Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2001 22:56:13
From: Guy Trache <pfantazm@hotmail.com>
Subject: The Procurers, Part 5

The Procurers - Part 5

By Pfantazm

~~~

Author's Note:  This story contains depictions of the future.  If they are
proved to be inaccurate several hundred years from now, enh, that's
science fiction for you.

The characters in this story have unprotected sex, with the basic
assumption that anything that can do them in will have been cured by the
time the story takes place.  If you think you can hang on that long
(especially given the previous disclaimer about accuracy), then, by all
means, follow their example.  Otherwise, stay safe.

Direct interpersonal contact is feasible via pfantazm@hotmail.com.  To
access and review other documents of a similar derivation to the one
herein, locate the relevant directory at
www.pridesites.com/pfantazm/index.html.

~~~

1.5 - THE ZYMOBIUS FILE

Scott received the message that Evan hoped to meet them at Avenita City
while Meicross was in the process of docking at New New Orleans.  He
checked the map he'd inloaded before leaving _Daybreaker_ to see just how
far off-course they were, and found that the trip between cities would be
short.

The map was part of the Graumann's guide database to all the inhabited
planets in the Earth/Pictaw conglomeration.  Scott read back Halvaga III's
entry while he went through the drudgery of registering with the planet.

Halvaga III [no common name] is a highly urbanized home world, he read,
with a very high level of development.  Mining and construction have
reshaped the planet until the planet itself was quite diminished. It is
now several thousand kilometers narrower around its equator.  Habitation
consists primarily of aging skyscrapers divided into levels that are
nearly constant across the planet.

The nethermost levels are primarily the domain of the criminal and the
poor.  Because of the severe mining practices of the developers of this
world, small pseudo-volcanic eruptions occasionally flare up where the
planet's crust has been stripped so thin that the magma breaks through.
As such, the ground level of Halvaga III is usually much hotter than is
comfortable.  This level is not recommended for the intrepid traveller
unless s/he wishes to see absolutely everything.

Levels rise from the depths, with civic buildings and some businesses just
above the ground level, then some residential areas, then businesses, and
so forth, alternating until the roofs of the buildings are reached.  The
most affluent areas tend to be in the centres of the buildings, rather
than the heights.  The reasoning behind this is that most of the
population does not see the sun most days, and tend to be sensitive to
light.  Some cities feature a tourist's paradise of upscale shopping and
hotels on the sky level; see individual city files for more details.

Scott stopped the flow of information while he dealt with the customs
clerk.  His agent card was scanned.  The official was surprised to see
that data on Scott_Quinn arrived so quickly.  She squinted at the screen.

The reason was the quantum computer implants he had were from Tashari: top
of the line.  They had fed Scott's info to the customs clerk to clear his
way - a common benefit of being a Tashari customer.  Their implants
carried prestige (and a heavy price tag) and those few people discerning
enough to have them installed shouldn't have to wait for such a mundane
thing as a customs check.

The reality was that in a place like this, the foreign data tended to
confuse customs clerks, who weren't used to them.  The frowning official
was on the comm to her superior, trying to verify that the data could be
trusted.  She was undoubtedly being told that the data were bonded, and
that the Tashari Corporation would take responsibility for any fraud
committed using their data.  Information is currency, and Tashari's was
good.  In short, if Tashari said that this was Scott_Quinn, then it was.

He was waved through.

Scott started the dataflow once more, allowing factoids and statistics to
wash over his subconscious as he studied the spaceport.  The port was
mostly empty of people.  Scott recalled that Meicross had had little
trouble negotiating a berth for them to touch down.  The lack of a crowd
hurrying either to buy tickets or use them let him see the decor.  The
wall panels were somewhat staticky, and in desperate need of upgrading.
There was a patch of the self-cleaning carpet that was so threadbare that
it was sparking.  Scott's implant blared a warning in his brain to stay
away from the hazard as he continued to look around.

A malfunctioning section of wall panel flickered an arrow in the direction
of the rental office where Scott had secured a car.  He had to let his
implants do the driving for a while until he learned how the controls
worked by himself.  As he pointed himself toward his meeting point with
Evan, he mused that on any of a hundred other worlds he'd seen, the
antigrav autoroute that he was driving on would have been the perfect
thing for travellers to marvel at the mastery of architecture that had
developed on those planets.  Instead, Scott stared out his car windows at
plastic-concrete cuboids, ranging in colour from pale grey to barely
beige, slowly being polluted to dust.

