That shouldn’t be possible.
A human being couldn’t do it unassisted, Iwas sure of that; some pretty powerful software would be needed tomonitor and control all the communications between Epimetheus andPrometheus well enough to catch any reference to whether YoshioNakada was alive or dead. Software that powerful was more likelythan not to be an intelligence in its own right.
Maybe there really was a conspiracy here, andmaybe some of the conspirators weren’t human.
And there I was, with my brain plugged intothe nets, my consciousness roaming a domain where software was moreat home than we mere mortals, poking into places this theoreticalintelligence probably did not want me poking.
I had just had that unpleasant thought whenone of my retrievers came buzzing back to me to say that it hadfound Yoshio Nakada’s ITEOD files, including the access records,and was fetching me a copy of everything. I just had to keep itactive long enough.
I called my watchdogs in to guard it, let myother retrievers shut down one by one as they reported in, andwaited.
And I saw it coming, saw it and felt it andheard it through the synesthetic web link, I even smelledit, and tasted smoky copper. Something big and blue-black andscreaming was searching for… well, I didn’t really know what itwas searching for, but my best guess was that my retriever haddisturbed it, tripped some sort of warning that had brought thisthing swooping down on me. It felt like hot melting velvet as itflashed past me down into the police records, and smelled ofvinegar and burning styrene.
Three of my watchdogs just vanished, eraseddown to the last bit. I erased the retriever myself, to reduce thechances of being traced, and then got the hell out of there. Ipulled the plug from the back of my neck and was back in my officeon Juarez, sitting in the dark-I hadn’t reactivated the walls orlights, only the desk. The windows faced east, and I had themdimmed but not opaque, so I could still see the seething, squirmingcolors of the Trap, but that was the only light in the room-thedesktop had gone dark.
I rebooted the desk and took a look. Theretriever had downloaded 93% of Yoshio Nakada’s ITEOD files,including the complete access log; the odds were that I had gottenwhatever was there that I wanted to get.
There was a lot there to get; the deskhad partially crashed because it had run out of memory and hadn’tbeen able to swap data offsite fast enough. It would have been fineif I had let it slow down, or if the security had been a bitlooser, but I’d been in a hurry.
What the hell was in there, that took thatmuch memory? That desk could hold a dozen human minds withoutstraining, right down to suppressed childhood memories, butNakada’s files had filled every last gigabyte.
If I could have talked to the old man justthen I would have had some pretty pointed questions to ask, but hewasn’t even on the same planet, and communications between the twowere not to be trusted.
I had some other questions I didn’t thinkNakada could have answered. For one, what was that thing thatchased me off? That wasn’t standard cop security. That wasn’tanything I had ever seen before. I didn’t know what it would havedone to me if I’d let it, and I didn’t want to find out. I’d hadhostile software in my brain before, and had no interest inrepeating the experience.
Did the cops even know it was there? To havethe effect it did that thing must have huge bandwidth; it would behard to miss. Whoever programmed it hadn’t been going for subtlety.But if the cops knew it was there, wouldn’t they do something aboutit?
Had it been prowling the nets at random? Wasit guarding the old man’s ITEOD file? Had it been looking for me?It might be doing any of those, or it might be something elseentirely. Maybe I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.Maybe it was guarding something else, or chasing someone else.Maybe it was after something else in the police net.
Lots of questions, not enough answers.
I had to admit, though, that it looked as ifI was onto something. Whether it really was a conspiracy to murderYoshio Nakada I didn’t know; why anyone would want to murderYoshio Nakada I didn’t know.
But I was definitely ontosomething.
Chapter Eight
The access log I’d snagged with Grandfather Nakada’sITEOD files wasn’t exactly long, nor was it hugely informative.There were only three entries.
An officer named Hu Xiao had accessed thefiles under the direction of the court, and had copied portions. Anote indicated that the copying was for later analysis, and thatMis’ Hu had filed a report of his findings. The report was notavailable to the public.
An analytical program named Dipsy 3 hadaccessed the files. What Dipsy had done with them wasn’t listed.Dipsy was presumably pointed at the files by the courts, same as Huwas.
And finally, someone using a NakadaEnterprises corporate account had downloaded a complete copy of thefiles. No further details were included.
That third one-if the faked death had beendone to get at the ITEOD files…
Well, no. I couldn’t rely on that. Someonemight have been subtle and gotten what he was after by crackingHu’s storage, rather than the original the cops had. Or maybe Dipsyhad been tagged for it. Or maybe the original Nakada download waslegitimate, but then our interplanetary liar had gotten at itsomewhere in the corporate nets.
But the third one was worth a look, so Iplugged back in and started doing a trace on the account.
I’d expected it to be used by the New YorkGames Corporation, the subsidiary that ran the casino and most ofthe other Nakada businesses on Epimetheus, but it wasn’t. It was ahigh-level account for officers of Nakada Enterprises itself, ormembers of the Nakada family.
I unplugged again and stared at the displayon my desk.
This was too easy.
Grandfather Nakada thought a member of hisown family had tried to kill him. I had guessed that the motivemight be connected with his ITEOD files, and here was someone whomight be a member of the Nakada family accessing those ITEODfiles.
It couldn’t be that simple. I was good at myjob, but I wasn’t that good-or rather, I couldn’t believeany Nakada could be that bad at covering her tracks. Eventhat grithead Sayuri would probably have done better than this.
Of course, that assumed there was areason to cover those tracks. Maybe whoever this was hadn’thad anything to do with the attempted murder, or the fraudulentreports of Yoshio’s death.
It also assumed that I could identify whichfamily member it was. That wasn’t a sure thing.
I had looked over the Nakada family treeduring the flight from Prometheus, but now I pulled it up andlooked again.
Yoshio Nakada was the oldest surviving memberof the clan. His two siblings, both younger, were long dead. Yoshiohad married three times and sired five children-at least, five heacknowledged-over a period of about a century, ending roughly ahundred years ago. There had been eleven grandchildren, twenty-sixgreat-grandchildren (including my old friend Sayuri), thirty-threegreat-great-grandchildren, and forty-seven great-great-greatgrandchildren, so far. I didn’t bother counting up the threeyoungest generations; half of them were just kids, and all of themwere so low on the corporate ladder that I couldn’t take themseriously as any sort of threat.
A lot of these people were dead, and therewere dozens of spouses, ex-spouses, and concubines in the mix, ofcourse.
And then there were the two collateralbranches. Yoshio’s sister Hinako had one daughter, Narumi, who waschildless, twice widowed, and still alive, but at last report wason Earth, not in the Eta Cassiopeia system at all.