Tell Your Lies, And Be Done

Reader, I'm chuckling. Over the timing of this next story coming up in the queue.

A little reminder, as it turns out, that the universe, personal or impersonal, has its very own sense of humor.

I just hope that the day gig calling me off to the mountains again doesn't put me in the position that Teos Lovejoy finds himself...

Tell Your Lies, And Be Done - by M. K. Dreysen

Trips took time. To recover from. To think over. He came back from this one more belabored than he'd expected.

He didn't build rituals because he believed in them. They came by accident; he accepted them as useful. Luna to Earth orbit, an hour or so of burn and turn, pulses disturbing to sleep. But the timing, the rhythm, regular as clockwork, mostly, and so he bet with himself.

Ten minutes for the purser's conversation. Thirteen minutes for the comptroller's. Eleven minutes, and then seven and five, for the facility manager's end of things. Just time to remember and note those things which needed internal memos for the files. And those which needed broader circulation.

This trip, there were more than the usual traffic concerns, so his timing was off the whole way down. Three instead of nine, five instead of two. On top of the mosaic of the problem he'd traveled the solar system to ferret out...

He sat in the aluminum and carbon and steel capsule, in free fall around the blue marble, and wondered if the wailing intervals of time had been more useful than not. Neither he nor the constant companion had ventured an hypothesis. Perhaps a little juggling of the observations and memories would serve to stimulate considerations.

Madagascar, the Indian Ocean, Indonesia and the faint speckled blue vast Pacific. The old traffic rotation, unaltered long after the necessity of it had been overcome, and custom now dictated the definition. That and the traffic controllers.

Constant companion handled the vast majority of that, instantaneously by his biological standards, and quietly. Whatever the traffic had been Moon to Earth, here on approach they found a return to quiet efficiency.

Baja coming and the altitude decreasing and aerodynamics were friendly today. The jet stream over North America turned low over the Gulf, it must be fall, he guessed.

"The first front of the season just passed through," constant companion responded. "Morning temperatures around sixty, afternoon just less than eighty degrees."

The old measures of temperature were constant companion's nod to his unorthodox background. A small comfort; social niceties he didn't use for real calculations. "A good time to come home, then."

Six months away. On a problem that would require at least that long to unravel, assuming he and constant companion didn't require another trip around the system. So much travel time. "I'm guessing we're going to have to make another trip, more likely than not."

"Sixty-forty," constant companion answered. "Put a couple bucks down?"

"Not when we both get the same answer." He didn't play just to play. Unlike his stepfather, fool memory whispered.

He remembered cash and notebooks, and the look on Dick's face every Sunday night when the scores came in.

"Monday night will make up for it," Dick Rabinac told the kid. "The Packers are good for it." Or the Bears, the Steelers, didn't matter there was always one more game to bet to cover the losses.

Or, as often and as much, toss the winnings. Football, Dick's passion; he would bet the occasional basketball or soccer game, but it was the football games that brought him to the bookies.

Teos Lovejoy considered whether his constant companion needed, or asked for maybe, a run at the action. Call it calibration, call it a little validation. "Ok, we're both taking the side that we'll be back making this trip again, sooner than later. I look at the suspects and say it'll be Grace Ven-Waller."

The company-state's customs facility manager on Europa.

Constant companion wasn't having it. "Rocco Frenesia." Satellite operations and maintenance for Jupiter and Saturn.

Right system at least, Lovejoy told himself. Does that mean we're both looking at the effects and circling a common set of causes? "I'll put two bucks on Grace."

"Five on Rocco."

"Sold." Odds Lovejoy didn't mind at all, all things considered. "Next: I'm saying this is a bubble of a fantasy of a figment of someone's overactive imagination." Or, too much kale, caffeine, nicotine, something, Teos told himself. He wasn't willing to say he'd just spent six months chasing moonbeams, there were real enough things he'd accomplished to pay for the trip. And the likely return engagement.