Scott's car rode on an antigravitational field above a good kilometre or
two of empty air.  The urban desolation around him receded somewhat as he
passed through the informal border between cities.  The roadway was a
long, gentle curve, and the scenery was uninspiring, so Scott's mind
turned inward to consider his meeting this afternoon.

He still hadn't come up with a feasible theory behind this Evan's
request.  Why had he asked for the original?  How did he know the file
would be there, when there was no publicly available catalog of Dr.
Zymobius' archives?  Why had he insisted to meet, and why not in the city
of his last known address?  Well, there was an obvious answer for that
one, at least, but it wasn't heartening.  All it begged was the true
reason the man was on the run.  The real question was whether it was worth
the possible trouble he was walking into to deal with him, and would he
regret offering the file for free?

As the surrounding buildings grew denser again, and Scott entered the next
city, he began to strategize.

				   * * *

"Just... be careful," OxygenJim pleaded.

"Oh, I'm always careful.  You know that," Evan told him.

OJ nodded his head, his eyes downcast and arms crossed.

"Even so, this meeting should not last much more than an hour, and it'll
only take me fifteen minutes or so to get there.  It has nothing to do
with You Know Who," Evan said, referring to the corp chasing them, "so it
should be clean.  Unseal that file I gave you if I'm not back within two
hours.  It has my bank account's emergency key numbers in it, but
encrypted with a very special key: questions only you'll know the answer
to.  Take the money and get yourself as far away as you can go.  Start
over."

"Evan--"

He took OJ by the shoulders.  "I know you don't like me talking this way,
but I'm being practical.  This is real."

OJ said, "I know, _*ssirash_."

Evan frowned.  Jim only ever used that word, Pictaw for 'friend', when he
was truly worried about him.  Evan had never gotten the pronunciation
quite right to call him by the same name.  "I'll be back for you."  He
kissed OJ and held him tight before climbing onto the airbike.  "Go hide
yourself."

He waited until he saw OJ scrambling through the small hole in the
plasticrete wall before juicing up the bike and turning out to the gravway.

On the drive down to the restaurant, Evan psyched himself up.  He knew
what he had to do to hook Scott_Quinn.  He just had to do it.

Evan already knew that Quinn was very heavily into information, but people
like that aren't just trivia hounds, trying to stockpile as much as they
can, though that's one aspect to it.  It's not the information that's the
attraction so much as the going from not-knowing to knowing.

In terms Evan understood best, Scott_Quinn got high on mysteries.
Specifically, solving them.  Give him a good puzzle to solve, and his mind
would sit on it until the solution came out, and he got his fix.  When
there are no problems, life is boring and he's liable to get irritable:
withdrawal symptoms.  Oh, it was an addiction, alright.

What Evan had to sell, he might spin to some folks as a curiosity, an
oddly-acting item that would be storehoused away, and maybe shown off to
one's choice friends or choicer enemies.  That sort of spin would not sit
well with Scott_Quinn.

Evan needed to baffle him, and not with bullshit.  He needed to force
Scott into the position where he could not live without knowing what the
hell was going on.

Given Quinn's current profession, this would not be easy.  From what Evan
could tell, Quinn was an all-around datahacker, digging up information in
a way mere computing power could not, and possibly never would.  Computers
and AIs could be very efficient at searches, but you still had to be able
to tell them where to look and what for.  This was where your datahacker
came in.

What was an insurmountable problem for the average schmuck could be
child's play for a datahacker.  To really get someone like Quinn hooked,
then, was a really good puzzle.  Between lane changes, Evan patted the
compartment where the bitbox containing Jasper 220 lay hidden.

				   * * *

Scott surveyed the menu again, looking for something appetizing.

Having travelled to so many worlds, he had chosen to partake of culinary
oddments more diverse than some food critics, and he had forced no end of
vile-looking swill down his gullet when the time had called for it, with
good results and bad on both sides of the line.  He was an adventurer with
food. His palate was educated, but not snobbish, as he himself was.

The problem with the menu was not that everything looked disgusting.  It
was that everything looked boring.  Even burger chain food could be more
exciting: the guilty pleasure of hearing his implants whine about calories
and cholesterol while he wallowed in greasy glee.  The dishes on this menu
were uninspired, consisting of two or fewer ingredients, nutritionally
unbalanced, and priced to stay that way.  The healthier an item was, on
the whole, the more expensive it was.

Scott sensed someone standing over the table and looked up.  The man he
saw had deep purple hair, a sharp, hawklike nose, and intriguing red
eyes.

