Did she gain anything from the reportsof Yoshio’s death? Nothing very obvious, certainly.
Sayuri herself wasn’t mentioned anywhere inconnection with the supposed death, and hadn’t set foot onEpimetheus in almost a year. She might have been involved in theattempt to kill her great-grandfather-she wasn’t clever enough tohave done it single-handedly, but she could be part of aconspiracy, perhaps even its instigator-but I couldn’t see anyreason for her to have sent a false report of his death.
There wasn’t an obvious beneficiary. Icouldn’t see any way in which the fake death changed anything inNightside City. Whether Yoshio Nakada was alive or dead, Vijay Voran the New York. Whether Yoshio Nakada was alive or dead, AkinaNakada was just the family’s troubleshooter, not directly involvedin anything of consequence. And Sayuri didn’t have anything to dowith Nightside City anymore.
So what did the alleged death change?It didn’t change anything in law enforcement, since it hadsupposedly taken place on Prometheus and it was officially due tonatural causes, and not a murder at all. It didn’t change anythingfinancially, so far as I could see. It didn’t alter the powerstructure.
I thought at first that it meant anyinstructions Yoshio sent would be ignored, and maybe someone wantedto undercut him on Epimetheus, but I quickly realized that wasbuggy-if instructions got through, even if they weren’t believed orobeyed, that would start an investigation and the whole program,whatever it was, would crash. If someone was trying to prevent theold man from intervening on Epimetheus, faking his death wasexactly the wrong way to go about it. Using whatever software hadfaked the death reports to block the incoming orders madefar more sense.
His actual death would have hadimmense effects, but they would all be back on Prometheus, or inthe struggling little colony on Cass II, or in other systemsentirely. Nothing obvious would change here on Epimetheus-but sofar as I knew, it was only on Epimetheus that he was believed to bedead.
The whole thing was glitched. After all,sooner or later someone from Prometheus who knew Grandfather Nakadawas still alive was going to show up and debug the system, so anychanges in ownership or control or cash flow would be rebooted.Whatever our mysterious gritware wanted, it had to be somethingthat didn’t need to be permanent. I tried to think what that couldbe, and the screen kept coming up blank.
So I almost missed it. I almost just let itgo right past me. Finally, though, a passing mention in one reportbeeped something, and I realized what would be changed by YoshioNakada’s death that would not be changed by illness, or a trip outof the Eta Cassiopeia system, or bankruptcy, or anything else. Istill didn’t see why it could possibly matter, but there was onething that his death brought about.
It meant that his In-The-Event-Of-Death fileswere opened.
Anyone in any sort of high-risk occupationmaintains ITEOD files, of course-all the secrets that you wouldn’twant anyone to know while you’re alive, but which you don’t wantlost if you die. Everyone who might want you dead, everythingyou’ve hidden away that you want your heirs to have, it all goesinto the ITEOD files, tucked away behind the most ferocioussecurity possible. Anyone cruising the net who gets too close tothe ITEOD files gets warned off; try to touch them and you’ll getthe most horrific feedback you’ve ever experienced. Go in on wire,and it’s like monsters screaming inside your brain, like blindinglight and the stench of death. There are layers of software thathate each other guarding it, competing to keep everyone out. Nobodyhas ever cracked an ITEOD file.
But when a death is reported and verified,the file is delivered to the city cops and read by both a human andan artificial intelligence. It doesn’t all become public, but itall comes out from behind the firewalls and encryption.
Did Yoshio Nakada have something in the ITEODfiles in Nightside City, something that someone else wanted abetter chance to hack? He undoubtedly had terabytes of juicygoodness in ITEOD files back on Prometheus, or whatever thePromethean equivalent of ITEOD files was-I hadn’t happened to haveany reason to check out whether cities on Prometheus had the samesystem Nightside City did, but I guessed there was somethingsimilar.
The first question was whether Yoshio Nakadaeven had ITEOD files in Nightside City. He’d never livedhere.
But he had visited here, he had businessinterests here, and he struck me as the kind of person who’d wantoffsite back-ups, so I was guessing he did have somethinghere. And if someone had wanted something in that file, faking theold man’s death was probably the best way to get at it.
If that was the motive for the bogusreports of his death, then was it the would-be assassin who wasresponsible for it?
Whoever reported the death must have knownabout the attempted murder; the supposed death matched the failedassassination perfectly, and I couldn’t buy that as merecoincidence. Did that mean the liar was the assassin?
Not necessarily. It might be someone else whohad been part of the conspiracy, or it might have been someone whofound out after the fact, perhaps while spying on the old man. Butit certainly might be the same guy.
I began to wonder whether I might actuallycrack this after all, and earn my five million bucks, and get ’Chanand our father safely off-planet. Tracing back the fake deathreport might not be possible, since the party responsible wouldhave expected that and would have covered her tracks as well as shepossibly could, but if the motive really was something in the ITEODfiles-and I couldn’t think what else it might be-then I might catchher by checking everyone who had accessed those.
In fact, maybe that was why someone had triedto kill Grandfather Nakada in the first place. Maybe the would-bekiller didn’t really care one way or the other about the old man’sdeath, but was absolutely desperate to get at something in thefiles.
That was, I admitted to myself, unlikely, butI couldn’t rule it out completely.
This was all lovely in theory, but I didn’tyet know whether it had any link to reality. I had someinvestigating to do, and I did it. This didn’t call for anythingfancy; there were public lists of who was included.
Sure enough, Yoshio Nakada had establishedstandard ITEOD files here in Nightside City fifty or sixty yearsago, and they had been updated regularly whenever he visited, andsometimes by encrypted uploads from Prometheus, as well. Thosefiles were turned over to the city cops about an hour after thereport of his death was verified.
I went to take a look at them.
I don’t mean I left my old office; I didn’t.I was still jacked in to my old desk, dancing the nets on wire, andI went looking for the files on the police nets. I didn’t havelegal access, but I’ve never worried much about details likethat.
I hadn’t made up anything special for thissort of cracking, since ten minutes earlier I hadn’t known I wasgoing to be trying it, but I had my standard collection ofwatchdogs and retrievers, and I put them to work. I cruised thecyberscape around the police nets and launched little exploratoryjabs into the cracks and crannies, and at the same time I wasscrolling through all the public data, looking for anything thatmight seem relevant and incidentally keeping some of the cops’software occupied.
I focused most of my attention on that, butat the same time some little corner of my head had already moved onto the next question about the falsified death report. I had atheory as to why someone sent it, but I didn’t have a clueas to how.
Grandfather Nakada’s floater back onPrometheus had said the old man didn’t trust anyone on his staff inNightside City anymore, and that he believed his family’s softwarehad been seriously compromised. I wondered whether he had actuallybeen in contact with Epimetheus at all. Whoever faked the report ofthe old man’s death had somehow controlled communications betweenthe two planets so completely that nothing and no one contradictedhis story. In fact, he’d faked official verification of theoriginal lie.