Cyberpunk

was loose too. The pain meds worked quickly. Too bad they couldn’t do something about the mood.
    She stepped out of the room, sealing the door shut behind her with a loud click of finality. Very 20c. That was nice too.
    The meds went right to the top of my brain, throwing open my skull and letting theory-brain get some air. It was the only explanation I had for the simple solution it presented to me a few fractions later.
    So very simple. So very nice.
    The key to any system is to discern the simplest route. GoogleTube had, in their own way, discovered that the simplest route to data domination was to decrease data separation to nearly zero. And while throwing hardware at a problem may seem to be counter to Ockham’s Insight of keeping it simple, it actually was because they were thinking about the problem from a different perspective .
    And when I thought about my problem from a different angle, the answer seemed obvious. It was an issue of logistics.
    Sophie had marked eighty-five more packages in-system, and even if I could killnine all of the deliveries, the packages and their contents were still physically in the ICE chain of custody. For them to be summarily destroyed without being opened would take an Executive Order from Prescott Four, the sort of request that would require a document trail and LegD audit. Prescott Four might be able to ultimately archive what was in the boxes, but it would take some corporate resources.
    Of which there were many, and that’s where I had gone astray. The point wasn’t to bring down ICE; it was to get someone’s attention.
    Mine.
    Once I realized that, theory-brain happily skipped to the next realization. If my attention was being sought, then what was the message? It wasn’t the packages. It was the way they were being delivered. Or more accurately, the way they were being put into the ICE system. By hand.
    Eighty-eight packages all together, hand-delivered to the stopdrops scattered across the Ring in a pattern that would—based on a fairly accurate model of ICE PDL—arrive in waves. In order to achieve that pattern of delivery distribution, the blackmailer would have to drop off the packages in an extremely precise route. One that could, if enough t-flops were redirected to model the permutations, be re-created.
    While Sophie’s emotive personality wasn’t speaking to me, her analytical persona was, and it didn’t take much to talk her into finding me the processor power to chart the most probable epicenter of the blackmailer’s route. My best theoretical estimate was that this location—within a few radians—was where I would find Prime Doctor Sandeesh’s grandson.
    “Hello, Max,” Sophie said in my ear.
    “Hello, Sophie,” I sub-vocalized back. Before I had left her place, she had upspliced a piece of military-grade code into my iView’s appstore. We were permanently connected now, handshaking on an encrypted link.
    It was almost better than sex. Almost.
    “I have the RPC.” Before I could read the coordinates she sent, I felt the ’tubebus change direction. “Routing you there now.”
    “Thanks,” I said. “Look, I’m sorry about what I said earlier.”
    My mail icon bounced. An R & U from her with a subject line of “Apology.” Read and Understood, but not Accepted. She was still mad at me.
    “I’m not very good at this,” I tried again. “So I guess I’ll just say it and . . . well, anyway . . . I don’t really know the proper protocols for . . .” When she didn’t say anything, I lumbered on, “. . . this sort of relationship. I mean, how am I supposed to treat all your personalities? The same? Differently? It’s confusing to us single-core guys.”
    “It always is,” she said.
    I bristled slightly. “That’s not fair. You’re baselining statistics on me.”
    “And you aren’t?”
    “What? How so?”
    “My personalities? You think I’m splitcore?”
    I paused, and my theory-brain shuffled through a couple scenarios and couldn’t find one that didn’t end badly. “Aren’t you?” I tried, cringing slightly as I said it.
    The only answer I received was a weird sensation of having a black hole in my brain, an emptiness that came from an open link that carried no data. It was the weirdest sensation of loss I had ever felt.
    Half a winding later, as I wandered around an Emporium 31 looking at jewelry, I tried again.
    I had found a holostat of Hammurabi Kip Sandeesh, the grandson, and I had loaded it into the