Cyberpunk

and felt underneath. Stuck to the bottom was a tiny lozenge, a mag-strip candy—a tasty treat that came with a data payload. As casually as I could, I tugged the tiny lozenge off the plate and popped it in my mouth. As it dissolved on my tongue, my iView registered two numbers. One was the full GTAC/GMAC of the ICE terminal that had zombied her system. The other was a directory access number.
    I scrolled back through my call log.
    Different than before. This one must be her direct line.
    I didn’t want to call right away. Subtle signals aside, she appeared to be focused on the business at hand, and I wanted to have something useful to tell her when I did call. As a result, it was late—nearly cycle change—before I did.
    “Hello, Max,” she said without preamble before my iView had even registered that the handshake protocol had been completed. As much as my paranoia resisted, I found that I liked having her voice in my head.
    “Hello, Sophie.” I remembered why I called her in the first place. “I found the zombie maker.”
    “But . . .”
    “How do you know there’s a ‘but’?”
    “There always is with men.”
    “Hey, that’s . . .” Probably true. “Okay. So, yeah, there is a ‘but’—” I stopped and took a deep breath before continuing. EyeSpies always charted on the SocDis spectrum; it went hand in hand with their ability to focus and multitask. There was no point in getting angry with her. She probably wouldn’t understand why I was upset.
    “ But ,” I said, moving on, “the terminal was EOLed a half-turn ago, and removed from our routing tables three rotations later. I have a priority request for documentation of its recycle tab, but it’ll be post-meridiem before I hear anything.”
    “This news does not comfort me, Max.”
    “Yes, but—”
    “Every ’tube-ready object has a unique GTAC/GMAC key,” she said as if I didn’t already know this. “It won’t accept power without one. You can’t reuse a key.”
    “I know, Sophie,” I interrupted. “But—” It was like I was stuck in a bad code loop— but, but, but . . .
    “So, if this machine has been recycled, how did its GTAC/GMAC end up in my iNetMom dashboard yesterday?”
    “I’m still working on that,” I said. “That’s why I’ve got the Query registered.”
    She was quiet for a fraction. “This isn’t useful information,” she said.
    “It’s progress,” I tried. “You know, forward movement on the situation.”
    “What if the tag is present? What data does that give us?”
    “Well, I don’t know if the tag is there or not. That’s why I’m asking.” I was raising my voice again. Theory-brain was defaulting to my SOP with internal SysAdmD communications. Everyone thought they knew something about Theoretics.
    “If the recycle tab is available, then you have a spoofer.”
    “Yes, Sophie, I suppose that is possible.” I sighed. Somehow this conversation hadn’t gone like I had hoped.
    A spoofer was, like a zombie maker, a system that hid behind other systems, though in the case of the spoofer, it falsified its GMAC to the ’tubes. Both zombie making and spoofing were old hacks that had been bound out by the 23.r4 rev of iStructure. Of course, that was only true if SysAdmD was current on its iStructure revs.
    My confidence in ICE SysAdmD wasn’t that high, but I wasn’t about to share that with an outside agency.
    “What is your position on the presence of a spoofer, Max?” Sophie asked.
    “I—look, why are you breaking my balls?”
    “I’m . . . that’s rather odd syntax, Max. Rather aggressive.”
    “No, I—it’s an idiom. Late 20c. Sorry. That was inappropriate of me.”
    “Late 20c,” she replied, and for a few fractions, all I heard over the audio link was a micro-noise that seemed like the sound of her breathing. “You know much 20c?” she asked finally, in a different tone of voice. Much less brittle. Silkier, like this was an Avatar consultation.
    “A little,” I said. “It’s a hobby.”
    “A man does need a hobby.”
    “And how.”
    “Um . . . I . . . well, during your personal cycle time—”
    “Sorry, another idiom.”
    “Oh, yes.” She went silent again, and for the second time I wished this handshake had included a visual feed. I couldn’t get a read on what she was thinking, and the theory-brain was starting to wonder if I was talking to the same woman. Her voice had changed enough that—
    “I, yeah, I’ll know more about that tag in a few