The Android's Dream

Chapter 3

Harris Creek sat across from Lingo Tudena, the Kathungi Cultural Attache, and performed his role for the State Department: He delivered the bad news.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Tudena," Creek said. "But I'm afraid we can't let your spouse on planet."

Tudena's vestigial shoulder wings, which had been fluttering excitedly in anticipation of his wife's visa, halted mid-flutter. "Begging pardon?" he said, through his vocoder.

"Your wife, Mr. Tudena," Creek said. "Her visa has been denied."

"But why?" Tudena asked. "I was assured by the Art Council that her visa would be no problem at all. Just a few routine checks. No problem."

"Normally there isn't a problem," Creek said. "But something popped up in your wife's case."

"What?"

Creek hesitated for a minute, then realized that there was no gentle way out of it for either of himself or Tudena. "Your wife, Mr. Tudena," Creek said. "She's entered her fertility cycle."

Tudena twitched his head in the Kathungi physiological equivalent of a surprised blink. "Impossible. I'm not there to initiate it. You must be in error."

Creek reached into his portfolio and slid the doctor's report over to Tudena. Tudena grabbed it with one of his forearms and held it up to one of the simple eyes the Kathungi used for near objects. After a few seconds, his vestigial shoulder wings began to jerk chaotically. Physiologically the Kathungi have no need of tears but by any emotional standard it was clear he was crying.

The Kathungi were a people with a beautiful and artistic culture and a procreation process that utterly disgusted every other sentient species they had come in contact with. After a nearly month-long phase in which the female Kathungi was enticed into a fertility cycle by her mate, both male and female Kathungi were pheremonally trapped into an uncontrolled "spew" phase: The female Kathungi would be randomly seized by a contraction of her egg sac, which would spew a milky, rancid-smelling fluid embedded with hundreds of thousands of eggs onto anything in the vicinity.

At the sight and smell of the eruption, the male Kathungi would follow suit with a greenish and even more foul-smelling milt that would coat the egg spray. The two substances would then congeal into a gelatinous mass whose purpose would be to protect and nourish the fertilized eggs until they hatched. By which time the Kathungi parents would be gone; rare among sentient species, the Kathungi were not nurturers. Kathungi eggs hatched into voracious, cricketlike larvae that ate everything in their path (including other larvae); it wasn't until a much later phase that members of the vastly thinned ranks of surviving larvae entered a pupae phase in which they grew the brains required for sentience.

The particulars and repercussions of Kathungi reproduction were visited upon Earth not long after the UNE allowed non diplomatic Kathungians to visit Earth on tourist visas. One young Kathungian couple decided to drive across the United States on a road trip and got as far as Ogallala, Nebraska, before they were overcome by the spew phase. The two rented a room at the Sav-U-Lot Motel off of Interstate 80 and spent the next day and a half with the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door, coating the interior of the room with goo more than an inch thick in places. The cleaning crew quit rather than touch it; the manager ended up scooping up the goo with a dustpan, depositing it into the bathtub, and running the shower head to dilute the stuff enough to let it slip down the drain.

One week later, guests of the Sav-U-Lot ran screaming from their rooms as millions of larval Kathungi, who had consumed the contents of the Sav-U-Lot s massive and poorly maintained septic tank, migrated en masse through the plumbing in search of food. The manager rushed into one of the rooms armed with a flyswatter and a can of Raid Ant & Roach Killer. The Kathungi larvae ate everything but the plastic zipper on his pants and the metal grommets of his shoes; seven guests were never found at all. After consuming every organic morsel the Sav-U-Lot had to offer, the larvae, with their natural predators far away on the Kathungi home planet, set on the town of Ogallala like a Biblical plague.

