Cyberpunk

waiting at my office. “Did you find the tag?” I asked as I sat down behind my desk, and started to massage my temples. I always got a tension headache after meetings with upper management. Having Yullg there had only made this one worse.
    Trip hooted, and banged on his ’tray keyboard. Trip was an IT monkey. A modified chimpanzee, he had a predilection for primary colors, which expressed itself as a yellow beanie and a blue vest. His Jaynes LinkTray was slung low across his chest, and a large red “Free Genetics!” holostat curled around the bottom edge of the unit.
    The speakers set in the ’tray housing popped with noise for a fraction before modulating into a human voice. I had been working with Trip long enough to know that first spit of sound wasn’t zero-tech feedback, but was a triggered sound effect—aural commentary on the synthesized human speech about to follow. “No tag.”
    The voice wasn’t the generic voxtrack, but one that had some subtle modulation and inflection. Like most IT monkeys, Trip was a tweaker. Every piece of hardware he used was a mod-kit; nothing ever stayed OTS long with them. “Log hole,” the voice added.
    “Really?” A log hole meant an AsManD discrepancy, a mismatch between electronic data and physical assets. “Where?”
    More banging. “Patent Directorate Asset transfix to FinD, part of SI & R.”
    Back to that again. The Systemic Introspect & Reorganization. The end of CorEsp brought about CILR, which in turn, led to the i3Cee. Prescott Four, during the media blitz showcasing the new era of ICE-applied valuation, had been caught on-feed wondering how couriering packages could offer humanitarian reform. As a result, every division and directorate suffered through a costly self-analysis, resulting in a number of early retirements, ROI layoffs, and internal restructuring. The SI & R.
    SecD had been defanged, and those of us who remained as desk monkeys became as inflexible and intractable as the extruded furniture in our three square meters of office space. Entropy was turning us into statues, one joint at a time. So much for humanitarian reform.
    PatD got swallowed by FinD, who, IIRC, had been mandated to become a visible asset, i.e., they had to operate black and not be a cost center any longer. The first response—like every moment of brain trust panic through the ages—had been to cut staff. While it had certainly helped FinD go black the first turn following the SI & R, it hadn’t done much to the IQ ratio of the Directorate.
    This was good news, after all. The GTAC/GMAC had belonged to one of the patent agents. I didn’t have a spoofer. One of the SI & R rifters had taken their terminal with them, and through some typical AsManD data contrafusion, the terminal had never been properly retired. Not entirely surprising, really. For a turn or two after the SI & R, there was an impenetrable flow of re-hires and consultants among the brain trust. “Who?” I asked Trip.
    “Kip Birmingham Sandeesh, Prime Doctor.”
    “Where can I find him now?” Suddenly, it seemed like my clever (read desperate) plan might actually work.
    “Deceased.”
    Or not.
    “Family?”
    “Grandson.” More key banging. “RPC null.”
    “That’s interesting,” I said, falling back on a phrase of Prescott Four’s. My theory-brain tried to construct a viable scenario. If the terminal still had its original GTAC/GMAC, then it should be visible on the iStructure dashboard. That would, in turn, give us a Ring Positioning Coordinate. It would follow that the son’s GPIT—if he was indeed behind this blackmail—should be readily available.
    Since it wasn’t, that certainly made the case for his being my prime suspect.
    “When did Prime Doctor Sandeesh expire?”
    “EOL 3T post-EOE.” A pause, inserted by a hairy thumb resting on a space bar. “Anniversary of EOL: 1Cyc.”
    “This rotation?”
    Trip triggered a noisy sound effect. His equivalent of confirmation.
    “Well, now . . .” I mused.
    Grandfather gets WTFed during the SI & R. Dies three turns after leaving the company. The anniversary of his death was the first cycle of this rotation—the cycle before the arrival of the first package.
    The best part of this revelation was that I had an excuse to call Sophie.
    While in-transit to the domicile still registered to the Sandeesh Familial Asset Library, I called her.
    Halfway through the protocol handshake, she was there in my head. “Hello, Max.”
    “You were