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NoLiMa

Dataset card Data Studio Files
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She felt an answering smile at the corners of her mouth and turned into the fridge to fetch out some gourmet... she said, then laughed.
She set everything to perking and went into the bedroom to pull on something smart and camera-friendly, but everything was in the hamper, so she settled for jeans and a decent shirt from last-year's wardrobe.
What?
> Major General Graeme Sutherland, the commanding officer for Northern California DHS operations, confirmed the request at a press conference yesterday, noting that a spike in suspicious activity in the Bay Area prompted the request. "We are tracking a spike in underground chatter and activity and believe that saboteurs are deliberately manufacturing false security alerts to undermine our efforts."
My eyes crossed. No freaking way.
> "These false alarms are potentially 'radar chaff' intended to disguise real attacks. The only effective way of combatting them is to step up staffing and analyst levels so that we can fully investigate every lead."
> Sutherland noted the delays experienced all over the city were "unfortunate" and committed to eliminating them.
I had a vision of the city with four or five times as many DHS enforcers, brought in to make up for my own stupid ideas. Van was right. The more I fought them, the worse it was going to get.
Dad pointed at the paper. "These guys may be fools, but they're methodical fools. They'll just keep throwing resources at this problem until they solve it. It's tractable, you know. Mining all the data in the city, following up on every lead. They'll catch the terrorists."
Thus she was no longer missing; she was now the apparent victim of an attempted murder. However, rather than being helpful, the local policia appeared annoyed she'd been found, thereby reopening the matter. A blond gringa was out hiking somewhere she had no business being in the first place and tripped and hit her head on something. Where's the crime?
Lou brought her back to New York, using a medevac plane supplied by the State Department, which, wanting no more CIA-type scandals of American nationals being murdered in Guatemala, cooperated with great dispatch.
After that, he needed a job that would afford him time flexibility, so he could be at her bedside as much as possible. David was looking for a security head, and I realized it would be a perfect match. Since we didn't really need a full-time person, Lou could spend a lot of hours at Lenox Hill, watch­ing over Sarah.
She was just lying there now, no sign of consciousness, her body being kept alive with IV I'd go by to visit her as much as I could, and almost as bad as seeing the comatose Sarah was seeing the grief in Lou's eyes. He would sit there at the hospital every day, sometimes several hours a day, fingering an old engraved locket that carried her high-school graduation picture, just rubbing it through his fingers like a rosary. We always made allowances when he wanted to take time off during one of our shooting schedules, figuring maybe he was helping her. . . .
though.) Then he asked me to teach him some Python, which didn’t go so well. It turned out he was good at making weird sculptures out of junk and screen-printing posters and reading hard books, but he didn’t have the patience to code. He doesn’t like being wrong, and being wrong is mostly what code is about.
You’re wrong again and again until finally it works.
But we found out we were both really interested in privacy issues, online and in real life, which turned into a kind of game.
We both started paying more attention to our surroundings,
noticing where security cameras were located (which is way more places than you might think), always looking out for spots that weren’t under surveillance, finding ways to evade Big Brother on an everyday basis. Wheeze was better at it than me, and I thought I was good. He started reading about encryption and when I sug- gested we both use PGP and exchange public keys, he was all over it.
He even let me jailbreak his phone and install Convo, and it was a good thing I did, since it was the only safe way we could commu- nicate about the bust he barely escaped because he wasn’t at the house much these days.
"As you like." He gave an absent shrug.
I looked around and noticed that just off the kitchen was another space, which was, I realized, his private dining room. There was a rustic table in the center that looked like it had been carved from the trunk of a large Cebia tree.
"In case you change your mind and decide to join me." He placed a bowl opposite where he was planning to sit. "Like I said, there're unusual herbs around here with flavors you've never dreamed of."
He began eating, while behind him I glimpsed Marcelina moving down the hall, carrying more trays of vaccine and headed out toward the vestibule again. I had to find a way to talk to her.
As I settled into the rickety chair that faced my plate, I glanced down and saw a red lumpy mixture with a spray of indefinable green specks across the top like a scattering of jungle stars. No way.
When I looked up again, he was swabbing his lips with a white napkin, his penetrating eyes boring in.
"Now," he said, "it's time we started concentrating on you. Got you going with your program."
“Fuckrag,” Felix said, “fuck off.”
They had less than a day’s worth of fuel when Felix was elected the first ever Prime Minister of Cyberspace. The first count was spoiled by a bot that spammed the voting process and they lost a critical day while they added up the votes a second time.
