Vigilantes by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

hundreds of extra safeguards after the Anniversary Day attacks, and he had installed a few more after the Peyti Crisis—not that he’d had a lot of time.
    He knew that the security staff was also fortifying those offices.
    In addition, Popova was there. She understood what Talia was going through, at least on some levels. Popova didn’t know that Talia was a clone (hardly anyone did), but she knew some of Talia’s history, and knew that these attacks had devastated Talia in ways that nothing else had before.
    Popova had lost her lover in a particularly brutal way on Anniversary Day, and the therapists she had sent Talia to had helped Popova overcome the worst of it.
    Talia had an appointment with her therapist later that day. Popova said she’d make certain Talia got to the appointment. Flint had asked that some security accompany them.
    Yes, he was being overprotective. And at the moment, he didn’t care what others thought of that. He needed to keep an eye on his daughter. He was worried.
    But he also needed to focus on his work.
    He returned to one of the desks and stood in front of it, hands in his back pockets. The information scrolled on the see-through screen faster than he could process it.
    But he saw bits and pieces of it—records, documents, forms—all in Standard, even though the language of Peyla was Peytin. He rocked a little. He peered closer and saw shadow documents scrolling with each Standard document. He peered at the shadow documents and realized that his own mind had edited them out.
    They were in Peytin, which was a language he couldn’t read. It wasn’t even recognizable as a language to him. It looked like pen marks on paper, scratches on the surface of a desk, random lines and waves that made no sense to him at all.
    Of course the Peyti law schools would require their documentation to be in two languages. Standard was the language of the entire Earth Alliance. If the Alliance certified a school—particularly one that would have graduates that functioned on the Alliance-level, not just some regional level—then the Alliance required all documentation (and anything searchable) to be in Standard.
    The Peytin documents had to be for internal use only.
    He wondered if he should set up one stream to translate every single Peytin document that his system was sorting through. He walked around the room for a moment, considering it, realizing as he paced just how restless he was.
    His job as a Retrieval Artist primarily involved sifting through records. Documents. Histories. Yobibytes of information, more than he cared to think about. He looked for the smallest hint of a fact hidden in large amounts of information.
    His greatest skill was combining all of that information in a way that no computer system could.
    Even now, even though the networks and links and information streams were all hooked together, and there was more easily accessible information than ever, even though computer systems had gotten so sophisticated that the correct information rose to the surface with a single query, he still out-analyzed the computers. Mostly because even the most modern equipment still couldn’t make an intuitive leap that the human brain could.
    The error rate in computer intuition was about fifty percent—much too high for someone to rely on.
    And he often did the best analysis while he was watching information scroll.
    The system was comparing names, backgrounds, applications for the law school, for college, for any public database. It was also looking at financial records, funding, scholarships (and who provided them), grants, and financial aid.
    He hoped the Peyti school’s financial system was at least similar to the human ones he had encountered in the Alliance.
    Because the largest problem he faced now, as he went through all this information, was that he had never analyzed big data from a non-human point of view. He had always searched for Disappeareds or researched the backgrounds of potential