Chapter Four
“It started out of pure scientific curiosity. In case it isn’t obvious,” she said, “I design user interfaces for a living. I work for...” She paused. “I work for one of the bigger firms and I do pretty well. Dealing with the interaction between people and machines, you tend to end up thinking of it in one of two ways — either it’s all just a programming problem, with inputs and outputs and your job is to try and make it all fit together. Or you become obsessed with the psychology of it all. And that was me.
“I started reading all these boards about human/machine interaction and not just the ones about making it work. The ones about how it makes us feel. About how it makes us more than human, less than human, something other than human. How it makes us different, how it changes our lives. Now, obviously, I didn’t want to post using my real identity. I’m somewhat well known in the field and even if no one would have recognized me, I wouldn’t have wanted the firm’s routine scans to turn up activity at some of the boards that are hostile to our work. And so Reuben was born.
“I first used that identity on those boards, but when I started keeping a journal about my observations, it seemed obvious to use Reuben as the author. My... Reuben’s pages never had a huge audience, but there were a few avid readers. The Reuben identity began to make connections within the community — he developed his own personality, his own friends. By the time I made an avatar for him, he was more popular socially than I was.”
Dex wondered if he heard a trace of envy in her voice and added the thought to his running log of notes from the conversation. Aloud, he said, “Can you give me some names, people or groups I can talk to who associated with Reuben?”
Ivy swirled the liquid in her glass and seemed to be staring at it as if it, rather than she herself held the answers to Dex’s questions. “Sure,” she said, finally. “The only trouble is that none of them know me as Ivy. And no one knows that Reuben is... gone.”
“Just get me the names,” Dex said. “I can handle the rest. I’ve done it before.”
“What will you tell them?” Ivy asked, her voice trembling slightly.
“The truth,” Dex said, “that Reuben was murdered and that I’m investigating.” He finished his drink and set the empty glass on the table. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I won’t mention you. I don’t even think I’ll need to mention that he was a multi, at least not yet. Just let me take care of it.” He could hear Ivy sigh deeply, as if she had been holding her breath the whole time and was only letting it out now.
“I’ll send you contact information for everyone I can remember,” Ivy said. “A lot of it was lost in Reuben’s memory, but I should be able to dig up some addresses and links.”
“Good,” Dex said. “We’ll meet again once I’ve had a chance to go over the list.” He linked out of the bar and refocussed on the physical world.
• • •
Dex ran his tongue around his mouth and grimaced at the taste. Sometimes he was able to pay attention to his physical surroundings when he was in Marionette City, but this wasn’t one of those times. He went offline, blinked a few times to readjust his vision to his apartment and drew a glass of water. He swirled the liquid around his mouth and spat onto the floor of the lav. He poured a liberal dose of rum into the glass and topped it off with ginger ale.
By the time he was back at the table and logged back into the ’nets, he had a message waiting from Ivy. It was a list of names — mostly links to boards Reuben had frequented, but a few individual names as well. Dex decided to start on the boards, since Ivy had provided little contact information for the individuals. He logged into the Cubicle Men’s system and was reminded of the weekly squad meeting the next day. He sent the names Ivy had given him to the organization’s database with a request to have the results sent directly to him. Then he paged over to the first board Ivy had sent him.
It was one of the communities Ivy had described. Dex scanned the board and decided that the denizens seemed to be mostly a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals pontificating about things they don’t really know a lot about. Dex read a few of the most recent posts, then looked up Reuben’s posts. The items tagged to Reuben seemed to Dex to be on the less controversial side, mostly asking questions, or looking for insight. It didn’t seem to be a terribly personal board; the interactions more on topic and pretending to be academic. Dex found boards like that to be unbelievably boring, so he moved on.
Most of the links Ivy had given him were to similar areas, though Dex found a couple of boards where the conversation was more like a group of friends than a philosophy conference. Boring, pedantic friends, but friends none the less. Dex spent more time reading the posts on these boards, learning a bit about Reuben’s relationships with these people and noting who seemed to be closest to him. Reuben didn’t seem to be involved in any great arguments here either, but Dex knew that the relationships formed on a board could easily spill over to socializing in Marionette City or even, in extreme cases, the physical world.
He poured another drink and pulled up his credentials file. Inside, he had what appeared to be certified keys for a couple of false identities — mostly as a member of Security for the larger firms. They wouldn’t stand up to any kind of rigorous scrutiny, but they usually got him in the door. This time, though, he thought it might be better to make it clear that he was an independent. The Cubicle Men didn’t exist officially, but everyone had heard of them one way or another. It was just a question of making it clear who he was without having to answer too many questions. Dex chose the signature file that was closest to the truth — Andersson Dexter, independent investigator of private claims and concerns.
Dex spent the next hour sending messages to Reuben’s friends from the boards, informing them of Reuben’s unfortunate death and explaining that he was investigating and would like to talk to them. He attached the signature file and hoped that at least a few people would respond. With the messages sent, he checked to see if the database had come up with any information about the names Ivy had given him. He got a few leads and saw that for a couple of the names there were surprisingly long dossiers in the database. He decided to learn a bit more about these individuals before tipping them off quite yet.
