Chapter Two

  "Well I'd say it looks a lot like a modified 2160 desk unit," Alice said as quickly as she could, desperately grabbing for time.

  "So it does," he gnced at the wall above her head and then met her eyes again, "You should know that this booth was swapped with a security booth while you were outside. You can save us a lot of time by answering my questions accurately."

  "Is that not what I did? It's still a modified 2160 desk unit. I'd even hazard that it's a 2160-C based on the port configuration." She was screwed.

  The Subdirector's eyes narrowed and his lips pressed into a grim line as he asked, "Who gave this to you?"

  "Gave it to me? No one gave it to me! I made that!" Alice bit out, immediately regretting it. Stupid stupid stupid.

  "Convince me." He said after another gnce above her head. Alice realized that there must be a readout there of whatever they were using to assess her answers. Regardless, she had already admitted to making it, she might as well finish herself off.n

  "It is a modified 2160-C desk unit. It has one sender antenna and one receiver antenna with a dish soldered into the motherboard behind the ports. They were originally going to connect directly into the ports but those were disabled, so I had to bypass them completely. The sender antenna sends a burst and then the receiver waits for an answering burst. It's only capable of text communication."

  Horton raised an eyebrow, "How did you break the security on the operating system to get it to do anything at all?"

  Alice shrugged, "I didn't, the operating system is wired to report any fiddling so I wiped the system and used the boot cycle program instead."

  "It looks... crude," the Subdirector said with a sideways gnce at her device, "What kind of range did you get?"

  Alice realized that they could use that information to find the other unit. The one hidden one hallway over and two rooms down under Gloria's bed. She leaned back in her chair and cross her arms, "I'm done talking shop, you know I'm the one that made it. Why should I admit to anything else?"

  "Let's just say that it's in your best interest," the bastard was smiling his evil little smile.

  Alice gritted her teeth but didn't budge, "I need some assurances before I will tell you anything else about it."

  "Well, you can have precisely none," The smile got a little bigger and a little less evil looking, he was enjoying this. Did that mean that he wasn't as sadistic as the NSB was supposed to be, or that this wasn't as bad as it looked, or that it was way worse than she had thought and he was just as sadistic as the NSB was supposed to be. It didn't matter, she had to protect Gloria from all of this.

  Alice gave him the terms anyways, "You saw my scores, I'm sure you can accept that this was me, that this was entirely my work, entirely my fault. I need to know that no one else will be punished." He gnced above her head and his face went sck like he was thinking, but she was reasonably certain he was reading from the screen that was behind her. It took everything in her not to spin around and look.

  After what seemed like ages but was probably only seconds he looked back at her and said, "Fine, if it's your work and you want to be a martyr, be my guest. Now what is the range of this device?"

  She held his gaze for a moment, but it was the best she was going to get and they both knew it. She let out a deep breath and gave it up, "15.75 meters through 4 interior walls. Probably more without the walls."

  Horton went from predatory to contemptive in an instant, "How many of these devices did you make?"

  "Two, the other is a scavenged 2161-D with the same modifications. The communications protocol only works with a wirelessly tethered pair."

  The Subdirector nodded his understanding and gnced at the readout again before responding, "And where is this other unit?"

  "It is in my building, room 4-4-8," Alice said, giving the coordinates corresponding to floor, hallway, and room.

  He gnced at the readout and then informed her, "We'll have a team check that now. Assuming it is as you say it is, you will be the only one experiencing the consequences of your actions. Just out of curiosity, why build this at all? Just to prove you could?"

  "Sure, let's go with that." Alice wasn't about to admit to anything they couldn't prove, and both units wiped and overwrote the chat file everyday at 0500.

  "While we're sitting here waiting, would you answer a hypothetical for me?" He said, appearing disinterested.

  Alice wasn't buying that for a second, "Do I actually have a choice or are you being polite?"

  "Obviously that was an attempt to be polite, you made your choice when you built this. Let's say that you're in my pce, and you want to make sure that no one else wants to use a simir device to also report company secrets..."

  Alice cut him off, "Whoa, hey wait! I didn't report..."

  Horton shut her down, rising half out of his seat, "The only be information we could find on this unit were the configuration files to make it work. No logs, no storage. Until I, and I alone, say otherwise you are a leaker and guilty of corporate espionage, and have vioted a 1-A-1 company policy!" He appeared to realize that he had come out of his seat, and abruptly sat back down.

  Alice just stared. The NSB officer just stared back. At first she was shocked that they thought she had been doing some kind of student corporate espionage, 1-A-1 viotions always carried a penalty of elimination. After a moment though her mind began to work again and she thought back over the conversation. If you ignored the threats, this actually seemed a little like a skills interview. With a tiny bit of hope in her heart she responded into the heavy silence, "I never thought that much about how to stop it, only how to make it work. I guess it depends on what you're specifically asking. For this specific device, I never could get the transmissions to broadcast as tight as I would have liked. If you expand the channels that you're monitoring on, and increase the number of monitoring units so that you catch low power transmissions, that would have detected it. It took a lot to tune the range down to exactly what I needed to avoid detection. If you mean this specific communications protocol, I would bet that you or your people had that figured out before you walked in here. It transmits a series of packets with 26 bits, each representing a letter."

