Realms of Light by Lawrence Watt-Evans Page B

compromised. I wondered whether he had actually
been in contact with Epimetheus at all. Whoever faked the report of
the old man’s death had somehow controlled communications between
the two planets so completely that nothing and no one contradicted
his story. In fact, he’d faked official verification of the
original lie.
    That shouldn’t be possible.
    A human being couldn’t do it unassisted, I
was sure of that; some pretty powerful software would be needed to
monitor and control all the communications between Epimetheus and
Prometheus well enough to catch any reference to whether Yoshio
Nakada was alive or dead. Software that powerful was more likely
than not to be an intelligence in its own right.
    Maybe there really was a conspiracy here, and
maybe some of the conspirators weren’t human.
    And there I was, with my brain plugged into
the nets, my consciousness roaming a domain where software was more
at home than we mere mortals, poking into places this theoretical
intelligence probably did not want me poking.
    I had just had that unpleasant thought when
one of my retrievers came buzzing back to me to say that it had
found Yoshio Nakada’s ITEOD files, including the access records,
and was fetching me a copy of everything. I just had to keep it
active long enough.
    I called my watchdogs in to guard it, let my
other retrievers shut down one by one as they reported in, and
waited.
    And I saw it coming, saw it and felt it and
heard it through the synesthetic web link, I even smelled it, and tasted smoky copper. Something big and blue-black and
screaming was searching for... well, I didn’t really know what it
was searching for, but my best guess was that my retriever had
disturbed it, tripped some sort of warning that had brought this
thing swooping down on me. It felt like hot melting velvet as it
flashed past me down into the police records, and smelled of
vinegar and burning styrene.
    Three of my watchdogs just vanished, erased
down to the last bit. I erased the retriever myself, to reduce the
chances of being traced, and then got the hell out of there. I
pulled the plug from the back of my neck and was back in my office
on Juarez, sitting in the dark—I hadn’t reactivated the walls or
lights, only the desk. The windows faced east, and I had them
dimmed but not opaque, so I could still see the seething, squirming
colors of the Trap, but that was the only light in the room—the
desktop had gone dark.
    I rebooted the desk and took a look. The
retriever had downloaded 93% of Yoshio Nakada’s ITEOD files,
including the complete access log; the odds were that I had gotten
whatever was there that I wanted to get.
    There was a lot there to get; the desk
had partially crashed because it had run out of memory and hadn’t
been able to swap data offsite fast enough. It would have been fine
if I had let it slow down, or if the security had been a bit
looser, but I’d been in a hurry.
    What the hell was in there, that took that
much memory? That desk could hold a dozen human minds without
straining, right down to suppressed childhood memories, but
Nakada’s files had filled every last gigabyte.
    If I could have talked to the old man just
then I would have had some pretty pointed questions to ask, but he
wasn’t even on the same planet, and communications between the two
were not to be trusted.
    I had some other questions I didn’t think
Nakada could have answered. For one, what was that thing that
chased me off? That wasn’t standard cop security. That wasn’t
anything I had ever seen before. I didn’t know what it would have
done to me if I’d let it, and I didn’t want to find out. I’d had
hostile software in my brain before, and had no interest in
repeating the experience.
    Did the cops even know it was there? To have
the effect it did that thing must have huge bandwidth; it would be
hard to miss. Whoever programmed it hadn’t been going for subtlety.
But if the cops knew it was there, wouldn’t they do