Cyberpunk

an “incomplete” mark received on a course in Economic Linguistics. There was an issue with a position paper. I knew this because both Prescott’s wayward term paper and a copy of the dean’s letter to Prescott Three (which mentioned the word “plagiarism” in all caps quite prominently) had just been automat-delivered to me by one of our own couriers.
    “Where did you pick this up?” I asked.
    The iDeeBoy beeped at me, and it extended its ICEPane for my Package Receipt Acknowledgement key. As a member of the Security Directorate at ICE, the automats would allow me to open a package without signing for it, but they wouldn’t go away until I had officially tagged the COCT.
    I swiped my ICID instead, and the iDeeBoy froze, the image on its v-mon panel caught midway between a happy and a sad face. After a fraction, the look of constipation vanished and was replaced by the automat’s terminal interface. I called up the PDL manifests and discovered the ICEpak on my desk had been in-system less than three windings. A local delivery, picked up from—
    My hand retreated from the v-mon panel as it were hot, and I suddenly felt a little constipation of my own.
    The package had come from a “B” series station. Depot 12-B4. One of the old stopdrops.
    The stopdrops were first-gen stations, put in right after the GTI Accords had been ratified. They had been a marketing tool, really, one stolen from one of the other CorCongloms, and there had been one or more every radian inRing. P2P fulfillment went one step further, making the stopdrops obsolete, and a lot of them had been removed during the Retail Interregnum when Ring real estate demand was in flux; the rest had experienced a renaissance during the CorpEsp Reconstruction as a useful way to disseminate confidential information in an anonymous manner. Sometimes the best message is the one that can be submitted and delivered without leaving your GPIT all over it.
    IIRC, they were supposed to have been End of Lifed as part of the ICE SI & R.
    The iDeeBoy beeped and its v-mon changed back to the smiling face of everyone’s favorite delivery boy. It tapped its ICEPane against the edge of my desk, completely oblivious to the fact that I had been touching its internals. It wasn’t going to leave until I iSigned for the package.
    I signed and licked my thumb. The iDeeBoy, sensing the motion it was programmed to wait for, rotated its ICEPane and scanned my thumb, registering both my DNA and the physical print of my thumb. Satisfied that my GPIT matched its PDL, it trilled happily and trundled out of my office, leaving me with the mystery of this package.
    Why had someone sent me an old term paper belonging to our CEO? Why were they using old channels that weren’t supposed to exist? The term paper was a minor embarrassment, even with the issue of plagiarism. LegD had spent two turns scanning every document Prescott had ever touched before signing off on his appointment to CEO. Something like this wouldn’t be newsworthy enough to last more than a few media cycles.
    I glanced at the opening page of the thick document, and the first sentence of the abstract made my eyes cross. Autonomous Microphalengeal Retrieval as an Extra-Biologic Currency Acquisition System. I didn’t even understand what that meant.
    The paper was a headache waiting to happen, and not just because it ran two hundred and forty-six pages and it had so many footnotes that it looked like another paper entirely lived down there in the margins. No, the delivery was a symbolic gesture. It was a message, delivered via our own delivery system, using an unsecured backdoor. Which was surprising in itself, as intercorporate espionage had been outlawed for nearly ten turns now.
    Who was the target, though? my theory-brain asked. Me or our CEO?
    My name is Max. I work in what is left of SecD—Security Directorate—and it’s my job to be paranoid. I call it the “theory-brain,” the part of my job that’s all about figuring out how things worked. Not mechanical things; I don’t have that sort of aptitude. No, straight-up subcognitive theoretics and abstract extrapolation, with a focus on social wetworks, viral superstition mimetics, religio-aesthetic visual cues: you know, the sort of thing that a SecEd Tag in Pre-Collapse History is good for.
    Using the stopdrops as a way to send anonymous messages had been my idea. It had labeled me with a Director tag, and until the Systemic Introspect & Reorganization,