The Nebraska governor imposed martial law and sent in the National Guard to eradicate the larvae. After it was discovered that the insects were in fact Kathungi larvae, the governor was hauled into CC court on the charge of xenocide and hundreds of thousands of individual counts of murder of a sentient species member. The bewildered governor served out the remainder of his term of office from the federal prison located (gallingly for a Nebraskan) in Leavenworth, Kansas. Shortly thereafter the UNE changed its visa policy to require that Kathungi females visiting Earth to be on birth control; under no circumstances would a female Kathungi who had begun her fertility cycle ever be allowed to set foot on planet again.

The fact that the cultural attache's wife was fertile doomed her chances of coming to Earth. The fact that the cultural attache's wife had begun her fertility cycle while her husband was away was going to doom her marriage. One simply does not enter a fertility cycle randomly. And one definitely doesn't enter a fertility cycle without one's spouse.

Creek gently took back the medical file from the cultural attache, whose wings were still jerking up and down. "I'm sorry," he said.

"She always said she wanted to come to visit Earth,'' Tudena said. His vocoder, tuned to be sensitive to its wearer's emotions, inserted sad, gulping sounds.

"She didn't know you were trying to get her a visa?" Creek asked.

Tudena shook his head. "It was going to be a surprise," he said. "I was going to take her to Disneyland. I've been told that it is the happiest place on Earth." His shoulder wings began to shake violently, and he buried his head in his forelimbs. Creek reached over and patted Tudena on his chitinous husk; Tudena shoved back from the desk and stumbled out the door. After several minutes one of Tudena's assistants came to collect Creek, thank him for his time, and escort him to the door of the embassy.

Creek's official title with the State Department was "Xenosapient Facilitator," which meant absolutely nothing to anyone but the State Department bursar, who could tell you that a Xenosapient Facilitator got the GS-10 pay grade. Creek's unofficial title, which was more accurate and descriptive, was "Bearer of Bad News." Whenever the State Department had bad news to deliver to a member of the alien diplomatic corps who was significant enough to require a personal response but not significant enough to rate someone who actually mattered, he, she, or it got Creek.

It was the proverbial dirty job. But equally proverbially, someone had to do it, and Harris Creek was surprisingly good at it. It took a special human to look various members of various alien species in whatever organ it was that passed for their eye and tell them that a visa request was denied, or that the State Department was aware that assassins were plotting to kill them on their trip back to their home world, or that due to a memorable bout of public drunkenness on the Union Station carousel, which resulted in the alien projectile vomiting on terrified human children there for a birthday party, their diplomatic status was this close to being revoked. In his time, Creek had done all of these among many others.

Members of alien species had differing ways of showing anger and grief, from the sad, silent shaking of Mr. Tudena to the ritually approved destruction of property. Most people, regardless of their training in diplomacy, were simply not psychologically equipped to deal with a member of an alien species freaking out in front of them. The reptile portions of the brain, nestled down close to the brain stem, would too often override the gray matter and send the puny human bolting away, leaking fluids as the "eject the ballast" portion of the "fight or flight" response kicked in.

Harris Creek did not have anywhere near the diplomatic training of his peers—in fact, he had none when he took the job. But he also didn't run when the furniture stated flying. For his particular job, that was enough. It was easier to learn about diplomacy than it was learn to control one's bladder in front of a rampaging member of the alien diplomatic corps. Most people wouldn't think so, but it's true.

Outside the Kathungi Embassy, Creek fired up his communicator to locate his next appointment; it was at the Larrn Institute over on K Street. Creek was going to have to tell a new Tang lobbyist that while the State Department was willing to regard one threat to eat a UNE Representative's children if she didn't vote the way he wanted her to as a cultural misunderstanding, doing it a second time would have impressively negative repercussions.

"Hello, Harry," Creek heard someone say. He looked up and saw Ben Javna, leaning against a marble pillar.

"Howdy, Ben," Creek said. "Fancy meeting you here."

"I happened to be walking by and saw you there," Javna said, and then nodded in the direction of the door Creek had come out of. "Bad news for the Kathungi?"

"One of them," Creek said, and started walking. Javna followed. "Actually, two of them, at least. But only one of whom is here on Earth. That's part of the problem, I think."

