I see Sofia taking it all in as we head out the back—I’m good at electronic networks, and she dominates the social ones, after all. So she’s doing what she does best. I see her study the school schedules on the screen in the kitchen, the photos of Mae and her kids, the comfy, mid-priced furnishings. Mae and her partner Tanya used a donor for the kids, then Mae ended up a single mom when it turned out raising babies was hard work. She shrugged, and said better to raise two than three. That’s what Mae’s like—the kids are the thing that matter. Sofia’s working that out, I’m pretty sure, from what’s on show here.
Though it’s very faint, she almost smiles when we head through into Mae’s office. I guess most of my kind don’t have well-tended potted plants and framed family portraits in their secret dens of hackery.
Me, I’m just itching to get over to Mae’s huge bank of screens. It’s like a gap inside me, having no way to get online—it’s an addiction, and I know it, but it’s one that works for me just fine. I tug on my sensor gloves and sink down into Mae’s chair. It hums softly, contours adjusting as it folds around me, and just like that, I’m at home. Behind me I hear Mae talking to Sofia about food and drink, but I’m already submerging in my world.
Most of the screens are taken up with forums, which Mae must have been checking when we arrived. They’re her specialty, though I dabble there as well. Say what you will about the conspiracy theorists, their paranoia comes in handy. If anything of interest makes it onto any corner of the hypernet, one of them’s going to notice it—and a couple of well-placed comments will send them marching off like an army of ants to investigate. Then all you have to do is sort the truth from the imagined shadows. Still, it’s worth it for the occasional gem, and that’s why the Knave provides anonymous, protected venues for their discussions. Looks like Mae was checking in on the Corinth Against Tyranny group—after their protest the day Sofia and I met, a bunch of their supporters are still missing. With the LaRoux stranglehold on the media, they’re not having any luck raising a fuss. This is the problem for all the groups who listened to Flynn Cormac’s infamous Avon Broadcast. Even if they do believe him, they’re never going to get the word out.
I slide in a couple of thumb drives to set up the programs I want, and watch the information start to fly by. For a moment I can see it before me, a vision of all my files streaming through the hypernet, locked down and encrypted beyond the wildest dreams of government agencies, part of an endless river of data. Does it all slide through hyperspace in some form recognizable to those who live there, the whispers? I wonder what they make of the stories we send—our love letters, our tax returns, and everything in between.
I shake away the question, and while I wait for them to run their security scans, I turn my attention to a discussion about Avon that takes up the top two screens on the right.
Nothing new on the first—a rehashing of the same old arguments about whether Flynn Cormac’s just a crackpot, no mention at all of Towers, some new data on the latest terraforming reports on Avon…and then. Oh, very nice. Kumiko and her band of Avon veterans, alleged Fury survivors, are chattering like I’ve never seen before. The author of the Avon Broadcast himself is coming to Corinth.
Someone’s copied and pasted the press release, with some sarcastic comments about how “the Man” keeps trying to pretend Cormac’s speech was all a lie. “Part of the official delegation from Avon, arriving in Corinth to present the credentials of the planet’s first elected senator to the Galactic Council and participate in the peace summit, Cormac is known for his involvement in the much-discussed Avon Broadcast, in which he claimed…” I know the rest.
My Avon expert’s probably got more info on the delegation than she’s posted in the forums, but my curiosity on that front will have to wait. I can picture Kumiko in her own den to the south of this sector, hunched over her screens. She’s a more reliable source of information than most, especially when it comes to the Fury on Avon, but I never quite trusted her enough to tell her I was after Towers. I don’t know who Kumiko served under on Avon, and since Towers’s role in the Fury epidemic there isn’t exactly public knowledge, I can’t be sure where Kumiko’s loyalties would fall.