  Horton's gaze flicked up and back down, "That is an incredibly inefficient communication protocol."

  Alice tried not to feel annoyed, "Its a first version, I already had a way to streamline it."

  Horton leaned forward, "What was that?"

  Alice thought back to how she had pnned this out, "I was going to set up a tier system and rearrange the letters by how often each letter was used. That way the system isn't checking 26 bits for every letter."

  The Subdirector raised his eyebrow a notch, "I suppose that is a bit better."

  Alice decided that this was her moment to see if she was going to survive this encounter, "None of this actually solves your problem though."

  His eyes didn’t move off of her as he asked, "And what is my problem, Ms. Campbell?"

  Taking a deep breath, Alice said, "What you're actually asking me is how to eliminate highly localized covert communications, and the answer is that you can't, at least not entirely. I could have run a wire between systems, or managed to tighten the transmission down so it was only a few millimeters wide, or could have run this whole thing on paper, or created a new encryption method, or managed to find a storage drive to hand off to exchange communications. What you actually need, and probably already have, is someone who is coming up with new ways to get around Nile's systems that are in pce to detect this kind of thing and creating new equipment and procedures to stop it. And as soon as the screen behind my head tells you that I was telling the truth about who I was talking to, you're going to offer me a spot in that department."

  Horton broke into a bright boyish grin that seemed entirely out of pce, "Maybe, but doubtful. You're still a man who wants to be a girl, who needs the standard depression and anxiety meds, and though I can't prove it, you're probably in some kind of romantic retionship with Ms. Greene. That puts you at something like a 12 percent deficit. Not exactly first rate."

  Temper officially lost, Alice snapped, "Do they always call in a Subdirector from the NSB when they need an asshole?"

  The grin didn’t budge, but the eyes tightened down a notch, "I have been given a rge amount of titude concerning your contract."

  "Making you an asshole with titude."

  His eyes flicked up and stayed there. Must have been lots of info on the screen. Finally he looked back down at her, "This asshole not only has a rge amount of titude concerning your contract but also has information. Information including the contract status of one ‘Gloria Greene’."

  Alice did her best to appear only mildly interested as she asked, "Yeah? What contract did she get?"

  Horton’s grin twisted into a malicious sneer, "She didn’t. She failed her medical exam."

  Alice felt the mask that was her face almost slip, but she kept it in pce, "Huh, I never seemed to notice anything with her. What did she have that was so expensive?"

  He wasn’t even trying to hide his enjoyment as he said, "Standard depression and anxiety, ADHD with an emphasis on attention deficit, and markers for heart disease, she will likely need a prosthetic in fifteen years or so. Honestly it would probably take less time to list off what wasn’t wrong with her."

  Alice’s anger turned to ice in her chest. Gloria had been the one they had never worried about. All of their pns had revolved around what they would do if Alice didn’t get a contract. Alice had known about the ADHD, but that was only 3 points. Oh and her heart!? She should have… and then she realized that she was sitting in front of an NSB subdirector with a fake smile on her face like a bot that had been powered off.

  "That’s a shame,” she said just to fill the space, “So what happens now?"

  Horton shrugged, "She's free to do what she will, she just won't be offered a contract with Nile.”

  "I’m sure she will,” Alice said, trying desperately to move the conversation away from Gloria, “What I was asking though, is what happens now to me?"

  The Subdirector stood up and smiled his fake smile, straightened his fake uniform and it’s fake insignia, "Now, Campbell, you come with me. You’ve been cleared of corporate espionage and you've been offered a contract with Nile as a fourth css security analyst, Security Research Department. You have bags to pack, it’s a long flight to Nile Headquarters. Oh, and welcome to the NSB."

  Authors Context Note:

  This facts and details of this event, and many other events in this book, were drawn from a series of interviews with Alice and Gloria’s daughter, Summer Campbell-Greene. I felt that Summer was thrilled to finally be able to tell Alice’s side of the story.

  This entire event lends context to Gloria’s actions immediately following her failed attempt to become a Nile corpo. While her journey from the Nile facility of her childhood to one of the st remaining private security companies on the North American east coast has been lionized as a significant transition period from aspiring corpo to aspiring rebel warrior, mainly due to the hit folk song The Wanderer by the band Fallen Towers in the te 2190’s, from this story it seems much more likely that Gloria returned home to a missing improvised communications unit and fled for her life. She would have had no knowledge of Alice’s fate or known that the Nile Security Bureau was not seeking her at all.