He extended one well-muscled arm his way.  "Scott_Quinn," he said, smiling.

Scott half-stood between his chair and the table and shook the gentleman's
hand.  "You must be Evan.  Pleased to meet you."

They sat and the waiter came by.  He greeted Evan warmly.  "Howdy,
E-male!  Entury!  You need a menu or do you know what you want?"

"Grilled cheese, Hatcher, my boy, and--"

"Water.  Got it," Hatcher said with a grin.  "And you, sir?  Are you ready
to order?"

"I'll have the spaghetti, and the green salad."

"And to drink?"

"Do you have tea?"

"Iced," Hatcher said with a small frown.

"I'll take it."

The waiter left after making a face that said, 'If that's what you really
want....'

When he was gone, Scott asked, "'Entury'?"

"Long time, no C," Evan told him.  "How do you like our wondrous little
planet?"

"It's... well, it's not one of the nicer ones I've been to, I'm forced to
admit."

"It's a turdhole," Evan agreed, "and I wouldn't be living here if I didn't
have to be.  Which brings us to business.  Do you have the file?"

"I do."  Scott pulled out his own bitbox and laid it on the table.

Evan picked it up and pressed the small button to display its contents.
He smirked, tossed the bitbox into the air with a wicked little backspin,
caught it, and set it back down.  "You tried to pass me a copy."

Scott's implants made certain he made no display of being caught in an
apparent deception.  "And what makes you say that?"

"It's not hard to guess.  You did ask me a few times to give in on that
part of the arrangement."  He tipped the box up and peeked into the
display once again.  "You tried to give me a copy, but this is the
original."  Scott's face did register confusion.  "You must have some way
of staying in touch with your database.  Check it for that file.
Malachite two-eight-four," Evan said, and turned the box around so Scott
could see.

Scott's eyes narrowed slightly.  "Minder?" he called, and the little
agent-sphere glided over to Scott's shoulder.  Evan looked impressed.

>Ready.

"Uplink to Ganymede, please."

After a moment, Minder told him that the link was established.

"Perform a directory search for a file with the same name as, or identical
in content to, the file in the bitbox on the table in front of me."

After a much longer pause, Minder reported, >No match found.  Scott
stiffened slightly.  >Nearest match, at 13%, is a VR .scen file in the
Egypt--

"Cancel report," Scott ordered.  He glared at Evan across their table.
"How did you do it?  How did you crack my system?"

"I didn't.  I didn't have to."

Just then the waiter came by with their food.  Their platters of food came
to rest on the plastic table with a dull clack.  Their drinks were set
down more gingerly, now that Hatcher's hands were free.  "Enjoy," he said
half-heartedly before moving on with his duties.

"What do you mean you didn't have to?" Scott said testily.

Evan sensed trouble on the horizon.  Best that he remove all thought of
him breaking into Quinn's 'puter here and now.  "Do you have space cleared
in your, uh, Minder there?  Enough for a copy of that file?"

Scott thought a second.  "I should.  Why?"

"Copy the file to Minder."

Scott stared at Evan as though trying to psychoanalyze him on the spot.
"Minder, sever your link to Ganymede and create a new link to the bitbox
on the table, please."

>Signed off.  Ready.

"*Copy*, do not move, copy, all files into your memory."

After a moment, the sphere said, >Upload complete.  One file transferred.

Evan smiled an evil smile and asked, "Now what's in the box?"

Tentatively, Scott reached for the dir button, as if he already knew what
he would - or rather, wouldn't - see there.  The bitbox was empty.

"This isn't possible," he murmured.

"You did look at the file before bringing it planetside, am I right?"

"It's just a graphics file!"

"Lower your voice," Evan warned.  He looked around the restaurant.  "How
big is your graphic file, and what are the dimensions of the graphic?"

Scott thought back to the relatively lo-res picture of the broken tablet.
"The file is too big."

"I tried copying my file to and from every OS and every computer system I
had access to, and it never copied.  It always disappeared from wherever I
was copying it from.  Whatever they are, I think there's only one copy of
them anywhere.  And we have them."

Scott frowned.  "Excuse me a moment.  Minder, inload Malachite 284."  His
eyes focussed on something over Evan's shoulder.

"You're a chiphead!" Evan blurted, and instantly regretted it.  He'd get
nowhere by insulting him.  Maybe he didn't hear it while he was messing
with his file.