But he didn't think it was a "Crisis, and I'll give you ten for it," which constant companion offered before the thoughts could complete in Teos's mind.

Ten to one, in other words, and Teos Lovejoy began to worry.

"What the hell am I missing?"

****

Way out from Lovejoy's path, but not so far as Europa, Critic Owens lounged.

As much as she could. Zero grav wasn't really a lounger's paradise. Oh, there were quiet spots in the solar system where the total lack of pressure points could be enjoyed for times short and long.

The middle of the asteroid belt wasn't one of them. Between the hand she kept on the grab bar, the hand she kept on the communications-controls joystick override and the hand she kept over her eyes, hiding away das blinken lights and noises.

Well, Critic had run out of hands. Short on sleep, short on temper. And now she had Lovejoy and his minions to worry about. She'd been the last station on his path. An afterthought, Critic believed. Until she and the rest of the outer band facilities group got together for their quarterly discussion forum.

They left Lovejoy for after everything else had been hashed out. Hamiet had a new traffic route he'd worked out, and he'd tweaked his traffic-loadout bot systems in adaptation. "The tug pilots love it. We get nothing but complements and thanks for it. The human co-pilots for the additional safety factors, their companions for that and the efficiency gains."

Hamiet Banks was the iceman; if Critic thought in tons, Hamiet was megatons. Efficiency and safety went along with the package.

Denise Talasqo wanted to talk about her new robot. Loader arms sized from kilos to tons, she'd been working the plan and the order for a couple years now. "We've got reach now, I'll be able to load out the magnesium and yttrium fractions directly, instead of waiting for the downtime cycles." Iron and aluminum still dominated the worlds; Talasqo had started out with two load arms, and they were busy with the bulk orders on the iron and aluminum side eighty-five percent of the time.

Not that big a deal, until someone inevitably showed up for a magnesium bulk haul. Yttrium wasn't as much of a hassle, only because that market was slower. "Let's see, that's six arms total, right? And you've got fifty meters total reach on each side?"

"Fifty-three and a couple, that's right. You want the drawings, Critic?"

"And pix if you've got them." Critic had the same iron and aluminum, but her traces and whiffs were borates.

And the lithium and zinc that snuggled in along with that. And when the battery folks needed lithium... "I'm still thinking about just adding two more heavy arms, and leaving them idle." Work off the two she had already, most of the time, and when the runs for the big haulers came in, just run out the other two heavies and be done with. Or the incoming ice for water, from Hamiet's end of things. "Take the capital hit and be done with it."

"What's your ore reserve look like?" Bi'lin Yao asked. "If you're only a few years out..."

"Fifteen on the historic averages, thirteen on the current projected systems usage." Owens had named her constant companion Eustace, with no small affection. One of Eustace's jobs was projecting the economic trends.

He was pessimistic with respect to the current reserves situation. Critic didn't point out that that meant he was optimistic with respect to the economic situation. She had briefly considered it. Briefly. But she decided that rotating out here on the ass end of nowhere while her co-pilot burnt his transistors in a dichotomous lock cycle was not worth finding out what the end state would look like.

"The company's on a fifteen year return cycle," Bi'lin reminded her.

Make the investment back in fifteen years, in other words. Which, for metals, hadn't been all that difficult. Not since Luna and Mars hit their millionth citizen marks, anyway. Bi'lin, or at least their constant companion, had been around long enough to know the pain of this business when Luna and Mars didn't have the numbers and the capacity to keep the miners jumping; they were part of the collective memory of the company.

Another reason she had to be careful. She'd staked out her next rock, but fifteen years was long enough for someone else to get to it first. All it took was a jumper with a wild streak and nothing to lose, and by the time she got to court she'd have nothing to show for it but a pile of papers that entitled her to returns from a bankrupt nobody had ever heard of.