"So you're still enjoying your job," Javna said.

"I don't know if enjoy is the word I'd use," Creek said. "That'd imply a certain level of sadism, enjoying giving people bad news. I find it interesting. But I don't know how much longer I can keep doing it."

"Giving bad news to people would get to anyone," Javna said.

"It's not that," Creek said. "That part is fine. It's that people are beginning to know who I am. I went to the Phlenbahn embassy yesterday, and the guy I was supposed to see wouldn't let his assistant show me in. I could hear him screaming on the other side of the door in Phlenbahni. My communicator translated it. He was calling me 'the angel of death.' I thought that was pretty harsh."

"Why were you there?" Javna asked.

"Well, in that particular case it was to inform him that a car with diplomatic plates assigned to the Phlenbahni embassy had been linked to a fatal hit-and-run in Silver Spring," Creek admitted. "Even so. He didn't know that's why I was there before I said anything. It's a strange thing to make aliens twitchy just by existing. Sooner or later I'm sure they're all going to bar me from getting through the embassy door. State's not exactly an efficient department, but eventually someone would notice. Maybe I should start looking for another job."

Javna laughed. "Funny you should mention that, Harry," he said. "I have a job that needs doing. One that could use your skill set."

"You need me to break some bad news to someone?" Creek asked. "You and Jill doing okay, Ben?"

"We're happy like newlyweds, Harry," Javna said. "Not those skills. Your other skills. The one's you're not paid to use at the moment."

Harry stopped and looked at Javna. "I have a lot of skills I'm not paid to use at the moment, Ben. Some of which I'm not really interested in using again."

"Relax," Javna said. "It's nothing like that."

"What is it?"

"Well, let's not talk about it right now," Javna said. "Why don't you and I get together this evening. Say, around six-thirty."

"I'm free," Creek said. "You want to get a drink?"

"I was thinking maybe we could meet at Brian's place. I haven't been there for a while."

"Brian's place," Creek said.

"Sure. Should be quiet there. Six-thirty?"

"Six-thirty," said Creek. Javna smiled, saluted jauntily, and walked off without looking back. Creek watched him go for a long moment, then hurried off to the Larrn Institute.

Seventy-five yards back and across the street Rod Acuna flipped open his communicator and rang up Dave Phipps. "Another street meeting," he said when Phipps clicked on.

"Christ," Phipps said. "That's the fourth one in an hour and a half. He's screwing with us. He knows you're out there, Rod."

"He hasn't seen me," Acuna said. "I guarantee it."

"I'm not saying he has," Phipps said. "I'm saying he knows we'd be having him watched."

"Yeah, well, anyway, this one might be the real thing," Acuna said. "Javna and the guy he just met are getting together tonight at six-thirty for a drink."

"Did they say where?"

"Some bar called 'Brian's Place,'" Acuna said. "Although maybe that's just the name of the owner."

"Either way, we can find it," Phipps said. "Keep on him, Rod. Call me if you learn anything new."

Acuna flipped off and set after Javna.

Brian's place was section 91, space 4088, Arlington National Cemetery. Javna was already there when Creek walked up.

"I'm remembering the day you and Brian tried to assassinate me," Javna said, without turning. He had heard Creek walk up. "You know, with the model rocket."

Creek grinned. "We weren't trying to assassinate you, Ben," he said. "Honest and truly."

Javna looked over his shoulder. "You launched the rocket into my car, Harry."

"It was just a small one," Creek said. "And anyway, you had gotten out of the car."

"Barely gotten out of the car," Javna corrected. "And wish I had still been in the car. It might have kept the rocket from torching the seats."

"Possibly," Creek said. "Of course then you'd have had third-degree burns across your body."

"Skin grafts would fix that," Javna said. "But that was a classic car. Those seats were leather from an actual cow. You can't get that anymore. I could have killed the two of you. I would have had my lawyer stuff the jury with classic car enthusiasts. We're talking acquittal in under an hour."

