Rusted Chrome

by Karlos Allen

Day Two

part 2 of 2

He wasn’t going to drive to the District, that would’ve taken all day; instead he rode one of the MAX air taxis. His badge got him a free ride up and over the hill into Portland, landing him within walking distance of the server farm.

He looked around and adjusted his gun. There were some places where a badge wouldn’t protect you. There were also places where a gun wouldn’t, either. The Pearl was about halfway between those two. He walked down the block carefully not making eye contact with any of the people camped out along the sides of the buildings.

Checking them out through the corners of his eyes, he noticed a large number with caps on. Most of them had the letters C B tattooed on their foreheads. He thought about going online to find out why, but decided he’d wait till he got to someplace safer.

The server farm was alive with workers, all wearing caps, carrying out pieces of shattered computers. They weren’t wasting any time getting the place back online. Tien was supervising personally. O’Leary hadn’t expected him to look anything like his avatar, but he wasn’t prepared for a short balding Caucasian with red hair. Tien of course recognized him immediately.

“Detective? I thought you people were all done here.”

“I thought we were too, Tien. We’ve run into a bit of a stone wall though, so I’ve come down to look things over personally. I hadn’t expected you to be moving along so quickly with the repairs.”

“We have to. The lost revenue is killing us. I don’t know what you think you’re going to find that the remotes didn’t; they were pretty thorough.”

“I don’t know either, but I have to try.” He started into the building.

Tien stopped him. “Wait, if you’re really going in there, Detective, you’d better sign a waiver. I don’t know how safe it is.” He held up a pad, the form already showing on the screen.

O’Leary looked down at it and interfaced. A second later his avatar showed in the box marked “signature.” Satisfied, Tien printed his avatar in his box and saved the form. “OK, Detective, it’s all yours. Do you want us to stop work?”

“If you could give me fifteen minutes? If I don’t see anything obvious, I’ll get out of your way. If I do...” He shrugged.

“OK.” Tien went online for a second and all of the workers stopped what they were doing.

As O’Leary went into the building he saw the workers filing past. Some were already online; others looked at him curiously for a few seconds as they went by. By the time he got to the actual server rooms, he was alone. The first couple of rooms were still intact, and he could hear the faint buzz and smell the ozone coming from the power supplies.

Just as he was about to enter the damaged room, his eye caught a piece of paper taped to a rack next to the door. Curious, he walked over to look at it. It was new. Then he started to read it.

Within seconds he was swearing at himself, the remotes, and the fool techs that operated them. Looking around, he saw that any remotes coming in to inspect the damage would’ve missed it entirely. Their cameras faced forward, giving them the equivalent of tunnel vision. The note from the bomber was taped to the end of the rack facing the door. They would’ve gone right by it going in and on the way out they would’ve been running on autopilot with no one watching.

Hastily he started looking through his pockets for a glove or something with which he could get it without damaging it. Suddenly all of the Old Man’s advice about crime scenes and protecting evidence was starting to make sense.

Not finding anything, he went on line and called Tien. A minute later he showed with a plastic bag in his hands. He stared at the note as well.

As O’Leary carefully pulled it off and worked it into the bag, he asked, “Did anybody mention seeing this?”

Tien looked at him. “No, of course not! We would’ve reported this right away, Detective.”

“I understand, Tien. What I don’t understand is how everybody could have missed it.”

“Your people did.”

“You’re right, and I’ll have a few things to say to the techs about that. However, they were using remotes. You’ve had workers going in and out of here all day, and I’m sure you have been in here too.”

Tien scalp started to match his hair. “Hold on, Detective, if you are implying—”

“I’m not. I was just wondering why nobody noticed it. It’s in plain sight when you walk out of the room.”

“So are a lot of other notes. Look around, Detective; you will see printouts taped to racks all over this place. We use them to post everything from the physical identification of the servers to the results of the latest betting pool. After a while, you ignore them.”