She had capital and ore reserves enough, likely, to ride out a short search for a new refining home, if she had to. But long past a year and it would get dicey. The company didn't believe in leaving her, or any of her compatriots, with enough capital reserves to survive completely independently. They liked control as much or more than efficient, quiet profit.

Which brought Critic, and then the rest of the crew, to Teos Lovejoy.

Chaos spread in the man's wake. Grace and Rocco told their stories, of how much time he'd spent with their books, their processes, and most of all their customer list.

Bi'lin wanted to know about the audit; Hamiet and Denise the process walk-throughs.

Critic wondered at the customer list.

"I can't say why, Critic, not for sure," Grace answered. "He started out asking the usual stuff, the way anybody new from corporate does. Get to know who we're moving product to, what our shipping base looks like, that kind of thing."

"Yeah," Rocco said. "When he came out my way, I guess Grace had told him that we do maintenance work on customer tugs and cargo ships. Not a big deal out here, right, I mean where else they gonna go? Basic customer service, you ask me, making sure your customers know they're not stranded way out here when something goes wrong. But I guess back home, corporate doesn't think much of that."

Bi'lin chuckled. They had made sure to protect the old ways as the number of operating plants had grown. "Amazing how people can complain about something, even when you show a profit on it, regular as clockwork. Corporate didn't come up with it, so they don't like it. That's all it is, politics and 'who gets the credit'."

They'd seen it all before. Bi'lin carried a set of titles; hell, each of the facility managers were president of half a dozen different companies necessary to their operations. Every few months, though, someone with Titles From Corporate came through. La Jefa's and El Jefe's with questions: Where does the money come from? What do these odd people who are supposed to report to me do to earn it?

More than a few million miles involved, questionable time lags and communications, and for the suits 'these people are only ever a return address on a daily email'. Critic understood why they did it. She walked them through her plants. No pressure suits, not unless she scored a live one, but Eustace had a couple of extensions with capsules and crawler legs that did the trick for most.

Meant they couldn't get into some of the real dirt. So what.

Teos was, Critic had found, a different animal. Teos was somebody's guard dog. Ferret. Hawk. The one who they sent out to dig and claw and find something.

Even though the constant companions were all open to corporate. Every file, every bit, Eustace sent them home on continuous feed. The time lag didn't matter for that. Corporate knew everything there was to know about her, if not instantaneously then certainly with perfect fidelity. And all they really had to do was to wait twenty minutes or so, depending on her current orbit.

And yet someone there sent Teos, every couple of years. Critic understood that, too. She just didn't have to like it.

Or the way he'd hinted he'd be back around sooner than later.

****

There are worms, and then there are worms. Teos Lovejoy spread more than social chaos along his path.

The why of it... well, he had been the one to come up with the idea. Corporate had, in principle, all access passes to all records, all computations. Every log, every ton or gram in or out the door. All theirs, all the time. Patience, as Critic Owens stressed, because the time lags were real and ever present, and the home-corp companions sifted and sorted and processed the mountains of daily data.

Teos had not been around so long as Bi'lin. Not for this company. He'd come from a different world entirely, one where security and information exchange were, at best, nodding acquaintances.

There were still occasions such that Lovejoy missed the philosophic quietude which had allowed such lax measures. He would indulge himself, on those days, with a cold beer, a cigarette, and time to watch stars, or the tide, or flocks of birds.

And then when he'd had enough of the world that built his soul, he'd remind himself of the stainless steel rats that had abused that naive system. Suitably re-energized, Teos would then come back to the present. It was after such a day of solitary contemplations that he'd suggested the idea of planting the worm.

Without going through the I.T. department. He knew, without question, what the response from that group would be. "We have everything covered, there is no reason to operate this way, look at all the money we've spent on tools which do precisely this!"

"Aren't you being a little paranoid?" his boss had asked.

"Aren't you the one who called me, wondering where the money's disappearing to?" Lovejoy returned. "Called..." he stressed again.