Creek opened his hands wide, imploring. "I humbly ask your forgiveness, Ben. I'm sorry we torched your car. Our only excuse was that we were ten at the time and remarkably stupid for our age. Anyway, don't be too hard on your brother. Launching the rocket was my idea."

"That's one of the reasons why I like you, Harry," Javna said. "You still stick up for Brian even when it can't possibly do him any good. Before the two of you shipped out, he told me he was the one who pointed the rocket at the car. He said you tried to talk him out of it."

Creek grinned again. "Well, it was a classic car," he said. "Seemed a shame to torch it."

"I just wish you'd been more persuasive," Javna said.

"You know Brian," Creek said. "You couldn't tell him anything."

The two stood there in front of space 4088, section 91, for a minute, silently.

"You didn't have me come out here to talk about something Brian and I did twenty years ago, Ben," Creek said, gently.

"Right," Javna said. He reached into his coat pocket and tossed something to Creek. It was a bracelet with a small metal disk on it. "Put that on and press the button," Javna told Creek. Creek slipped on the bracelet with a little effort and pressed the red button in the center of the disk. He could feel a small vibration from the disc. He looked back over to Javna, who was wearing one as well. Javna was placing a small cube on Brian's headstone, attaching it by the suction cup on one of the sides. He pressed the top.

"That should do it," Javna said.

"Should do what?" Creek asked.

"I was being followed when I met up with you today," Javna said. "I laid a few red herrings across my trail to confuse my tails and I'd be willing to guess that they're thinking we're meeting at a bar. But you can never be too careful."

Javna pointed at the cube. "So, that little object does two things. It creates a sphere of white noise with a radius of thirty feet. Anyone trying to listen in more than thirty feet away is going to hear static, if they're using conventional listening devices. It also vibrates the headstone, to confuse devices that can register sound conduction by bouncing lasers off of solid objects and processing how much the sound waves make them move. The little wrist doodads are doing the same thing to us. Not that they would have much chance with the lasers. Human bodies are poor sound conductors, and the headstone doesn't give them much to work with. The whole outdoor thing really messes with laser detection. But better safe than sorry."

"That still leaves Up reading," Creek said.

"Well, then," Javna said. "Try not to move your lips too much."

"Cloak and dagger shit bores me, Ben," Creek said. "What's going on?"

Javna reached into his coat pocket again and produced a small curved tube. "Ever seen one of these before?" He handed it to Creek.

"I don't think so," Creek said, taking it. "What is it?"

Javna told him the whole story, from the murder by fart to the need to find sheep.

"Wild," Creek said. "Disgusting, but wild."

"Let's say I wanted to find out who made this," Javna said. "How would I do it?"

Creek turned the apparatus around in his hands. "I'm assuming this isn't a mass-produced object," he said.

"Probably not," Javna said.

"Then someone either designed this from scratch or altered an existing design. You could probably check the UNE Patent and Trademark Office database to see if something like this exists, and then if it does, you could try to see who's accessed the information in the last year or so. Presuming your guy searched off the government database and not off a private archive, you might get something."

"So you think we could get the guy that way?" Javna said.

"Sure, if the guy was an idiot and didn't bother to cover his tracks," Creek said. "Does that sound like the sort of person you're looking for?"

"Probably not," Javna said again.

"There's another place to look, though," Creek said. "This isn't mass-produced but it's also not something you could make in your garage shop. This thing was probably made in a small-scale fabricator." Creek looked up at Javna, who shrugged. "A small-scale fabricator is like a printer that works in three dimensions," Creek explained. "You provide it a design and some raw material and it 'prints' the object you want to make. It's inefficient—you wouldn't use it to make a lot of things—but if d be perfect for a job like this."

"How many of these things are out there?" Javna asked.

