Cyberpunk

nostalgia, Starbucks’s interior design hadn’t changed. They even still made their coffee by hand, using anachronistic, steam-driven espresso machines. My heart skipped a beat when I saw her sitting there, in the noisiest spot in the room. Such security consciousness . A small demitasse cup sat on the green counter, and on a nearby plate was a half-eaten Starbucks bar.
    She was wearing a long white coat with white feather trim, and a solar flare head wrap that matched her shoes. She still wore her glasses and, when I got a good look at them from the side, I realized they weren’t the sort that one took off casually, even for bed.
    I ordered tea, generating some confusion with the barista, and sat down next to the Eyes of Baskin-Robbins Emporium 31.
    “You should be a bit more discreet,” she said.
    “Coffee makes me twitchy,” I explained. “And if I had ordered coffee, it’d just sit there on the table. And no one would notice that in a place like this.”
    “You could have said something.”
    “You didn’t give me a chance.”
    “I—” she stopped. Her glasses darkened several shades as she glanced around, reading heat patterns, microwave signals, and who knew what other manner of electromagnetic waveform. “I’m sorry. I don’t do this very often.”
    “This?” I asked.
    “Meeting people,” she said. The corner of her mouth twitched, an unconscious emotional tell. “I . . . spend a lot of my time logged in. My UVEI is less than 8.”
    I had noticed. But it wasn’t an unhealthy color. Not like the grid lizards you find nesting next to the heat vents down in the UPS farms.
    “I’ve gotten off to a bad start, I see,” she continued. “Let’s try this again.”
    “Okay.” I held out my hand. “Max.”
    She took it. Firm, but not demanding. Supple, but not too soft. A working hand that was well-cared for. “Sophie.” Her fingers twitched as she let go, tickling my palm.
    “Nice to meet you.” I swiveled around on my stool so we were both facing the same direction, as if we were watching the parade of ads on the wall of jumbo v-mons. “So, Sophie,” I continued, trying my best to appear completely at ease, though truth be told, I was just as badly out of practice. “What can I do for you?”
    “Earlier, when you asked me to retrieve the visual feeds from the lines at that Emporium 31 . . .”
    I sipped my tea and nodded.
    “. . . I told you the closest time stamp match I had was four windings prior. Exactly four.”
    “Right. Your security policy was written either by an overzealous LegD or you had a bunch of baboons as consultants.”
    “It’s not,” she said. “It’s actually sixty-four windings. Or, at least it was. A new policy went active at cycle change, precipitating a systemic data purge.” She gave me one of those smiles. Hinting at a wellspring of laughter, one that hadn’t quite breached. “I need to thank you, actually. If you hadn’t asked to see the data, I wouldn’t have had a need to access the archives. It may have been a full rotation before I noticed the change in policy. That would have been . . .”
    “Catastrophic?”
    “Bad, for my PIPe. I have a mid-turn review next rotation.”
    “Good luck.” I raised my cup.
    “Thank you.” She put her hands in her lap. “But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.”
    “No?” My voice rose on the second letter, a rather awkward squeak as if I was attempting to impersonate one of those autonomous miPets.
    She shook her head. “The change was executed via a shell script. From a root login. On a system within our network that had been zombied by a terminal with a GTAC of ‘1E78/BF001.’”
    “A what?”
    “A GoogleTube Access Cipher key.”
    “I know what it is, it’s—”
    “The key belongs to ICE, Max.” She spelled it out for me, as I appeared to not be getting it. “One of your systems hacked my network last night.”
    “Ah,” I said. There I went, reverting to monosyllabic responses again. “Well,” I tried, but my head was filled with too many options, Theorist paranoia overflowing my buffers.
    She stood up, and pushed her half-eaten snack closer to me. “Please, finish this for me, will you?” She put her hand on my shoulder. “And please pull the plug on whomever is accessing my dataform.”
    She left, and I realized, as the aroma faded in her wake, that she smelled like flowers.
    When I touched her plate, I noticed it wasn’t quite flat on the table. I lifted it slightly