“I see.” He rubbed his mouth and glanced in the server room. There wasn’t a lot left. “You don’t happen to have any coffee, do you? I could really use a drink right now.”

Tien didn’t, or at least he wasn’t admitting to it if he did. Probably wants to get rid of me as fast as he can. Stepping back outside, O’Leary looked around the perimeter of the building. There was an alley running between the farm and a parking garage. He noticed that the low concrete barrier surrounding the garage was broken in several places by walkways, a couple of them added recently by kids needing something to burn up adolescent hormones on. Thoughtful of them.

Walking down the alley, he saw a door leading into the farm with a camera facing it. Looking up, he saw that the lens had been shattered a long time ago. Not surprising, people did that to every camera they could in places like this, just on general principles.

Trying the door he confirmed that it was locked. There wasn’t any keyhole of course, just a shatterproof plastic plate covering a radio ID reader. If you had the right badge you could swipe it and the door would swing open for you. He shook his head. Unless this was an expensive reader, and he doubted that, there were plenty of ways of spoofing it. I could probably buy any of them within a block of here. He came back up the alley and called the taxi.

When he got back to the station, he went online. Sitting down in his office, he started noting what he’d seen and his initial conclusions. He also wrote up a scorching first-draft email for Hans in Forensics.

Then he called Margie. There was no answer. He tried again and finally got up and walked over to her door. Opening it he glanced in. Her chair was empty, but there was a note on her desk. Picking it up, he read:

“Mr. O’Leary. I had to go out and run some errands, I’ll be back as quick as I can. If you need to find something you can ask the operator by dialing zero on the telephone. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

He shook his head. It happened every once in a while. The first time, he’d been pretty hot about it and had ranted for quite a while to Tech Support before he’d calmed down enough to listen. It turned out the personal AI’s, besides being expensive, were also delicate and required more down time for maintenance than standard Web applications. It just always happened at the most inconvenient times.

Oh well, it wasn’t important. He decided to go talk to Hans directly. Going offline he grabbed a coffee and the note, now in a regular evidence bag. Then he walked down the hall to the office marked “Forensics.”

When he walked in, he noticed it looked a lot like the IT office upstairs. Hans looked up from his desk and grinned. “Hi Chuck! How’s the case going?”

O’Leary sat down on the corner of Hans’ desk and handed him the bag.

Hans read the note inside and looked up, the grin missing. “Where did you find this?” he asked very quietly.

“Taped to the end of the server rack facing the door into the bombed room. Right about eye level. I didn’t even make it into the room before I saw it. This is kind of important, don’t you think?”

Hans looked him in the eye. “Yeah. I have a couple of things I want to say to the tech. Do you want to watch, or do you want to let me handle it internally?”

“Scorch him good, Hans. That’s all I ask.” O’Leary got up and walked out.

He sat down at his desk and re-read the note:

Enough is Enough! Our country was founded on freedom. We have the right to think our own thoughts and hold our own values. No one, public or private, has the right to use our brains against our will or without our knowledge. Stop the Bio-Server Project now!

Bio-Server Project, huh? That was the second time it had come up. I guess that pretty well nails down the motive. Now all we need to do is trace the document. He’d already had it scanned when he brought it into the station. There were no fingerprints, of course. The bomber wasn’t sloppy, but maybe he’d missed with the note.

Unless the bomber had used a local printer, the document must have spent some time on the Web, at least in a print server queue somewhere. More than one criminal had been caught because he’d forgotten that once data gets into the Web, it almost never gets out. Unfortunately, this kind of trace took time. The IT tech had promised to work on it right away, but had said that he probably wouldn’t get any results till tomorrow.

Stretching, he glanced down at his coffee. It was cold. Drinking it anyway, he got up and decided to put in a quick call to Okawa’s room before going home. A nurse answered and told him that Bill was resting comfortably but his condition was unchanged. Mrs. Okawa, she said, had gone out.

Well, that’s that. I guess I’ll just take off, myself. Locking up his desk he walked out and drove home.