Creek shrugged. "Couldn't tell you. I'd guess a couple hundred in the DC area," he said. "They're used by people who need to make replacement parts of old things whose manufacturers have gone out of business or stopped supporting the product. Like that old car of yours. If you ever got a replacement part for it, it was probably fabricated. But you could narrow it down in a couple of ways. This is mostly a metal object, so you could ignore the fabricators that output plastics, ceramics, and carbon composites. That's still going to leave you with a few dozen, but at least that's a smaller number."

"But that still doesn't tell us which of these fabricators made the thing," Javna said.

"No, but you could find out pretty quickly from there. Fabricators are like any mechanical object—there are small, unique differences in their output. Put this under the microscope to find the pattern unique to its fabricator. Basic forensics." Creek handed the apparatus back to Javna, but Javna held up his hand. "You want me to keep this?" Creek asked.

"I want you to find who made it," Javna said. "That, and one other thing."

"What's that?"

"I need you to find that sheep I told you about."

"You can't be serious," Creek said.

"I'm totally serious," Javna said.

"Ben, even one of these things is a full-time job for actual analysts and investigators. And if you recall, I already have a full-time job. You got it for me, remember."

"I do," Javna said. "Don't worry about the job. I've already given you cover for that. Your boss has received notice that for the next two weeks you'll be participating in a State Department Xenosapient training program. And as it happens, there actually is a State Department Xenosapient training program going on over the next couple of weeks."

"That's swell," Creek said. "Then there's just the minor detail that I'm deeply out of practice in what you're asking me to do."

"You figured out how to track down this fabricator pretty quickly," Javna said.

"Jesus, Ben," Creek said. "Anyone who watches detective shows could have told you that."

"Harry," Javna said. "Just because you're currently slacking through life with a dead-end job doesn't mean that I have to pretend I don't know what you can do."

"That's not very fair, Ben," Creek said.

Javna held his hand up. "Sorry," he said. "But, you know, Harry. If I had half your brains and talent, I'd be running the country by now. I mean, hell. I know you find your current job interesting. But it's like using an n-space drive to go down to the store to get a bottle of milk."

"Not everyone wants to run the world," Creek said.

"Funny, I said something like that about you to Heffer," Javna said. "Anyway, you don't have to run the world. I just want you to save it a little. We need to find these things, but we can't be obvious that we're looking for them. I need someone I can trust to do this thing for me, and do it quietly. You fit the bill, Harry. I need your help."

"I don't have what I would need to do all this," Creek said. "I don't even own a proper computer anymore, you know. I've got my communicator and the processors in my household appliances. That's it."

"What happened to your computer?" Javna said.

"I had a crisis of faith about its use," Creek said. "I stored what I was working on and gave it to the neighbor kids."

"Then we'll get you a new one. Tell me what you need," Javna said.

"How big is your budget?" Creek asked.

Javna smiled, reached into his pocket yet again, and gave Creek a credit card. "Anonymous credit," Javna said.

"How much?" Creek asked.

"I don't rightly know," Javna said, and nodded towards the card. "I don't think one of these cards actually runs out of credit. So don't lose it, or I'm in deep trouble."

"Oh, wow," Creek said. "A boy could have a lot of fun with a toy like this."

"Don't get too excited," Javna said. "If you buy yourself a tropical atoll, it's going to get noticed. Buy everything you need. Just don't buy anything else."

"No worries," Creek said, pocketing the card. "I'm also going to need access. I don't know what my access level is on the UNE database, but whatever it is I guarantee it's not high enough."

"Already done," Javna said. "But it's like that credit card. Use your powers wisely."

"You're sure this is square with Heffer," Creek said. "I don't want you taking a fall for anything I do."

"Heffer trusts me," Javna said. "I trust you. Therefore you have Heffer's trust. For exactly six days. That's when all this has to be done and dealt with."

"That's not a lot of time," Creek said.

"Tell me about it," Javna said. "But that's the time we have."

"All right," Creek said. "I'll do it. But you have to promise me my job's still going to be there in two weeks."

"It's a promise," Javna said. "And if your boss gives me any trouble, I'll have her fired and you can have her job."

