"It wasn't the first time he did it. I've been running the logs back three years and I've found at least a dozen streams that he tampered with. Each time he used a different technique. This was the first time we caught him. Used some pretty subtle tripwires when he did it, so he'd know if anyone ever caught on. Must have spent his whole life living on edge, waiting for that moment, waiting to bug out. Must have been a hard life. "
"What was he doing? Spying?"
"Most assuredly," Gerta said. "But for whom? For the enemy? the Securitat?"
They'd considered going to the Securitat with the information, but why bother? the Order did business with the Securitat, but tried never to interact with them on any other terms. The Securitat and the Order had an implicit understanding: so long as the Order was performing excellent data-analysis, it didn't have to fret the kind of overt scrutiny that prevailed in the real world. Undoubtedly, the Securitat kept satellite eyes, data-snoopers, wiretaps, millimeter radar and every other conceivable surveillance trained on each Campus in the world, but at the end of the day, they were just badly socialized geeks who'd left the world, and useful geeks at that. The Securitat treated the Order the way that Lawrence's old bosses treated the company sysadmins: expendable geeks who no one cared about — so long as nothing went wrong.
No, there was no sense in telling the Securitat about the sixty-eight bytes.
"Why would the Securitat poison its own data-streams?"
"You know that when the Soviets pulled out of Finland, they found forty kilometers of wire-tapping wire in KGB headquarters? the building was only twelve stories tall! Spying begets spying. The worst, most dangerous enemy the Securitat has is the Securitat. "
There were Securitat vans on the street around him, going past every now and again, eerily silent engines, playing their cheerful music. He stepped back into shadow, then thought better of it and stood under a pool of light.
"OK, so it was a habit. How do I find him? No one in the sister's building will talk to me. "
"You need to put them at their ease. Tell them the truth, that often works. "
"You know how people feel about the Order out here?" He thought of Posy. "I don't know if the truth is going to work here. "
"You've been in the order for sixteen years. You're not just some fumble-tongued outcast anymore. Go talk to them. "
"But—"
"Go, Lawrence. Go. You're a smart guy, you'll figure it out. "
He went. Residents were coming home every few minutes now, carrying grocery bags, walking dogs, or dragging their tired feet. He almost approached a young woman, then figured that she wouldn't want to talk to a strange man on the street at night. He picked a guy in his thirties, wearing jeans and a huge old vintage coat that looked like it had come off the eastern front.
"'Scuse me," he said. "I'm trying to find someone who used to live here. "
The guy stopped and looked Lawrence up and down. He had a handsome sweater on underneath his coat, design-y and cosmopolitan, the kind of thing that made Lawrence think of Milan or Paris. Lawrence was keenly aware of his generic Order-issued suit, a brown, rumpled, ill-fitting thing, topped with a polymer coat that, while warm, hardly flattered.
"Good luck with that," he said, then started to move past.
"Please," Lawrence said. "I'm — I'm not used to how things are around here. There's probably some way I could ask you this that would put you at your ease, but I don't know what it is. I'm not good with people. But I really need to find this person, she used to live here. "
The man stopped, looked at him again. He seemed to recognize something in Lawrence, or maybe it was that he was disarmed by Lawrence's honesty.
"Why would you want to do that?"
"It's a long story," he said. "Basically, though: I'm a monk from the Order of Reflective Analytics and one of our guys has disappeared. His sister used to live here — maybe she still does — and I wanted to ask her if she knew where I could find him. "
"Let me guess, none of my neighbors wanted to help you. "
"You're only the second guy I've asked, but yeah, pretty much. "
"Out here in the real world, we don't really talk about each other to strangers. Too much like being a snitch. Lucky for you, my sister's in the Order, out in Oregon, so I know you're not all a bunch of snoops and stoolies. Who're you looking for?"
Lawrence felt a rush of gratitude for this man. "Anja Krotosky, number 11-J?"
"Oh," the man said. "Well, yeah, I can see why you'd have a hard time with the neighbors when it comes to old Anja. She was well-liked around here, before she went. "
"Where'd she go? When?"
"What's your name, friend?"
"Lawrence. "
"Lawrence, Anja went. Middle of the night kind of thing. No one heard a thing. The CCTVs stopped working that night. Nothing on the drive the next day. No footage at all. "
"Like she skipped out?"
"They stopped delivering flyers to her door. There's only one power stronger than direct marketing. "
"The Securitat took her?"
"That's what we figured. Nothing left in her place. Not a stick of furniture. We don't talk about it much. Not the thing that it pays to take an interest in. "
"How long ago?"
"Two years ago," he said. A few more residents pushed past them. "Listen, I approve of what you people do in there, more or less. It's good that there's a place for the people who don't — you know, who don't have a place out here. But the way you make your living. I told my sister about this, the last time she visited, and she got very angry with me. She didn't see the difference between watching yourself and being watched. "
Lawrence nodded. "Well, that's true enough. We don't draw a really sharp distinction. We all get to see one another's stats. It keeps us honest. "
"That's fine, if you have the choice. But—" He broke off, looking self-conscious. Lawrence reminded himself that they were on a public street, the cameras on them, people passing by. Was one of them a snitch? the Securitat had talked about putting him away for a month, just for logging them. They could watch him all they wanted, but he couldn't look at them.
"I see the point. " He sighed. He was cold and it was full autumn dark now. He still didn't have a room for the night and he didn't have any idea how he'd find Anja, much less zbigkrot. He began to understand why Anomalies were such a big deal.
He'd walked 18, 453 steps that day, about triple what he did on campus. His heart rate had spiked several times, but not from exertion. Stress. He could feel it in his muscles now. He should really do some biofeedback, try to calm down, then run back his lifelogger and make some notes on how he'd reacted to people through the day.
But the lifelogger was gone and he barely managed twenty-two seconds his first time on the biofeedback. His next ten scores were much worse.
It was the hotel room. It had once been an office, and before that, it had been half a hotel-room. There were still scuff-marks on the floor from where the wheeled office chair had dug into the scratched lino. The false wall that divided the room in half was thin as paper and Lawrence could hear every snuffle from the other side. The door to Lawrence's room had been rudely hacked in, and weak light shone through an irregular crack over the jamb.
The old New Yorker Hotel had seen better days, but it was what he could afford, and it was central, and he could hear New York outside the window — he'd gotten the half of the hotel room with the window in it. The lights twinkled just as he remembered them, and he still got a swimmy, vertiginous feeling when he looked down from the great height.
The clerk had taken his photo and biometrics and had handed him a tracker-key that his pan was monitoring with tangible suspicion. It radiated his identity every few yards, and in the elevator. It even seemed to track which part of the minuscule room he was in. What the hell did the hotel do with all this information?