Nightside City

When I got tired of listening to the porno ads on the hold circuit and staring at the far wall of my office, wishing I could put something interesting on the big holoscreen without losing my call, I started puttering around with some of my data on the desk pull-outs, kicking around files on the six corporations and the nine casino names, and ru

The six corporations all had their incorporations properly filed, but the only officers named were software written specifically for the job-no humans, and I knew that I wouldn't be able to get anything out of business software. All six of them had filed five or six weeks earlier, but other than that none of the fifteen were on public record. I wondered what was on private record; naturally, I had ways of getting at stuff I wasn't supposed to, or I wouldn't have stayed in business very long, but I didn't want to use anything illegal when I was on an open cha

"Nothing much," I said. "And nothing that'll hurt. I just wanted to check up on an outfit you did some business with, Westwall Redevelopment. I'm doing some background on them for a client." I tabbed the main screen control and watched her face appear.

"Oh?" she said, as the focus sharpened. Her expression was polite and blank.

"Oh," I answered her.

"So?"

"So I'd greatly appreciate it, Mis' Cheng, if you could tell me something about them-just anything. I understand that Epimethean Commerce sold them some property out on West Deng?"

"That's a matter of public record."

"Yes, mis', it certainly is, and that's how I came to call you. Your name was on the deed-or at least it was on the comfax of the deed. I was hoping you could tell me a little about Westwall, since you dealt with them." I started to say more, to elaborate on my story, but I stopped myself. One of my rules of business is to try not to say more than I have to. If I give myself half a chance, I'll keep talking forever, same as I'm doing now telling you all this. If I let my mouth run, sooner or later I'm either telling someone something they shouldn't know-or at least not from me or not for free-or I'm making my lies too complicated, so they'll trip me up later. The best way to lie is to simply not tell all of the truth, and that's exactly what I was doing here; I wasn't going to tell her that I was trying to get squatters out of paying rent, but I'd almost gone and made up some lie about it instead.

She hesitated, then said, "Listen, Hsing, I'm working; I don't have time to peddle gossip. If you want to talk to me on the bank's time, you'll have to make it the bank's business."

I watched her face, and I knew what she was telling me. She didn't want to talk about it over the com-at least, not unless I could convince her that it would be safe and worth her while.

That made it interesting. It meant she did have something to say about Westwall Redevelopment, but not something she wanted everyone on the nightside to hear and have on permanent record.

What she had to say I had no idea. It might have been nothing. It might have been anything. Maybe the transaction was a fraud.

Her reasons for wanting it private and off the record could have been anything from a jealous lover to crime in high places-or maybe she was coming up for a promotion and didn't want it on record that she talked to an outcast like me. It could have been anything.

But I wasn't exactly buried in useful information, so I decided that I definitely wanted to talk to her.

"Have it your way," I said. "I was just hoping for a favor, one human being to another; I don't think the bank's got an interest in this one. Maybe I'll see you around sometime."

"Maybe you will, if you're ever in the Trap." The desktop screen went blank as she cut the co

I looked at it without seeing it. If I was ever in the Trap? That meant she wasn't about to come out to the burbs; I'd have to meet her at her home or office. They weren't the same place-banks are old-fashioned about that in the Eta Cass system; they don't like their human employees working at home.

I typed in an order for all available data on the person last called, sca

She'd be working for another four hours, and her office was in the bank's central branch, at the corner of Third and Kai. If I happened to bump into her there we could go get a drink somewhere.

I could live with that.

Meanwhile, I had four hours-three, when you allow for travel time and the vagaries of fate. Maybe, if I prodded the right program, I could wrap up the whole business by then, from my desk.

I start punching buttons, as always cursing under my breath the idiot who had put in touch instead of voice.

Chapter Three

COM SECURITY VARIES. SOME PEOPLE DON'T BOTHER with it on anything, since everybody's known for centuries that anything one person can set up another person can crack. Other people put their damn grocery lists under sixteen layers of alarms and horse and counter-virus.

The people I was after seemed to all be the second kind. I ran a customized parasite search-and-trace pyramid program that could run through all the unshielded open-system data anywhere in Nightside City in under an hour, and except for the official records I'd already sca

It wasn't sentient; I don't trust sentient software to do what it's told and never use it if I can help it, because anything complex enough to be self-aware is complex enough to be untrustworthy. Even if it doesn't glitch or get moody, it can be duped or sabotaged. That's why I used a pyramid instead of a net. My pyramid wasn't even close to consciousness levels, but it was fast and sneaky and did what I wanted.

And it came up empty.

But that was in unshielded, open systems. The names were out there somewhere; they had to be. Not unshielded, though-and the truth is that I hadn't really expected to find anything unshielded. It just didn't feel like that sort of case. So for most of the time that my parasite was ru

As I think I said before, I don't like ru