But by then, it was all seeming like more of a joke. Half the data-centers had gone dark. Queen Kong’s net-maps of Google queries were looking grimmer and grimmer as more of the world went offline, though she maintained a leader-board of new and rising queries—largely related to health, shelter, sanitation and self-defense.
Worm-load slowed. Power was going off to many home PC users, and staying off, so their compromised PCs were going dark. The backbones were still lit up and blinking, but the missives from those data-centers were looking more and more desperate. Felix hadn’t eaten in a day and neither had anyone in a satellite Earth-station of transoceanic head-end.
Water was running short, too.
Popovich and Rosenbaum came and got him before he could do more than answer a few congratulatory messages and post a canned acceptance speech to newsgroups.
I was still weighing my options, trying to figure out if the plan that had come to me would work or if I should make an excuse and bail. After a few blocks we stopped in front of a decrepit house. “That’s me, up there.” He pointed up a flight of wooden stairs on the side of the two-story rental. “Let’s listen to the album, and then I’ll make up the couch for you.”
“I don’t want to be any trouble.”
“People crash at my place all the time.” He took my free hand and acted concerned. “Don’t you worry about getting frostbite,
biking in this weather?”
I could see myself indoors, playing along. We’d listen to the music and when he wasn’t looking, I’d swap our wine glasses.
Once he passed out, I would take a good look at both of his phones. I’d find his computer and copy his hard drive.
I was brave. I was the Secret Avenger. I could do this.
“You talked me into it,” I said, and locked my bike to the fence beside the staircase before following him up the steps, shivering but not from the cold. Inside, his apartment smelled like an ash tray that hadn’t been washed in about ten years. There was a ratty couch, a desk piled with papers and unopened junk mail, a bed in one corner, shelves that held a fancy turntable and a lot of records.
I was still so upset over Sarah, I couldn't immediately process those illogical observations, so I just grabbed my pink roses, dripping from the bottom of their paper wrapping, and opened the car door. It was definitely good to be home. I loved my Chelsea neighborhood, where you got to know the locals, running into them in the delis, the little restau­rants, the dry cleaners. Just like a small town. If you worked at home, the way I sometimes did, you even got to know the mailman and the delivery guys for UPS and FedEx. . . .
Hey! That guy. I finally placed the walk, a kind of a strut. He was the slimeball who'd been outside Paula Marks' building last week, carrying a gun and threatening me. What's he doing here?
My pulse went off the charts. Was he one of Nicky Russo's wiseguy crew after all? Had he come back, with his pistol, to pay me a return engagement?
My God.
Chill out, I told myself, take a deep breath. He's leaving. Just try and find out who he is.
Roses in one hand held up awkwardly around my face, I slowly ambled down the street after him. I didn't have to go far. Within about a hundred feet, he unlocked a long black Lincoln Towncar, stepped out of the FedEx camouflage, tossed it onto the seat along with the bag he was carrying, pulled the cap off his bald head got in, and sped away.
“You implanted a tracker in me!”
She shook her head. “Here’s how this is going to work. You tell us everything you know about Halliday, and you give us your real identity and any aliases. If we feel like you’d be an asset at that point, we’ll talk. If not...we’ll have a different talk.”
My mouth had gone dry, but the part of my brain that controlled speech didn’t seem to have registered that this could be some real trouble. “What, did your superiors give you a lot of shit when I cut your leash? Or did your idiot partner get fired for being dumb enough to step on something that should’ve gotten you both killed? Maybe they’ll fire you, too, for not being quick enough at finding the very smart woman you were supposed to be rescuing and possibly dooming the global economy in the process—”
“You should be behind bars,” she interrupted, so viciously I sat back, mute. “We’d be doing the world a fucking favor locking someone like you away, and if I have anything to say about it, that’s exactly what will happen. The only thing that’s saving you right now, the only thing, is that we’re in a fucking national security crisis that you don’t seem to give a rat’s ass about.” She paused, breath heaving, contempt writ through every line of her face. “You disgust me. The world might be ending for the rest of us, but you, it’s your goddamn lottery ticket. And you don’t even give a shit about it.”
“What?” I said.
Checker turned to one of his other machines without answering and started typing very fast.
“What is it?”
“I think—” His fingers slowed. “I think I know who it is.”
“What? What do you mean? You found who has Halliday?”
“Well, I can’t find them. But I think I would be able to if they weren’t wiped.”
“Hey.” I snapped my fingers at him. “Make sense.”
“I think it’s the Lancer.”
“Who’s that?”
