Realms of Light by Lawrence Watt-Evans Page A

ITEOD
files in Nightside City, something that someone else wanted a
better chance to hack? He undoubtedly had terabytes of juicy
goodness in ITEOD files back on Prometheus, or whatever the
Promethean equivalent of ITEOD files was—I hadn’t happened to have
any reason to check out whether cities on Prometheus had the same
system Nightside City did, but I guessed there was something
similar.
    The first question was whether Yoshio Nakada
even had ITEOD files in Nightside City. He’d never lived
here.
    But he had visited here, he had business
interests here, and he struck me as the kind of person who’d want
offsite back-ups, so I was guessing he did have something
here. And if someone had wanted something in that file, faking the
old man’s death was probably the best way to get at it.
    If that was the motive for the bogus
reports of his death, then was it the would-be assassin who was
responsible for it?
    Whoever reported the death must have known
about the attempted murder; the supposed death matched the failed
assassination perfectly, and I couldn’t buy that as mere
coincidence. Did that mean the liar was the assassin?
    Not necessarily. It might be someone else who
had been part of the conspiracy, or it might have been someone who
found out after the fact, perhaps while spying on the old man. But
it certainly might be the same guy.
    I began to wonder whether I might actually
crack this after all, and earn my five million bucks, and get ’Chan
and our father safely off-planet. Tracing back the fake death
report might not be possible, since the party responsible would
have expected that and would have covered her tracks as well as she
possibly could, but if the motive really was something in the ITEOD
files—and I couldn’t think what else it might be—then I might catch
her by checking everyone who had accessed those.
    In fact, maybe that was why someone had tried
to kill Grandfather Nakada in the first place. Maybe the would-be
killer didn’t really care one way or the other about the old man’s
death, but was absolutely desperate to get at something in the
files.
    That was, I admitted to myself, unlikely, but
I couldn’t rule it out completely.
    This was all lovely in theory, but I didn’t
yet know whether it had any link to reality. I had some
investigating to do, and I did it. This didn’t call for anything
fancy; there were public lists of who was included.
    Sure enough, Yoshio Nakada had established
standard ITEOD files here in Nightside City fifty or sixty years
ago, and they had been updated regularly whenever he visited, and
sometimes by encrypted uploads from Prometheus, as well. Those
files were turned over to the city cops about an hour after the
report 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, and
I went looking for the files on the police nets. I didn’t have
legal access, but I’ve never worried much about details like
that.
    I hadn’t made up anything special for this
sort of cracking, since ten minutes earlier I hadn’t known I was
going to be trying it, but I had my standard collection of
watchdogs and retrievers, and I put them to work. I cruised the
cyberscape around the police nets and launched little exploratory
jabs into the cracks and crannies, and at the same time I was
scrolling through all the public data, looking for anything that
might seem relevant and incidentally keeping some of the cops’
software occupied.
    I focused most of my attention on that, but
at the same time some little corner of my head had already moved on
to the next question about the falsified death report. I had a
theory as to why someone sent it, but I didn’t have a clue
as to how .
    Grandfather Nakada’s floater back on
Prometheus had said the old man didn’t trust anyone on his staff in
Nightside City anymore, and that he believed his family’s software
had been seriously