***
Hanna Dow watched nervously as the Archivist lay on a beach towel, his wrinkled green form soaking in virtual rays, toes up, a pair of visor-like sunglasses covering a third of his face.
Sweet sunlight, I hate my job sometimes, she thought.
The Scenario was a beach in Minorca, Spain, circa 1982, and the beach was full of virtual tourists, with a suspicious number of them being female tourists in the latest fashion innovation: the thong bikini.
It wasn’t that Hanna resented the Archivist’s lecherous tastes in online backdrop. It was just that he’d been logged in for nearly two hours of MultiNet time.
That was only 12 minutes in the real world … but entire corporate empires had fallen apart in less than 12 minutes. And many, many Archivists over the years had made the mistake of leaving too much online trace.
Won’t listen to me. Doesn’t ever listen to me. But I still have to tell him, or I’m not doing my job. And the one time I don’t tell him, he’ll ask why I didn’t remind him of the time.
To that end, she was subtly trying to signal him without being intrusive, the virtual beachgoers seemingly puzzled by her presence, discussing why someone in office clothing was standing on the edge of the water, patiently watching everyone else.
She coughed gently a few times, but he didn’t look up. Finally, he seemed to notice that a group of young women nearby was giggling, pointing at someone. He propped himself up on his sandy elbows, then lowered his sunglasses. “Yes, Ms. Dow?”
“Yes sir, it’s just that it’s been nearly a quarter of an hour in real time, and…”
He nodded. “Concern duly noted, Ms. Dow. As blissful as this seems, it does seem rather …” A double-beep interrupted him, signaling a real-world contact.
Dow listened to her earpiece intently for a moment.
“Sorry sir, that was Mr. Cardinal. Your second security detail is in place, and they’ve already had a hit. Local low-level scam artist, probably looking for a quick equipment theft. He was hanging around the private scenario buildings off Kobe Stop and asking questions.”
That hadn’t taken long, Dregba thought. “Right, let’s log out, Ms. Dow, and run a double-check on our real-world security. When these queries hit, they tend to come in bunches.”
Hanna nodded, saying nothing. Fairly soon, things would once again seem dangerous, desperate, unbearably tense for a few brutal minutes until security had done its job. But she was accustomed to it. They’d done this many times before.
A few moments later, they were back in the spacious suite in Kobe, watching the picture window at the end of the room shift to clear glass from polarized, as the sunset seized its evening advantage and the rolling clouds reflected the rosy hue of the coming night.
The Archivist went right back to his work routine, pacing the suite, liaising with staff online and off.
Hanna watched him patiently from the side of the room. She’d been his assistant for three years now, and his every move, every decision almost, was predictable. She could even predict the pattern with which he’d pace the room while working.
It was a job, and it was a way out.
She still wasn’t sure how she’d managed to get an interview – how a kid from Sydney with no family connections had managed to impress a low-level middle manager enough to get a chance to prove herself.
That in turn had led to a fateful Conference on Corporate Bureaucracy mixer and a meeting with The Archivist’s retiring assistant. How six months after that, a kid from the Aussie Freeverse community was booking passage with Archivist Dregba’s entourage back to G’Farg.
She watched him, slipping back into his working routine.
This is all crazy, this world. I’m not really here. I’m at Dave Flanagan’s building in New Cabramatta. I just stepped into some crazy MultiNet scenario and I can’t get out.
A tip of some sort would come in. The archivist would unleash a half-dozen crack investigators.
If the new tech was confirmed, they would approach the developer, the Archivist would negotiate a deal… and then both parties would wait for up to a week to find out if the copyright was accepted. Patents had long ago been rolled into the same system.
But a week was a long time.
With the growth in development near-exponential, it was not uncommon for a similar idea to be floating close to the market and for its proponents to try to … clear the field ahead.
What kind of personal assistant has to wear a Poly(hydridocarbyne) vest? My job is insane, and my boss is insane, and my life is insane.
She watched him pace, studying his face, looking for a sense of anger, or dismissal, or distaste – or anything, really, to indicate some passion. But despite all the life lines etched into his forehead, he let nothing out. At first, she’d assumed it was because he was just too professional to tip his hand to anyone. After so long, she’d realized it was just that he was a cold, cold man.
Still, he’d been her ticket off Earth and, assuming everything went to plan this week, would be again. But she was uneasy.
Don’t like it here. Can’t ever be comfortable here again, she thought, looking out the window as evening began to settle in and the emergency lights blinked with lonesome predictability.
The familiar double-beep of another update sounded, this time from the first security team.
The captain sounded breathless. “That was a tough one, sir. Ran into a group of mercs, data gatherers of some sort.”
The Archivist was listening intently at first, but then looked pensive. He followed that by tapping furiously on his virtual datapad.
“Where are you captain? Why aren’t you in position outside the holding facility?”
“Yes, sir. My apologies sir, but as I said, we got into a firefight with some data miners. They weren’t interested in our boy, just in seeing what loose personal data they could grab. So the other team has it under control, and we’ve headed back to Shen-fui Shen Stop to dust off…”
Data miners left behind web crawlers, sniffers, trackers, cookies. The easiest thing to do was a “dust off” – cleaning off by logging out and back in, and letting the MultiNet’s own spam control do its job.
The Archivist didn’t mince words. “Captain, return with your team immediately to your original position. If we’re lucky, you haven’t allowed a massive breach already. Make sure you keep a set of eyes on the Stop’s security office.”
As soon as he’d logged off the call he called Hanna again, pacing alongside the giant floor-to-ceiling front window.
“Ms. Dow, ensure Captain Granger is relieved of his duties and terminated with cause once this operation has been completed. Ensure it’s back-dated to today, so that we don’t have to cover insurance in the event that he dies during the mission and alert ground security detail that the hotel might be compromised. I doubt we’ll need it but ….”
And then the archivist froze, seeing the reflection through the corner of his eye, in the tinted glass.
He slowly turned his head to see the arm fully extended, and the pistol, and the silencer, and the glove. And that was the last thing the Archivist of G’Farg ever saw.