Cyberpunk

something smart to say, but the kid’s screen went black. Eyes out.
    He scratched his nose. “So . . .” he started.
    “Yeah,” I said, clearing my throat. “Just give me a scoop of Rocky Road. In a dish.”
    Something to chew on while I considered this new wrinkle. Baseline paranoia—the kind I got paid to explore—suggested that the individual who used this station had known about B-R’s data retention window. They knew ICE timetables too. Covering their tracks like a professional.
    I wasn’t thinking about the Visual Monitor and that last bit of eye contact. Not at all.
    Depot 12-B4 was a half-shell unit—an electro-bonded extrusion of ceramic with a pneumatic receptor and a battered 4ts-mon. Archaic, by any standard. I had d/l’ed their Lifecycle Management Protocol during the drop to Emporium 31. They had been EOLed shortly after the SI & R, but some middle manager down-chain had modded the LMP to only remove them as they broke down, a decision which failed to consider the high QA standard for this early generation of pre-fab. They made them to last counterclockwise.
    I could probably bit-sling responsibility of this mess over to Asset Management Directorate. My recommendation to retire all the stopdrops when the Corporate Influence Limitation Regulations had gone into effect was in the GPAR attached to the LMP, and with some serious butt-in-chair time, I could make the later amendment pop when someone queried the LMP. But that meant trusting the corporate chain to do the right thing and not panic.
    I had spent too many years thinking about what happened when the brain trust panicked. I had forgotten what a calm and rational response would look like.
    Holding my half-empty dish of ice cream in one hand, I swiped my ICID through the reader, and when asked for confirmation, I wiped off the grime on the screen and pressed my thumb against the glass. Like the iDeeBoy, the stopdrop promptly perked up and threw open its security panels to me.
    As I suspected, there was nothing on the internal surveillance from earlier ante-meridiem. Flicking back through the log, I had to go two cycles before I found a live image. The blurry motion of a flat object—on all three feeds at once, I noticed. Boom. Blackout.
    An alert in the log noted a security violation had been submitted to ICECORE. I didn’t even have to log on to the central ICE network to verify how much of a non-event that was to ICECORE. The vandalism would have just flipped the Need To Retire bit on this stopdrop. The AsManD sweeps got further and further apart every turn, and it would probably be a couple of rotations before their automats recycled this drop.
    Exactly what my message sender was counting on.
    This individual wasn’t just covering their tracks; they were also using our system to slow discovery of their malfeasance. The term paper wasn’t an isolated delivery. There were more coming. You didn’t need a Theorist to spec that.
    My phone icon bounced in my right peripheral. I glanced at it, noted it didn’t have any tags, and accepted the handshake request. “Max Semper Dimialos.”
    “Hello, Max,” she said. I was a little surprised that it was her. I mean, I realized a split fraction after I took the call that I was hoping it was going to be, and the thrill of hoping and receiving took me a little by surprise. “Would you meet me for a coffee?” B-R’s EyeSpy asked.
    “Ah,” I said, involuntarily glancing back at the rounded hump of the Baskin-Robbins Emporium, even though I knew she wasn’t onsite. Visual Monitoring was done out of B-R HQ in Chrysalis. “Now?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, I’m sort of busy right now.” Mentally kicking myself as I said it, even though it was true.
    “So am I.”
    “Ah,” I repeated. I was presenting quite the erudite image of the ICE Security Directorate. “I’ve got a bit of a red flag at the moment. I don’t really—”
    “The Bliss Canopy Rotunda,” she cut me off. “Verdigris Level. One winding?” She paused, but not long enough for me to gurgle out a response. “It’s not that sort of meeting.” And then the call terminated.
    I shoveled the rest of the ice cream in my mouth to cool down the flush rising in my cheeks. I hadn’t thought—
    Okay, I had. I mean, it’s not like anyone went to Starbucks for just coffee any more.
    • • •

    She hadn’t gotten a room; she sat in plain sight, on the stool closest to the coffee bar. Taking advantage of our need for