“A black hat hacker. A pretty infamous one. So much of what I’ve been trying to track has been wiped, and I just realized—it’s his style, exactly. The way the information’s gone missing—it’s like a shadow. His shadow.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “Does this mean someone else would be able to trace me through data you’ve wiped? Because that doesn’t make me feel terribly secure—”
“Oh, leave it to you to make it all about you. Come on, Cas. I’m the best. And whoever else—” He cut himself off with a cough. “It’s different. This guy left traces.”
But whoever this was probably felt confident he’d wiped the evidence clean. Just like Checker felt confident. And with the NSA’s spying eyes being turned toward us right now...my thoughts soured.
“No!”
“OK then. I don’t know either. But the money’s good. I don’t care. Hell, probably it’s two rich gamers who pay their butlers to craft for them all day. One’s fucking with the other one and paying us.”
“You really think that?”
Lucy sighed a put-upon, sophisticated, American sigh. “Look at it this way. Most of the world is living on like a dollar a day. I spend five dollars every day on a frappuccino. Some days, I get two! Dad sends mom three thousand a month in child-support—that’s a hundred bucks a day. So if a day’s money here is a hundred... my frappuccino is worth like five hundred dollars . And I buy two or three every day.
“And we’re not rich! There’s craploads of rich people who wouldn’t think twice about spending five... you think a hotdog and a Coke go for on the space station? A thousand bucks!
“So that’s what I think is going on. There’s someone out there, some Saudi or Japanese guy or Russian mafia kid who’s so rich that this is just chump change for him, and he’s paying us to mess around with some other rich person. To them,... a day to craft—I mean, sew—t-shirts. What’s a couple hundred bucks to... about it. It made a kind of sense. She’d been on hols in Bratislava where they got a posh hotel room for ten quid—less than she was spending every day on sweeties and fizzy drinks.
The words faded as he walked away, but the tone of his muttering sounded like an argument. “No way! I’m not going to risk my rep- utation. You can do this without me.” As he wandered back my way his words got clearer. “Exactly. All you got to do is meet with him, do your thing, boom. Get it? Boom.” He laughed, then sighed dramatically. “No, I’m not stoned. Look, I’ll call you.”
I waited until I heard the front door open and close, then crawled out of the bushes and crunched my way to the back door,
thinking about what to do. As important as it was to free my brother, I also wanted to be sure Simon’s reputation was ruined for good. I was worried the film I had made so far wasn’t damning enough, that people wouldn’t believe good old Simon was work- ing for the feds unless they saw him high-fiving an FBI agent as the bust went down. I stomped the snow off my boots and went into the kitchen.
“What were you doing out there?” Tweak was standing at the refrigerator.
“Somebody said there was more beer on the back porch, get- ting cold,” I improvised. “There wasn’t.”
"I'm saying I'm out. I'm going to be one of those people who acts like it's all OK, like it'll all go back to normal some day. I'm going to use the Internet like I always did, and only use the Xnet to play games. I'm going to get out is what I'm saying. I won't be a part of your plans anymore."
I didn't say anything.
"I know that's leaving you on your own. I don't want that, believe me. I'd much rather you give up with me. You can't declare war on the government of the USA. It's not a fight you're going to win. Watching you try is like watching a bird fly into a window again and again."
He wanted me to say something. What I wanted to say was, Jesus Jolu, thanks so very much for abandoning me! Do you forget what it was like when they took us away? Do you forget what the country used to be like before they took it over? But that's not what he wanted me to say. What he wanted me to say was: "I understand, Jolu. I respect your choice."
He drank the rest of his bottle and pulled out another one and twisted off the cap.
"You'll have to wear a mask pretty soon, if you're going to have any comfort, Huldah," said Rebecca. "Did he offer to lend you his class pin, or has it been so long since he graduated that he's left off wearing it? And tell us now whether the principal asked for a lock of your hair to put in his watch?"
This was all said merrily and laughingly, but there were times when Huldah could scarcely make up her mind whether Rebecca was trying to be witty, or whether she was jealous; but she generally decided it was merely the latter feeling, rather natural in a girl who had little attention.
"He wore no jewelry but a cameo scarf pin and a perfectly gorgeous ring,—a queer kind of one that wound round and round his finger. Oh dear, I must run! Where has the hour gone? There's the study bell!"
Rebecca had pricked up her ears at Huldah's speech. She remembered a certain strange ring, and it belonged to the only person in the world (save Miss Maxwell) who appealed to her imagination,—Mr. Aladdin. Her feeling for him, and that of Emma Jane, was a mixture of romantic and reverent admiration for the man himself and the liveliest gratitude for his beautiful gifts. Since they first met him not a Christmas had gone by without some remembrance for them both; remembrances chosen with the rarest taste and forethought.
