Cyberpunk

showing through its silver plating, a collection of military bullet casings childishly glued to an oak panel, a rosary with corn kernel beads, a mustache trimmer. “What’s all this junk?” she said, but of course she knew, for she recognized the pair of terra-cotta robins that had belonged to her mother. This was the collection of what her family regarded as heirlooms. Nancy, the youngest and most steadfast of seven children, had apparently been designated its conservator. But why had she brought it out for airing just now? Zoranna knew the answer to that, too. She looked at her sister who now lay among the hospice patients. Victor was scolding her for not wearing her vascular support stockings. Her ankles were grotesquely edematous, swollen like sausages and bruised an angry purple.
    Damn you, Zoranna thought. Bug, she tongued, call up the medical records of Nancy Brim, nee Smolenska. I’ll help munch the passwords .
    The net is unavailable , replied Bug.
    Bypass the houseputer. Log directly onto public access.
    Public access is unavailable.
    She wondered how that was possible. There had been no problem in the elevator. Why should this apartment be in shadow? She looked around and tried to decide where the utilidor spar would enter the apartment. Probably the bathroom with the plumbing, since there were no service panels in the kitchen. She stepped through the living room to the bathroom and slid the door closed. The bathroom was a tiny ceramic vault that Nancy had tried to domesticate with baskets of seashells and scented soaps. The medicine cabinet was dedicated to a man’s toiletries.
    Zoranna found the service panel artlessly hidden behind a towel. Its tamper-proof latch had been defeated with a sophisticated-looking gizmo that Zoranna was careful not to disturb.
    “Do you find Victor Vole alarming or arousing?” said Bug.
    Zoranna was startled. “Why do you ask?”
    “Your blood level of adrenaline spiked when he touched your hand.”
    “My what? So now you’re monitoring my biometrics?”
    “Bug is getting—”
    “I know,” she said, “Bug is getting to know me. You’re a persistent little snoop, aren’t you.”
    Zoranna searched her belt’s utility pouch for a terminus relay, found a UDIN, and plugged it into the panel’s keptel jack. “There,” she said, “now we should have access.”
    “Affirmative,” said Bug. “Autodoc is requesting passwords for Nancy’s medical records.”
    “Cancel my order. We’ll do that later.”
    “Tower directory lists no Victor Vole.”
    “I didn’t think so,” Zoranna said. “Call up the houseputer log and display it on the mirror.”
    The consumer page of Nancy’s houseputer appeared in the mirror. Zoranna poked through its various menus and found nothing unusual. She did find a record of her own half-dozen calls to Nancy that were viewed but not returned. “Bug, can you see anything wrong with this log?”
    “This is not a standard user log,” said Bug. “The standard log has been disabled. All house lines circumvent the built-in houseputer to terminate in a mock houseputer.”
    “A mock houseputer?” said Zoranna. “Now that’s interesting.” There were no cables trailing from the service panel and no obvious optical relays. “Can you locate the processor?”
    “It’s located one half-meter to our right at thigh level.”
    It was mounted under the sink, a cheap-looking, saucer-sized piece of hardware.
    “I think you have the soul of an electronic engineer,” she said. “I could never program Hounder to do what you’ve just done. So, tell me about the holo transmissions in the other rooms.”
    “A private network entitled ‘The Hospicers of Camillus de Lellis’ resides in the mock houseputer and piggybacks over TSN channel 203.”
    The 24-hour soccer channel. Zoranna was impressed. For the price of one commercial line, Victor—she assumed it was Victor—was managing to gypsy his own network. The trickle meters that she’d noticed were not recording how much money her sister was spending but rather how much Victor was charging his dying subscribers. “Bug, can you extrapolate how much the Hospicers of Camillus de—whatever—earn in an average day?”
    “Affirmative, Œ45 per day.”
    That wasn’t much. About twice what a hairdresser—or dance instructor—might expect to make, and hardly worth the punishment if caught. “Where do the proceeds go?”
    “Bug lacks the subroutine to trace credit