The Procurers

The Procurers - Part 5

By Pfantazm

1.5 - THE ZYMOBIUS FILE

Scott received the message that Evan hoped to meet them at Avenita City while Meicross was in the process of docking at New New Orleans. He checked the map he'd inloaded before leaving Daybreaker to see just how far off-course they were, and found that the trip between cities would be short.

The map was part of the Graumann's guide database to all the inhabited planets in the Earth/Pictaw conglomeration. Scott read back Halvaga III's entry while he went through the drudgery of registering with the planet.

Halvaga III [no common name] is a highly urbanized home world, he read, with a very high level of development. Mining and construction have reshaped the planet until the planet itself was quite diminished. It is now several thousand kilometers narrower around its equator. Habitation consists primarily of aging skyscrapers divided into levels that are nearly constant across the planet.

The nethermost levels are primarily the domain of the criminal and the poor. Because of the severe mining practices of the developers of this world, small pseudo-volcanic eruptions occasionally flare up where the planet's crust has been stripped so thin that the magma breaks through. As such, the ground level of Halvaga III is usually much hotter than is comfortable. This level is not recommended for the intrepid traveller unless s/he wishes to see absolutely everything.

Levels rise from the depths, with civic buildings and some businesses just above the ground level, then some residential areas, then businesses, and so forth, alternating until the roofs of the buildings are reached. The most affluent areas tend to be in the centres of the buildings, rather than the heights. The reasoning behind this is that most of the population does not see the sun most days, and tend to be sensitive to light. Some cities feature a tourist's paradise of upscale shopping and hotels on the sky level; see individual city files for more details.

Scott stopped the flow of information while he dealt with the customs clerk. His agent card was scanned. The official was surprised to see that data on Scott_Quinn arrived so quickly. She squinted at the screen.

The reason was the quantum computer implants he had were from Tashari: top of the line. They had fed Scott's info to the customs clerk to clear his way - a common benefit of being a Tashari customer. Their implants carried prestige (and a heavy price tag) and those few people discerning enough to have them installed shouldn't have to wait for such a mundane thing as a customs check.

The reality was that in a place like this, the foreign data tended to confuse customs clerks, who weren't used to them. The frowning official was on the comm to her superior, trying to verify that the data could be trusted. She was undoubtedly being told that the data were bonded, and that the Tashari Corporation would take responsibility for any fraud committed using their data. Information is currency, and Tashari's was good. In short, if Tashari said that this was Scott_Quinn, then it was.

He was waved through.

Scott started the dataflow once more, allowing factoids and statistics to wash over his subconscious as he studied the spaceport. The port was mostly empty of people. Scott recalled that Meicross had had little trouble negotiating a berth for them to touch down. The lack of a crowd hurrying either to buy tickets or use them let him see the decor. The wall panels were somewhat staticky, and in desperate need of upgrading. There was a patch of the self-cleaning carpet that was so threadbare that it was sparking. Scott's implant blared a warning in his brain to stay away from the hazard as he continued to look around.

A malfunctioning section of wall panel flickered an arrow in the direction of the rental office where Scott had secured a car. He had to let his implants do the driving for a while until he learned how the controls worked by himself. As he pointed himself toward his meeting point with Evan, he mused that on any of a hundred other worlds he'd seen, the antigrav autoroute that he was driving on would have been the perfect thing for travellers to marvel at the mastery of architecture that had developed on those planets. Instead, Scott stared out his car windows at plastic-concrete cuboids, ranging in colour from pale grey to barely beige, slowly being polluted to dust.

Scott's car rode on an antigravitational field above a good kilometre or two of empty air. The urban desolation around him receded somewhat as he passed through the informal border between cities. The roadway was a long, gentle curve, and the scenery was uninspiring, so Scott's mind turned inward to consider his meeting this afternoon.

He still hadn't come up with a feasible theory behind this Evan's request. Why had he asked for the original? How did he know the file would be there, when there was no publicly available catalog of Dr. Zymobius' archives? Why had he insisted to meet, and why not in the city of his last known address? Well, there was an obvious answer for that one, at least, but it wasn't heartening. All it begged was the true reason the man was on the run. The real question was whether it was worth the possible trouble he was walking into to deal with him, and would he regret offering the file for free?

