Cyberpunk

during the . . . activities. The downside of this distribution method meant that, after we were done, I couldn’t sleep. Too wired.
    She had a smaller, single-screen v-mon pad in the bathroom, and I used it to track down a niggling itch. Not the one in my chest. The persistent tap-tap from the theory-brain. You’ve missed something. I iPriv’ed in to ICECORE and accessed my delivery log.
    The third package was the anomaly. Why? Why had it come late in the day, and not with the morning run? Why was it a Gen-Y delivery and not a Prior-R?
    When I filtered the PDL to just the three packages, I saw the pattern. My mystery shipper was using all anonymous stopdrops, timing deliveries so that they arrived in a specific order on specific days. He hadn’t realized that a Gen-Y—a general issue delivery—had a modified schedule for ICE HQ: post-meridiem.
    His first mistake.
    I queried for the RPCs of the remaining stopdrops, all the way to the edge of outRing. Forty-seven , was the response. That stopped me for a few fractions. Was he going to use them all? That was a lot of blackmail material.
    Of course, Prescott Four probably had more skeletons than that buried.
    But he was going to send Yullg out before then. He already had, and EnforD had come up empty. That’s why he needed me out of bed and back in the field. There was something coming—and coming soon—that he really didn’t want to be made public.
    “Hello, Max,” she said in my ear, and I jumped because she was actually there, standing beside me.
    “Ah, hi,” I said. When I glanced up, I could see a reversed image of my screen along the lower rim of her left eyeglass lens. I should have known. Of course, she’d be monitoring her own house. Private network tunnel notwithstanding. “Just seeing if there was anything new.”
    “He’s using your own system, isn’t he?”
    “Yes. Yes, he is.”
    “So you’ve been just as compromised as I have.”
    I thought about a position we had recently been in. “Compromised” was one way to put it.
    “What’s in the packages, Max?”
    “Ah, term papers. DNA reports. That sort of thing.”
    She blinked, fish-eyed behind her glasses. “That’s only two.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “You’ve only suggested two items. There are three packages that have been delivered and signed by you.”
    “Signed?” I had been unconscious for the last one. “I . . . I don’t know, really. I didn’t get a chance to see it.”
    Her eyes flicked left, and I saw the screen image on her lens churn. My stomach tightened unconsciously. She was accessing ICE PDL. That was a violation of—
    Her focus snapped back. “Yes, I see that now.”
    “You know, it’s a little creepy how quickly you are able to retrieve my corporate assets like that.”
    She stared at me for a long time, her face impassive and unreadable. Then, the icy impasse broke and her face melted into a warm smile. “Max,” she said. “I’m keeping an eye on you. Don’t you feel more safe?”
    The iMed call. If she hadn’t triggered it, I wouldn’t be here.
    “Ah, yeah. I guess so.”
    Something flickered in her eyes. I wasn’t sure if it was a reflection from her glasses or something more . . . internal. The rapidity with which she moved between personalities was a little intense.
    “Based on the PDL from these stations, there are eighty-five more packages scheduled to be delivered to you. They’ll arrive over the next few cycles, in increasing number. Each wave utilizes a different sequence of the stopdrops.”
    “I’ve realized that.” Little boxes of blackmail.
    “They can’t all be—”
    I shook my head. “Probably not. He’ll have anticipated us figuring out he was using the stopdrops. We could query for all mail coming from those drops, but not all of them will be blackmail boxes. We don’t know which ones are hot.”
    “What are you going to do next?”
    “I was thinking about you and I going back to bed.”
    She slapped me.
    Wrong answer, apparently.
    “Is that all I am to you?”
    “All what?”
    “A one-off.”
    “We did it twice.”
    “What about my security breach?”
    “You have one?”
    She slapped me again. “This is such a mistake,” she said, almost as if her personalities were talking to one another.
    My lungs seized as the pharmacopoeia triggered another dose of painkillers. My cheek went numb. That was nice.
    “Which?” I asked, intruding on her internal dialogue. “Beating me up or sleeping with me?” My tongue