.Maybe it was after something else in the police net.

Lots of questions, not enough answers.

I had to admit, though, that it looked as ifI was onto something. Whether it really was a conspiracy to murderYoshio Nakada I didn’t know; why anyone would want to murderYoshio Nakada I didn’t know.

But I was definitely ontosomething.