As the surrounding buildings grew denser again, and Scott entered the next city, he began to strategize.

"Just... be careful," OxygenJim pleaded.

"Oh, I'm always careful. You know that," Evan told him.

OJ nodded his head, his eyes downcast and arms crossed.

"Even so, this meeting should not last much more than an hour, and it'll only take me fifteen minutes or so to get there. It has nothing to do with You Know Who," Evan said, referring to the corp chasing them, "so it should be clean. Unseal that file I gave you if I'm not back within two hours. It has my bank account's emergency key numbers in it, but encrypted with a very special key: questions only you'll know the answer to. Take the money and get yourself as far away as you can go. Start over."

"Evan--"

He took OJ by the shoulders. "I know you don't like me talking this way, but I'm being practical. This is real."

OJ said, "I know, *ssirash."

Evan frowned. Jim only ever used that word, Pictaw for 'friend', when he was truly worried about him. Evan had never gotten the pronunciation quite right to call him by the same name. "I'll be back for you." He kissed OJ and held him tight before climbing onto the airbike. "Go hide yourself."

He waited until he saw OJ scrambling through the small hole in the plasticrete wall before juicing up the bike and turning out to the gravway.

On the drive down to the restaurant, Evan psyched himself up. He knew what he had to do to hook Scott_Quinn. He just had to do it.

Evan already knew that Quinn was very heavily into information, but people like that aren't just trivia hounds, trying to stockpile as much as they can, though that's one aspect to it. It's not the information that's the attraction so much as the going from not-knowing to knowing.

In terms Evan understood best, Scott_Quinn got high on mysteries. Specifically, solving them. Give him a good puzzle to solve, and his mind would sit on it until the solution came out, and he got his fix. When there are no problems, life is boring and he's liable to get irritable: withdrawal symptoms. Oh, it was an addiction, alright.

What Evan had to sell, he might spin to some folks as a curiosity, an oddly-acting item that would be storehoused away, and maybe shown off to one's choice friends or choicer enemies. That sort of spin would not sit well with Scott_Quinn.

Evan needed to baffle him, and not with bullshit. He needed to force Scott into the position where he could not live without knowing what the hell was going on.

Given Quinn's current profession, this would not be easy. From what Evan could tell, Quinn was an all-around datahacker, digging up information in a way mere computing power could not, and possibly never would. Computers and AIs could be very efficient at searches, but you still had to be able to tell them where to look and what for. This was where your datahacker came in.

What was an insurmountable problem for the average schmuck could be child's play for a datahacker. To really get someone like Quinn hooked, then, was a really good puzzle. Between lane changes, Evan patted the compartment where the bitbox containing Jasper 220 lay hidden.

Scott surveyed the menu again, looking for something appetizing.

Having travelled to so many worlds, he had chosen to partake of culinary oddments more diverse than some food critics, and he had forced no end of vile-looking swill down his gullet when the time had called for it, with good results and bad on both sides of the line. He was an adventurer with food. His palate was educated, but not snobbish, as he himself was.

The problem with the menu was not that everything looked disgusting. It was that everything looked boring. Even burger chain food could be more exciting: the guilty pleasure of hearing his implants whine about calories and cholesterol while he wallowed in greasy glee. The dishes on this menu were uninspired, consisting of two or fewer ingredients, nutritionally unbalanced, and priced to stay that way. The healthier an item was, on the whole, the more expensive it was.

Scott sensed someone standing over the table and looked up. The man he saw had deep purple hair, a sharp, hawklike nose, and intriguing red eyes.

He extended one well-muscled arm his way. "Scott_Quinn," he said, smiling.

Scott half-stood between his chair and the table and shook the gentleman's hand. "You must be Evan. Pleased to meet you."

They sat and the waiter came by. He greeted Evan warmly. "Howdy, E-male! Entury! You need a menu or do you know what you want?"