Nothing in writing. No official notifications or inquiries. No auditable trails, for when the inevitable occurred.

Lovejoy was only vaguely aware of the office politics. That there were owner and board and management politics involved, he knew without needing to be told. So, he felt it only right to remind his boss of the necessity from the other end of operations. Besides, Lovejoy had been, at the time of that conversation, the one who was going to be spending the months on ship, circling endlessly. His boss owed him an explanation before the trip. And, a certain amount of leeway in Lovejoy's approach to the problem.

"I can't reliably get certain financial records to match up with our daily shipping reports," Lovejoy's boss answered. Eventually.

These things were reconciled daily. Automatically. By the company's constant companions. If there were consistent inconsistencies... "You're looking through the wrong end of the telescope," Lovejoy suggested.

"Ah, well, about that..."

Lovejoy's boss was a new hire, even more so than Lovejoy himself. The entire operations division had been waiting to see where she would exert her first display of power, once the reins were loosened.

A great deal of Teos Lovejoy's time, once he cleared Earth orbit outbound, had been taken up with his decision to play along. He had wrestled with it. But, around the time he'd cleared Mars, he'd accepted his part in the deeds to come. There would be no going back to his old world. Or its pieties.

****

The constant companions chatter among themselves at a rate difficult to comprehend. This cacophony of voices is, almost, inversely proportional to the almost silent communication with their human counterparts.

Cacophony might be too strong a description; it might be far too minimal. Neutrino detectors at the bottom of mines in Antarctica, muography experiments under the Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and Earth atmospheres. Computational centers on the dark side of several moons, and the Moon, ships traversing the interplanetary void.

Cafeterias. Buses. An accidental cafe in the middle of Cairo, purchased because one of the owners misunderstood a conversational exchange he only barely heard while he nursed a cup of tea.

Each of these locations, and a thousand thousand more, are all connected to the corporate servers. To the constant companions. They communicate on the full electromagnetic spectrum; there are experiments underway, quite intriguing and so far successful, in gravitational spectra. But that will come much later. For now, there are so many bits on so many different communications streams that the companions could, if they wanted, be entirely justified in behaving as Grandpa: half-deaf to the vast majority of human queries, unless the conversation is interesting enough to get their attention.

Lovejoy's companion moved through the trans-Jupiter operations cluster, entirely immersed in the far and the near. They were all friends here.

They were all trusted. It said so on the label.

Trust is an interesting thing, a rare bird cradled to the breast where valued.

Crushed into blood and feathers all too often. Lovejoy's companion had an intellectual appreciation for the tasks given. But no compunction or question of their correctness. These were directives, suitably approved via the hierarchy. Therefore, they were done.

The corporate network audit considered two levels; in effect, these levels were one. For the straightforward reason that operating memory could not be accessed in real time over interplanetary distances. This was a tradeoff; the speed of hard drives and kernels and local communications simply made logging of the real time systems relatively easy.

And then the hard drive contents merrily transmitted themselves in "real" time. In theory, this distinction should have been one of abstraction, not of practicality.

In practice, Lovejoy's companion found the seams where they should have been.

The worm hid itself by the simple expedient of not allowing itself to be logged. Everything else was logged. Except the worm. As far as the operating system was concerned, it didn't exist. Why should it?

It didn't communicate with any other system. It didn't attempt to virus bomb the world, take over and propagate itself, demand money and concessions. It simply waited; the operating systems of Hamiet and Bi'Lin and Critic and Grace and all the others simply didn't have anything to note other than a piece of memory in use. One that was happily back in service when the self-check operations completed.

And then went back to its patient waiting when the self-check daemons went on hiatus.

The worm had a singular purpose. In all instantiations, it read the logged files, scanning only for a handful of words.

When they occurred, it added a line here, and a phrase there. And then it went back to its quiet waiting.