"I'd rather not. I may be a slacker, but the job suits me," Creek said.

"I'm sorry about the slacker comment," Javna said. "You've done some important things, Harry. And you've always done the right thing by my family. You've always been there to help us. I haven't forgotten. We haven't forgotten."

Both of their eyes went back to the headstone.

"I was more helpful to some of you than others," Creek said.

"Don't blame yourself for Brian, Harry," Javna said. "That wasn't about you. It was about him."

"I promised you I'd look out for him," Creek said.

"Still sticking up for Brian," Javna said. "You said it yourself. You know Brian. You couldn't tell him anything. You couldn't look out for him because he wouldn't look out for himself. We know that. We've never blamed you for it. You did what you could. And then you made sure he came back to us. Most kids who die up there never make it back. You brought him back to us, Harry. It meant more to us than you know."

"This is Arlington National Cemetery?" Defense Secretary Pope said over the photos, to Phipps.

"That's right, sir," Phipps said.

"I thought you said they were heading for a bar," Pope said.

"They said they'd be meeting for a drink," Phipps noted. "It didn't really occur to us that Javna might be heading to his brother's grave until they were already there."

"Sloppy," Pope said.

Oh, and you would have figured it out instantly, asshole, thought Phipps.

"Yes, sir," Phipps said. "We're not using our in-house people on this one. I'm using a specialist suggested by Jean Schroeder. Rod Acuna. Schroeder says he uses him and his team often."

"Fine," Pope said. "But tell him to keep better tabs from here on out." Pope waved the photo in his hand. "Do we know what they're talking about?" he asked.

"No," Phipps said. "Javna carried a portable acoustic scrambler." Phipps braced himself for another sloppy comment, but Pope held his fire. After a couple of seconds Phipps went on. "But we think this is the guy Javna's going to use for his little project."

"Who is he?" Pope said.

"Harris Creek," Phipps said. " 'Harris' is actually his middle name; his first name is 'Horatio.'"

"Which explains why he goes by his middle name," Pope said.

"He's an old friend of the Javna family," Phipps said, digging through his notes. "Specifically of Brian Javna, who was the younger brother of Ben Javna. There's a twelve-year difference between the two. Or was. Anyway, Creek and Brian Javna joined the service at the same time, when they turned eighteen. They were both at the Battle of Pajmhi. Brian Javna died there."

Pope snorted. "Join the club," he said. No one in the UNE Defense community liked to talk much about the Battle of Pajmhi. There may have been worse clusterfucks in the history of human armed conflict, but Pajmhi had the misfortune of being the most recent.

"Creek got a Distinguished Service Cross," Phipps continued. Pope raised an eyebrow at that. "A note from Creek's CO. was put into his file, saying that the CO. had originally wanted to recommend Creek for the Congressional Medal of Honor, but that Creek had become so agitated at the suggestion that he had to back down. As it is, it doesn't appear Creek ever took receipt of his Cross. Most of his battalion was wiped out at Pajmhi; Creek was transferred to a military police brigade where he served the rest of his tour. Re-upped once and was honorably discharged as a staff sergeant."

Phipps flipped to another page. "After the service, Creek joined the Washington DC police department, working on electronic crimes. You know, fraud, hackers, child molesters in chat rooms. That sort of thing. Quit the department three years ago and spent a couple of years unemployed."

"What, like homeless?" Pope asked.

"No, not like that," Phipps said. "Definitely not homeless. His parents left him a home in Reston after they retired to Arizona. He just didn't work for anyone."

"What was he doing?"

"Doesn't say," Phipps said. "But about fifteen months ago he started working for State Department as a Xenosapient facilitator, whatever that means. His schedules are public record so I checked them out. He spends most of his time visiting embassies for other planetary governments of the CC. He's got no diplomatic training; he doesn't even have a college degree. So it's a pretty good bet Ben Javna helped him land the job."

"How does a semi-literate war hero help out Ben Javna now?" Pope asked. "I'm not seeing the benefit here."

