Realms of Light by Lawrence Watt-Evans

certainly.
    Sayuri herself wasn’t mentioned anywhere in
connection with the supposed death, and hadn’t set foot on
Epimetheus in almost a year. She might have been involved in the
attempt to kill her great-grandfather—she wasn’t clever enough to
have done it single-handedly, but she could be part of a
conspiracy, perhaps even its instigator—but I couldn’t see any
reason for her to have sent a false report of his death.
    There wasn’t an obvious beneficiary. I
couldn’t see any way in which the fake death changed anything in
Nightside City. Whether Yoshio Nakada was alive or dead, Vijay Vo
ran the New York. Whether Yoshio Nakada was alive or dead, Akina
Nakada was just the family’s troubleshooter, not directly involved
in anything of consequence. And Sayuri didn’t have anything to do
with Nightside City anymore.
    So what did the alleged death change?
It didn’t change anything in law enforcement, since it had
supposedly taken place on Prometheus and it was officially due to
natural causes, and not a murder at all. It didn’t change anything
financially, so far as I could see. It didn’t alter the power
structure.
    I thought at first that it meant any
instructions Yoshio sent would be ignored, and maybe someone wanted
to undercut him on Epimetheus, but I quickly realized that was
buggy—if instructions got through, even if they weren’t believed or
obeyed, that would start an investigation and the whole program,
whatever it was, would crash. If someone was trying to prevent the
old man from intervening on Epimetheus, faking his death was
exactly the wrong way to go about it. Using whatever software had
faked the death reports to block the incoming orders made far more sense.
    His actual death would have had
immense effects, but they would all be back on Prometheus, or in
the struggling little colony on Cass II, or in other systems
entirely. Nothing obvious would change here on Epimetheus—but so
far as I knew, it was only on Epimetheus that he was believed to be
dead.
    The whole thing was glitched. After all,
sooner or later someone from Prometheus who knew Grandfather Nakada
was still alive was going to show up and debug the system, so any
changes in ownership or control or cash flow would be rebooted.
Whatever our mysterious gritware wanted, it had to be something
that didn’t need to be permanent. I tried to think what that could
be, and the screen kept coming up blank.
    So I almost missed it. I almost just let it
go right past me. Finally, though, a passing mention in one report
beeped something, and I realized what would be changed by Yoshio
Nakada’s death that would not be changed by illness, or a trip out
of the Eta Cassiopeia system, or bankruptcy, or anything else. I
still didn’t see why it could possibly matter, but there was one
thing that his death brought about.
    It meant that his In-The-Event-Of-Death files
were opened.
    Anyone in any sort of high-risk occupation
maintains ITEOD files, of course—all the secrets that you wouldn’t
want anyone to know while you’re alive, but which you don’t want
lost if you die. Everyone who might want you dead, everything
you’ve hidden away that you want your heirs to have, it all goes
into the ITEOD files, tucked away behind the most ferocious
security possible. Anyone cruising the net who gets too close to
the ITEOD files gets warned off; try to touch them and you’ll get
the most horrific feedback you’ve ever experienced. Go in on wire,
and it’s like monsters screaming inside your brain, like blinding
light and the stench of death. There are layers of software that
hate each other guarding it, competing to keep everyone out. Nobody
has 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 and
an artificial intelligence. It doesn’t all become public, but it
all comes out from behind the firewalls and encryption.
    Did Yoshio Nakada have something in the