"Grilled cheese, Hatcher, my boy, and--"

"Water. Got it," Hatcher said with a grin. "And you, sir? Are you ready to order?"

"I'll have the spaghetti, and the green salad."

"And to drink?"

"Do you have tea?"

"Iced," Hatcher said with a small frown.

"I'll take it."

The waiter left after making a face that said, 'If that's what you really want....'

When he was gone, Scott asked, "'Entury'?"

"Long time, no C," Evan told him. "How do you like our wondrous little planet?"

"It's... well, it's not one of the nicer ones I've been to, I'm forced to admit."

"It's a turdhole," Evan agreed, "and I wouldn't be living here if I didn't have to be. Which brings us to business. Do you have the file?"

"I do." Scott pulled out his own bitbox and laid it on the table.

Evan picked it up and pressed the small button to display its contents. He smirked, tossed the bitbox into the air with a wicked little backspin, caught it, and set it back down. "You tried to pass me a copy."

Scott's implants made certain he made no display of being caught in an apparent deception. "And what makes you say that?"

"It's not hard to guess. You did ask me a few times to give in on that part of the arrangement." He tipped the box up and peeked into the display once again. "You tried to give me a copy, but this is the original." Scott's face did register confusion. "You must have some way of staying in touch with your database. Check it for that file. Malachite two-eight-four," Evan said, and turned the box around so Scott could see.

Scott's eyes narrowed slightly. "Minder?" he called, and the little agent-sphere glided over to Scott's shoulder. Evan looked impressed.

Ready.

"Uplink to Ganymede, please."

After a moment, Minder told him that the link was established.

"Perform a directory search for a file with the same name as, or identical in content to, the file in the bitbox on the table in front of me."

After a much longer pause, Minder reported, >No match found. Scott stiffened slightly. >Nearest match, at 13%, is a VR .scen file in the Egypt--

"Cancel report," Scott ordered. He glared at Evan across their table. "How did you do it? How did you crack my system?"

"I didn't. I didn't have to."

Just then the waiter came by with their food. Their platters of food came to rest on the plastic table with a dull clack. Their drinks were set down more gingerly, now that Hatcher's hands were free. "Enjoy," he said half-heartedly before moving on with his duties.

"What do you mean you didn't have to?" Scott said testily.

Evan sensed trouble on the horizon. Best that he remove all thought of him breaking into Quinn's 'puter here and now. "Do you have space cleared in your, uh, Minder there? Enough for a copy of that file?"

Scott thought a second. "I should. Why?"

"Copy the file to Minder."

Scott stared at Evan as though trying to psychoanalyze him on the spot. "Minder, sever your link to Ganymede and create a new link to the bitbox on the table, please."

Signed off. Ready.

"Copy, do not move, copy, all files into your memory."

After a moment, the sphere said, >Upload complete. One file transferred.

Evan smiled an evil smile and asked, "Now what's in the box?"

Tentatively, Scott reached for the dir button, as if he already knew what he would - or rather, wouldn't - see there. The bitbox was empty.

"This isn't possible," he murmured.

"You did look at the file before bringing it planetside, am I right?"

"It's just a graphics file!"

"Lower your voice," Evan warned. He looked around the restaurant. "How big is your graphic file, and what are the dimensions of the graphic?"

Scott thought back to the relatively lo-res picture of the broken tablet. "The file is too big."

"I tried copying my file to and from every OS and every computer system I had access to, and it never copied. It always disappeared from wherever I was copying it from. Whatever they are, I think there's only one copy of them anywhere. And we have them."

Scott frowned. "Excuse me a moment. Minder, inload Malachite 284." His eyes focussed on something over Evan's shoulder.

"You're a chiphead!" Evan blurted, and instantly regretted it. He'd get nowhere by insulting him. Maybe he didn't hear it while he was messing with his file.

"Shi-i-i-it,..." Scott breathed. After a few minutes, he blinked back into his conversation with Evan. "It's massively complex. I had to read it in machine language, right down to the bits. It looks like a data file but it isn't. I don't know what it is."