"Well, that's the thing," Phipps said. "You're assuming he's semi-literate because he doesn't have a college degree and he's an ex-cop. But that's not the whole story." Phipps shuffled through his papers and set one on Pope's desk. "Look at this. In his senior year in high school, Creek was a U.S. national gold medal winner for the Westinghouse Science and Technology competition. He designed an artificial intelligence interface to help people with degenerative motor diseases communicate with the outside world. He had a full ride to MIT and had been accepted to Cal-Tech and Columbia. This is one really smart guy, sir."

"He was a tech geek and yet he joined the army," Pope said. "That's not the obvious play."

"Just before his graduation, he got arrested," Phipps said, and handed his boss another sheet "He and Brian Javna broke into a George Washington University physics lab and gave each other brain scans with the lab's quantum imager. Apparently Creek hacked the lab's security system so they could get in, and then Javna talked them past the staff. Also almost talked them back out of the lab, too, but then the lab director showed up and had the both of them arrested. The lab got funding from the army, and some of its projects were classified. So technically, Creek and Javna could have been charged with treason. The judge handling the case gave them the choice of going to trial or joining the army and having their records expunged after they finished a tour of duty. They joined the army."

"That was still twelve years ago, Dave," Pope said. "A dozen years is like a century in tech. They're like dog years. He could be hopelessly behind the times."

"He's been near computers since he's been in the army, sir," Phipps said. "Those years on Metro Police. And when a geek takes a couple years off and hides from the world, he's probably not just playing video games. He's up to date."

"He still live in Reston?" Pope asked.

"Yes, sir," Phipps said. "We're already hard at work bugging his lines."

"Let's be a little more proactive than that," Pope said. "It'd be useful to everyone involved if we found what Creek's looking for before he does."

"Schroeder's given us genome," Phipps said. "All we have to do now is start looking for it."

"Let's get going on it," Pope said. "But I don't want you using any of the usual staff, and I definitely don't want you using any military personnel. They've got this thing about the chain of command."

"This department is crawling with contractors," Phipps said. "I could use one of them. I can encrypt the data so he wouldn't know what he was looking at."

"Do it," Pope said. "And try to find a smart one. I don't know how good this Creek character is anymore, but the sooner we're in business, the longer It'll take for him to catch up with us."

Archie McClellan was born to be a geek. The child of geeks, who were themselves the children of geeks, who were in themselves brought into the world by members of the geek clan, Archie was fated for geekdom not only in the genes that recursively flirted with Asperger's syndrome down multiple genetic fines, but in his very name.

"You were named after an ancient search protocol," Archie's dad, an electronics engineer with the DC Metro system, told him when he was in kindergarten. "And so was your sister," he said, nodding toward Archie's fraternal twin, Veronica. Veronica, who despite all generic predilections to the contrary had already begun a reign of popularity that would propel her all the way to the editorship of the Harvard Law Review, vowed instantly never to tell anyone of her name's origin. Archie, on the other hand, thought this bit of information was super cool. He was a geek before he could spell the word (which would have been at age two years, two months).

As also befitted his name, Archie McClellan made a specialty out of administering the various legacy systems that labored in the dusty corners of the many departments of the UNE government. One of Archie's favorite stories was when he was dragged down to the basement of the Department of Agriculture and presented with an IBM System 360, vintage nineteen fucking sixty-five. Archie McCellan turned to the administrative assistant who had hauled him down to the basement and told her that there was more computing power in the animated greeting card in her desk than in the whole massive bulk of this ancient mainframe. The administrative assistant snapped her gum and told him she didn't care if it was powered by chickens pecking at buttons, it still needed to be reconnected to the network. Archie spent a day learning OS/360, reconnected the hulking birdbrain to the network, and charged triple his usual consulting fee.