• • •
The two most interesting reads belonged to two files — people calling themselves Alvaro Zuccarelli and Tequila Kate. Zuccarelli was well known to the Cubicle Men, his file indicating that he was one of the gainfully unemployed — someone who made a living without working for one of the firms. He had previously employed the Cubicle Men to resolve a business dispute — a client had skived off without paying the bill. Dex scrolled through the document and saw that while Zuccarelli was certainly living a life off the grid, he seemed to be legitimate. There was no indication that he had ever been investigated for anything and his account with the organization had been fully paid in full and on time.
Tequila Kate, on the other hand, didn’t ring any bells for Dex except the obvious one that she must be a corker at parties. It turned out that the name was not exactly a terrible pseudonym, as Dex had assumed, but rather that Kate was essentially an activist for the cause of people with multiple identities. She was a self-identified multi, though no one knew who her creator was and she had a popular and controversial journal about the benefits of multiple identities and the struggle to have their rights identified. The dossier provided links to a couple of boards that were unavailable through regular searches of the ’nets and Dex paged over to check them out. They all required separate authentication, then a moderator had to approve the application for access. Obviously, they wanted to avoid the anti-multi trolls on the boards. Dex figured he could bluff his way past the mod, but he wasn’t interested in waiting so he pinged Annabelle Lewis, the squad’s resident cracker. The word around the squad was that there wasn’t anywhere on the ’nets Annabelle couldn’t find her way into. After a brief conversation, she promised to get him in to the boards, but it wouldn’t last lo
ng. Dex told her he wouldn’t need long and thanked her for the help. Only five minutes later she pinged him with the login details. Once he’d gained access, he set a script to download a complete archive of each board to his personal system. He guessed that their security wouldn’t be expecting anyone to try that, since it would eat a lot of disk. Dex, of course, had plenty and he planned to delete anything that wasn’t interesting anyway.
While the download was starting to come down and his head was only beginning to throb, Dex paged over to Tequila Kate’s journal. He searched for any reference to Reuben Cobalt, but came up blank. It seemed that while Kate was outspoken in her opinion that multis should be treated no differently than “real” identities, she was sensitive to the fact that most multis were trying to pass as first identities. Her journal rarely named other multis, preferring to refer to “a friend” or “some folks.”
Dex found her posts to be surprisingly sane, but there were the telltale elements of a zealot in there. There were the obvious comparisons between the plight of multis to the historical struggles of race and gender equality, but she also advocated that everyone take up a separate identity. It was obvious that she not only believed that her choices were as good as any other, but that they were, in fact, superior.
Dex was scanning one of Kate’s many articles articles about the merits of separate identities to correspond with different aspects of one’s personality, when he felt the familiar wave of nausea. He closed his eyes as the final weight of the download came upon him, then it was over. He paged over to the files he’d just received from the private boards and ran a scan for Reuben Cobalt. There were hits. Rather a lot of hits, in fact. Dex had his system aggregate just those posts and display them. Reuben had been a regular poster at both boards, at the support board first, then more frequently and more recently at the other board.
It was devoted to services for multis — tools to create realistic logins, information on how to hide your multi from friends and family, the usual underground stuff. Reuben’s posts were easy to find. It looked like his services were in quite a heavy demand. Reuben was selling the code to build multiple avatars for use in Marionette City.
• • •
“You have withheld key information from me.” Dex was using his goon voice, though he wasn’t anywhere near as angry as he sounded. “How do you expect me to help you if you won’t tell me anything?” He left the words just hanging there, waiting for Ivy to answer. He wished he could have seen her face, but she wasn’t logged in to Marionette City when he checked and he wasn’t willing to wait for her.
“Do you have any idea what would happen to me if it came out that I was selling a way to essentially hack M City?” Ivy’s voice was small and timid and Dex could tell that this conversation was hard for her.
“Of course,” he answered, shortly. “At best you would be fired and never get work at another firm again. You’d probably be sued out of any savings you’ve got. You’d almost certainly end up on the streets and I honestly don’t fancy your chances of making it a year out there. At worst...” He paused, as if thinking. “Well, who cares about how much worse it could get? But how could you think I wouldn’t find this out? Did you really think you could hide this from me and actually get a successful investigation? Are you insane as well as stupid?”
Ivy was silent and Dex wondered if he had gone too far. Eventually, he heard an intake of breath and her voice came back, surprisingly clear. “No,” she said. “Just stupid. It’s a habit to hide these things; I’ve been doing it for a while, you know.”
“Well you’ve got to stop,” Dex said, bluntly. “At least with me. You’ve already trusted me with enough information to utterly ruin your life and you have to just keep on trusting me. This won’t work otherwise.” He softened his voice, trying to sound sympathetic. If they had been meeting in Marionette City he would have reached out to touch her hand or arm, something to make it seem like he cared about her as a person, not just the puzzle of the case. “So talk to me. Tell me what you know.”
“I don’t know anything,” she said, her voice quivering. “I just don’t understand why. Why would someone do this? Who could hate me this much?” She finally broke down and Dex could hear her sobs.
He let her cry and when he could barely hear her ragged breath, he said, “That’s exactly what I’m trying to find out. And that’s what I need you to tell me.”