"Machine language? Doesn't that mean it's a program?"

"Some is, and some isn't. It's-- It's a bloody mess that shouldn't even display a crappy little tablet in a viewer. Visionary should have vomited all over my shoes when I tried to feed it the file."

Evan frowned. "But shouldn't you be able to figure out what it does?"

"Not really," Scott told him. "Most programs today are developed by a process similar to biological evolution - at least for the most part. Put a large set of small algorithms together, and let them undergo a kind of breeding, or command-swapping. Weed out the ones that seem to be going nowhere, and allow the semi-functional ones to propagate. After a few million iterations, you might have a vaguely useful function."

"A few million?"

"If you're lucky, it'll be something you can use to generate further programs. Interbreed them. The functions that you get aren't as rigidly structured as programs were in the early days, but they're far more efficient. A couple of centuries ago, when computer alchemists were producing the strains of the basic algorithms we use now, executable sizes actually started to shrink, rather than bloat, like they had been for the entire history of computing up to that point."

Scott then ate a forkful of the spaghetti. It was like chewing rubber. After he swallowed, he said, "It's underdone."

"It's al dente," Evan clarified. "It comes from an Old Earth language, meaning, 'to the teeth'."

"Italian, thank you," Scott said testily. "One of Earth's more beautiful languages, I've found, and what's more, I know pasta al dente. This is underdone."

Scott pushed his noodles around in the sauce. "As I was saying, the trouble is that an evolved program like this one is a lot more difficult to digest; it's too chaotic. It would be like trying to understand the function of the human heart without knowing what blood was for. You could draw obvious conclusions, but you wouldn't understand why it was necessary in the first place." Scott scratched his chin. "It's going to take some in-depth research."

The waiter came through at the end of Scott's brain dump, leaving more plates and glasses at a neighbouring before breezing through to take more orders. Evan openly gawked at Hatcher's tush as he bustled along.

"I was hoping," he said as he diverted his attention back to Scott, "that I'd would be able to take the file away with me today."

The yarn ball of spaghetti on Scott's fork unravelled slightly partway to his mouth. "I - don't think I could do that." He laid his other hand protectively onto the bitbox.

"I have an ident-checked v-mail from you stating that you would deliver the file, for free. If I need to, I can start legal proceedings to get it." The truth was that the last thing Evan needed that week was to set a lawsuit in motion.

Scott's blood ran cold at the threat of losing what could be the find of the century, more than the threat of litigation. "Give me a chance at least to find out what I'm handing over. It's possible I could crack whatever it is that's keeping the file from copying and we could both benefit."

Evan frowned as though displeased. "I can give you two days. After that, I may not be so easy to deal with." Because I'll be so far in hiding no one will be able to run a deal with me, he thought.

"Two days," Soctt agreed hastily.

On the people-mover back to Evan's airbike, he strutted like a peacock. Things were moving along perfectly. Quinn was on the hook in a major way, and next came the intimate little dance between keeping him in the deal and maintaining control of it.

So fixated on his good fortune with Scott_Quinn was Evan, that he didn't notice the homing chip Hatcher had planted on him.

On the ride back to the mooring station where Daybreaker was docked, Scott's mind raced. This Evan character hadn't gone for his fake to the bitbox and hadn't tried to steal it. The file was still in his own head, but Evan hadn't necessarily kept that close an eye on it. This suggested he would deal ethically - for now.

That meant he really would have two days to be able to figure the file out.

He put the car on autopilot and used Minder to set up a v-mail to a computer consultant friend of his. He checked his internal calendar, while Mider set up the camera. "JaSon, I really need your help here. Double your fee, if necessary. I need to know if anyone is currently doing research in anything like meta-programming: creating a file that cannot be copied. It would have some sort of evolved algorithm inside, but it would read like a data file. I only have two days to find out what I need, though with good info I may be able to negotiate for more. Tell me what you get by tomorrow. This could be very big. Scott_Quinn out."

He spent the rest of the trip trying to decompile Malachite 284 while the car drove him home.