So when Archie found himself being led down into a similar basement hall in the Pentagon, he assumed he was heading toward yet another ancient machine, still tethered to the network like a Neanderthal because of the government-wide directive not to throw out legacy systems due to decades of data that would be otherwise unreadable. No one building computers today makes their machines backwards-compatible with punch cards, DVD-ROMs, collapsible memory cubes or holo-encodes. He was mildly surprised when he arrived where he was going and saw the machine.

"This is this year's model," he said to the Phipps, who was waiting inside.

"I suppose it is," said Phipps.

"I don't understand," Archie said. "I contract to maintain your legacy systems."

"But you can work with today's computers, right?" Phipps said. "The computer doesn't have to be older than Christ for you to use it"

"Of course not," Archie said.

"That's good to hear. I have a job for you."

The job involved encrypted data that needed to be compared to data in an encrypted database. Archie's job would be to oversee the data retrieval process, and if at all possible, speed it up; the encrypted database was massive and the project was under severe time constraints.

"It would make it easier if the data weren't encrypted," Archie said to Phipps.

"Try to make it easier with it still encrypted," said Phipps, and glanced at his watch. "It's nine p.m. now. I'll be back tomorrow at nine a.m. to check on your progress, but if you come up with anything sooner you can send me a message."

"My contract states that any work after midnight through six a.m. constitutes double overtime rates," Archie said.

"Well, then, that's good news for you," Phipps said. "There's a vending machine down the hall to your right. Bathroom is down the left. Have fun." He left.

Archie set up the terminal in the basement office to begin searching through the database, and then went back upstairs to retrieve his personal work computer. He used his personal computer to optimize the search routine as much as possible given the encryption constraints, but after a couple of hours of fiddling he realized that even the fully optimized code was searching far too slowly for what he suspected was his new boss's expectations.

Fuck it, he said to himself, copied the encrypted data onto his own computer, and hacked the encryption. This wasn't difficult to do; whoever had encrypted the data used the encryption program that shipped with the computer's OS. The encryption was supposed to be nearly unbreakable standard 16,384 bit, but thanks to the OS manufacturer's perennially sloppy coding, the encryption generator that shipped with the OS featured distinct nonrandom artifacts which could be used to crack the encryption with embarrassing ease. The story finally broke when local TV in Minneapolis showed an eight-year-old hacking the encryption.

Coincidentally, at almost exactly the same time the story was airing in Minneapolis, the Seattle, Washington, metropolitan area experienced an earthquake registering 5.3 on the Richter scale. Tech wits attributed it to Bill Gates spinning in his grave. The OS manufacturer eventually put out a patch, but government IT managers were not well known for keeping up with the latest patches.

The data turned out to be DNA of some sort, which was excellent news for Archie. DNA lends itself extremely well to search optimization, since one can simply "sample" the DNA code, and look for variations based only on that portion of the code rather than the entire genome. Any DNA in the encrypted database showing variance could be thrown out, leaving a smaller set for examination with a slightly more rigorous sampling. Repeat a few times with progressively smaller numbers of DNA molecules on your database, and suddenly you've got your matches.

Now all Archie had to do was identify the species. He downloaded a shareware sequencer that promised a reference database of over 30,000 animal and plant species (upgradable to over 300,000—just $19.95!) and a special database containing the sequencing for 1500 breeds of livestock, domesticated animals, and common household plants, sent the genome in for processing, and ambled down to the vending machine for a Dr Pepper.

Which he promptly dropped when he saw the origin of the DNA waiting for him when he got back. This was followed by several seconds of unblinking, mouth-breathing agapeness, followed by a rapid lunge for his computer. Archie uninstalled the sequencer, deleted the cracked encryption file, chewed on his thumb for a good thirty seconds, and then went to his computer's shell prompt and reformatted his entire computer memory. Just to be sure.

Then he went down the hall to the bathroom, huddled into a stall, and made a brief, hushed but emphatic call on his communicator. When that was done, he sat on the toilet for several minutes with a look on his face that implied he was having a deeply emotional, spiritual moment, or that he was painfully gassy.

He was not gassy.