Cyberpunk

Monitor. Can you retrieve him for me?”
    The kid’s eyes flickered to the right, the sure sign he was on the IM. Each of the SIX modded their iStructure network to their own specs, but the baseline basic employeenet was always the same: IM, Lifecycle Management & Workflow, and MediaHub. It made the dissemination of corporate memos and quality assurance training materials easier, and the 1024-character ceiling on IM made it easy for the corporate substrate to live and die on that layer.
    Through the SysAdm whispernet, I’d heard that a couple of the SIX were no longer tracking IM data. GoogleTube still had a lock on cloud storage, and rumor was they were starting to raise rates outRing. Something like per TB, which was going to create all sorts of panic in FinD. No one wanted to be caught on the wrong end of a billing cycle when that rate change came through.
    The flexible monitor on the kid’s uniform made snow for a fraction, and then synched into the image of a narrow face, squeezed slightly more peevish by the aspect ratio forced by the boy’s narrow chest. Red-framed glasses (the same corporate shade as his slightly askew collar) told me this was the site manager, and not the person whom I had requested. “What can—” he started.
    I cut him off by pressing my card against the kid’s chest. “Not you,” I said. The holostat would translate across even the zero-tech of the kid’s uniform. Outside of ICE, a SecD sigil still carried some weight. “I want to talk to your eyes.”
    “I really—”
    “Now.”
    The kid yelped, and I wasn’t sure if it was from the tone of my voice or an all-caps IM lighting up his retinal feed.
    In a fraction, someone cleared their throat, and it was a much different noise than the squawking noise the site manager had been making. Female, for one. I lowered my card.
    She was pretty in the way the internal guts of an iNuPod were: compact, sleek, and incredibly efficient in design. Pale, in the way a good EyeSpy would be. A halo of synthetic d-cable twisted in her hair. She wore a simple black tunic that gave me the subtle impression that I was talking to a floating head. “How can I be of assistance to the Security Theorist of InterCore Express?” she asked. Her voice was about as bored as her gaze was unfocused, but I didn’t take it personally. She was multitasking on a factorial level that would make my head explode. She would probably be able to Read & Understand Prescott’s term paper.
    “I need eyes from this morning,” I said. “A winding’s worth, seventh to the eighth. Anything containing feed of the RPC minus one plus one from my current location.”
    Her eyes tracked left. “Query,” she said, and she rattled off a sequence I figured was my current Ring Positioning Coordinates. “Processing. One fraction please.”
    I had nothing else to do for several fractions (and it’s never one, no matter what they say), so I stared at her face. The kid squirmed a bit, and I reached across the counter and held him still. Behind me, a tiny voice was chanting, “Quadrilmint! Quadrilmint!”
    Her eyes twitched and a slight moue dimpled the right edge of her mouth. “One fraction,” she said again.
    Not a good sign.
    I glanced over my shoulder. Even with the haze of advertising, I could see the stopdrop from here. Every employee in Emporium 31 could. She should have multiple angles available. B-R SysAdmD shouldn’t have dropped that data set already; the ante-meridiem shift was still on. Even if they were crunching some serious t-flops to de-dupe it, there—
    “I’m sorry,” she said, drawing my attention back to her composed features. “That data is not available right now. Perhaps you’d like to inquire again later?”
    “Will my odds improve?”
    Her lips tugged into a thin smile. “I do not have that information.”
    “Of course not.” A thought struck me and I blinked, ghosting the Ring Coordinated Time on my retina. Thirteen twenty-seven. “What is the closest time stamp you can retrieve for me?”
    “Oh nine thirty—” She blinked, “—eight.”
    “That’s a four winding—” I stopped. A four winding retention window. What sort of baboon-brain was in charge of SysAdmD at Baskin-Robbins? “Ah, thank you,” I amended, keeping that question to myself.
    She hung all her sub-processes, directing her full attention at me for a fraction, and then gave me a nod that went, I thought, a touch beyond professional courtesy. I tried to think of