"Shi-i-i-it,..." Scott breathed.  After a few minutes, he blinked back
into his conversation with Evan.  "It's massively complex.  I had to read
it in machine language, right down to the bits.  It looks like a data file
but it isn't.  I don't know what it is."

"Machine language?  Doesn't that mean it's a program?"

"Some is, and some isn't.  It's--  It's a bloody mess that shouldn't even
display a crappy little tablet in a viewer.  Visionary should have vomited
all over my shoes when I tried to feed it the file."

Evan frowned.  "But shouldn't you be able to figure out what it does?"

"Not really," Scott told him.  "Most programs today are developed by a
process similar to biological evolution - at least for the most part.  Put
a large set of small algorithms together, and let them undergo a kind of
breeding, or command-swapping.  Weed out the ones that seem to be going
nowhere, and allow the semi-functional ones to propagate.  After a few
million iterations, you might have a vaguely useful function."

"A few million?"

"If you're lucky, it'll be something you can use to generate further
programs.  Interbreed them.  The functions that you get aren't as rigidly
structured as programs were in the early days, but they're far more
efficient.  A couple of centuries ago, when computer alchemists were
producing the strains of the basic algorithms we use now, executable sizes
actually started to shrink, rather than bloat, like they had been for the
entire history of computing up to that point."

Scott then ate a forkful of the spaghetti.  It was like chewing rubber.
After he swallowed, he said, "It's underdone."

"It's al dente," Evan clarified.  "It comes from an Old Earth language,
meaning, 'to the teeth'."

"Italian, thank you," Scott said testily.  "One of Earth's more beautiful
languages, I've found, and what's more, I know pasta al dente.  This is
underdone."

Scott pushed his noodles around in the sauce.  "As I was saying, the
trouble is that an evolved program like this one is a *lot* more difficult
to digest; it's too chaotic.  It would be like trying to understand the
function of the human heart without knowing what blood was for.  You could
draw obvious conclusions, but you wouldn't understand why it was necessary
in the first place."  Scott scratched his chin.  "It's going to take some
in-depth research."

The waiter came through at the end of Scott's brain dump, leaving more
plates and glasses at a neighbouring before breezing through to take more
orders.  Evan openly gawked at Hatcher's tush as he bustled along.

"I was hoping," he said as he diverted his attention back to Scott, "that
I'd would be able to take the file away with me today."

The yarn ball of spaghetti on Scott's fork unravelled slightly partway to
his mouth.  "I - don't think I could do that."  He laid his other hand
protectively onto the bitbox.

"I have an ident-checked v-mail from you stating that you would deliver
the file, for free.  If I need to, I can start legal proceedings to get
it."  The truth was that the last thing Evan needed that week was to set
a lawsuit in motion.

Scott's blood ran cold at the threat of losing what could be the find of
the century, more than the threat of litigation.  "Give me a chance at
least to find out what I'm handing over.  It's possible I could crack
whatever it is that's keeping the file from copying and we could both
benefit."

Evan frowned as though displeased.  "I can give you two days.  After that,
I may not be so easy to deal with."  Because I'll be so far in hiding no
one will be able to run a deal with me, he thought.

"Two days," Soctt agreed hastily.

				   * * *

On the people-mover back to Evan's airbike, he strutted like a peacock.
Things were moving along perfectly.  Quinn was on the hook in a major way,
and next came the intimate little dance between keeping him in the deal
and maintaining control of it.

So fixated on his good fortune with Scott_Quinn was Evan, that he didn't
notice the homing chip Hatcher had planted on him.

				   * * *

On the ride back to the mooring station where _Daybreaker_ was docked,
Scott's mind raced.  This Evan character hadn't gone for his fake to the
bitbox and hadn't tried to steal it.  The file was still in his own head,
but Evan hadn't necessarily kept that close an eye on it.  This suggested
he would deal ethically - for now.

That meant he really would have two days to be able to figure the file
out.

He put the car on autopilot and used Minder to set up a v-mail to a
computer consultant friend of his.  He checked his internal calendar,
while Mider set up the camera.  "JaSon, I really need your help here.
Double your fee, if necessary.  I need to know if anyone is currently
doing research in anything like meta-programming: creating a file that
cannot be copied.  It would have some sort of evolved algorithm inside,
but it would read like a data file.  I only have two days to find out what
I need, though with good info I may be able to negotiate for more.  Tell
me what you get by tomorrow.  This could be very big.  Scott_Quinn out."

He spent the rest of the trip trying to decompile Malachite 284 while the
car drove him home.