Wareham was a pretty village with a broad main street shaded by great maples and elms. It had an apothecary, a blacksmith, a plumber, several shops of one sort and another, two churches, and many boarding-houses; but all its interests gathered about its seminary and its academy. These seats of learning were neither better nor worse than others of their kind, but differed much in efficiency, according as the principal who chanced to be at the head was a man of power and inspiration or the reverse. There were boys and girls gathered from all parts of the county and state, and they were of every kind and degree as to birth, position in the world, wealth or poverty. There was an opportunity for a deal of foolish and imprudent behavior, but on the whole surprisingly little advantage was taken of it. Among the third and fourth year students there was a certain amount of going to and from the trains in couples; some carrying of heavy books up the hill by the sterner sex for their feminine schoolmates, and occasional bursts of silliness on the part of heedless and precocious girls, among whom was Huldah Meserve. She was friendly enough with Emma Jane and Rebecca, but grew less and less intimate as time went on. She was extremely pretty, with a profusion of auburn hair, and a few very tiny freckles, to which she constantly alluded, as no one could possibly detect them without noting her porcelain skin and her curling lashes. She had merry eyes, a somewhat too plump figure for her years, and was popularly supposed to have a fascinating way with her.
The floor around me was littered with bottles, my old toaster, my tiny microwave. It was a total shambles.
I recoiled stumbling again, this time over cans strewn across the linoleum. My kitchen, it was slowly sinking in, had been completely trashed.
I felt a visceral wave of nausea. It's the scariest thing in the world having your space invaded like a form of psychic rape. I sagged against the refrigerator as I gazed around. The cabinets had been emptied out, a hasty and haphazard search. Quick and extremely dirty, as glass containers of condiments, including an old bottle of dill pickles, were shattered and their contents smeared into the floor.
"I don't believe this." I marched back into the living room and reached for the lights. This room too had been turned upside down. The TV, stereo, VCR, all had been swept onto the rug. But they were still there. That guy, that animal, who did this wasn't a thief. He'd been looking for something.
My breath now coming in pulses, I edged into the bedroom and switched on the light. The bed was the way I'd left it, the covers thrown back and the pillows in a pile. The clock radio was there, and so was the old Mac, still on the table in the far corner, my "workstation." Again nothing seemed to be missing.
“And if I don’t agree to drink the Kool-Aid, then are you going to let us go?”
“Well, it hardly makes sense to do that if you’re going to work against us, does it? Not when our efforts are bettering so many, many lives.” She spoke simply, articulately, earnestly. “Ms. Russell, we lift countless people out of poverty and starvation every day. We’re bringing down violent crime globally, effecting drastic change in cities that have never known any other reality. We’ve headed off nuclear crises and tamed dangerous insurgent groups into nothing, made brutal warlords impotent or helped raise up revolutions against them. Millions of people suffer less every day because of what we do—real, tangible people who can work and love and live their lives now—because of us.”
I shook my head, trying to dispel her magic, to wrap myself in my internal mathematics and use it to ward off her spell. “You kill people,” I reminded her doggedly. “Arthur and his tech guy tied a long list of murders to you. And you do brainwash people; I saw what you did to Leena Kingsley, and I’m pretty sure you brainwashed Courtney into killing Kingsley’s husband and making it look like a suicide. Oh, and you’ve tried to kill Arthur and me both. Not the best way to convince me you’re all sunshine and rainbows.”
“Shit,” Arthur said softly.
I drew my gun, keeping it hidden from the street behind my body. “You got your lockpicks on you?”
“Cover me,” he said, pulling them out.
He slid the picks in and turned the knob. “Behind me,” I said as he pushed the door open, and I crept in crosshairs-first. Arthur dropped back so I could take point and eased the door shut behind us with a click.
The entryway led into an earth-toned living room in a jumble of... chairs were knocked off-kilter, with some needlepoint and photographs dangling askew and scattered across the floor. A set of shelves had fallen to lean precariously against the back of the couch, books and papers strewn across the furniture.
The disarray wasn’t too bad—just enough to tell the story of a struggle.
“Oh,” said a weak voice.
Arthur swore and slipped past me into the kitchen, holstering his Glock. I followed and saw a pair of stumpy legs sprawled over the ceramic tile, attached to a woman slumped against the refrigerator—a woman who was not Sonya Halliday. She was a very tiny older lady, with copper-toned skin and a face so creased with wrinkles she reminded me of a walnut. A cap of gray hair still shot with black gave her a few years back, though right now the hair was wet and matted, and the ice-filled washcloth she held against it was being dyed a deep red.