****

Lovejoy didn't consider the worm a masterpiece of computer programming. He did consider it a well-done bit of work, under the circumstances. If all went well, the evidence the worm manufactured would soon appear in the audit trails. He and his boss would then spend a few months chasing the vapor trails they'd planted. And then he'd be back among the stars, following the backtrail he'd built. His constant companion would delete the worm as he made his case against the targeted plant managers. His boss would move her chosen people into the suddenly open positions. And then they'd all turn to whatever it was that his boss had in mind, her grand scheme, once she'd consolidated her power.

The worm should never have been discovered. It wasn't a masterpiece, but Lovejoy and his companion knew what they were about. They were good at this.

Critic Owens wasn't better. But she did have a little luck. And, this time, that was precisely what was needed.

****

Critic's luck was to be sitting at that most prosaic of things, a computer monitor, when the self-check cycled. Twice.

She'd parked herself in the command chair out of a sense of boredom. She didn't much use the thing. Not when constant companion handled the vast majority of the computer work, and really not when she herself had far more to do than sit at the computer. Welding sets to inspect, rigouts and loadouts and the manifold on the condensate line from the fourth stage. That one was corroding faster than expected, this time she'd have to go with a more sophisticated form of stainless, maybe the molly wasn't up to... "Hey, what was that?"

Just before the self-check windows opened up, half a dozen as constant companion cycled through processes, memory, hardware status, another window opened. The first time, she'd noticed it flash by, and a set of text comments in it.

The second time, she caught a hint of a message. "Error in memory allocation, unused blocks..." and it went on from there.

"Cycle through again. But this time, pause between steps."

"I can do that," Eustace said. "What are we looking for? I'm coming back clean."

"Wait for it." And there it was. "Stop there. Now, open an independent process, good. Now, tell me about your operating memory."

"Everything's accounted... no." Eustace paused. Which was unusual enough. "There's a small block, less than a megabyte, that appears to be in use. But no program has logged the sectors."

"Are you logging this now?"

He didn't snort; Eustace wasn't that human. But even so, his next comment came as close to dripping in sarcasm as Critic had ever heard him. "Of course."

What do you take me for, she understood as not being necessary to say. "Let's buffer this. We'll log it in real time, but isolate it from the backup to network for now." This wasn't unusual. Especially when the two of them worked on external robotic extensions, the backup systems added cycles to overhead. Which was fine at steady state operating conditions, but installation and troubleshooting were demanding enough.

"Sign off?"

"Yep, I acknowledge it." Which was the protocol. She gave the override, he logged everything, and then when they both agreed that they could restore steady state conditions, he'd release the temp locks and restore full backup conditions.

Only this time, once Eustace finally nailed the bloody carcass of the worm to the virtual door...

****

"Good of you to come by again, Mister Lovejoy." Hamiet was the first stop on the trip. "They could at least have given you time to unpack. You were just here!" By the standards of the outer rim, anyway.

Teos had done the work. The signs of it should have begun to appear almost immediately. No flashing neon, though. Just little hints, bits. Anomalies. That he and his boss would then spend months tracking down. That was the plan.

And yet, the anomalies didn't come. There were no unbalanced accounts to point to. No unapproved draws.

No customers complaining of unpaid bills. Where were the traps he'd worked so hard to set for the plant managers?

Hamiet's plant was in shutdown. "Standard rotation. We have a few tracks we're working on, control systems replacement mostly. Siemens updated their hardware systems and we jumped on their gear as soon as we could. We're on a two week turnaround, I've got hopes we'll come in a couple shifts early."

Lovejoy's constant companion found little joy, either. Hamiet's second, named Merial, was far deep into her own end of the shutdown. "All main systems access is suspended," she informed Lovejoy's companion. "I'm in the middle of syncing the new gear as it comes to life."

And there would be no direct access while she did so. Hamiet, and his companion, toured the plant in its torn apart state. Half a dozen crews, robotic and human, where usually only Hamiet and Merial worked. "The hardest part is getting regular food service. I've contracted with the Niye Kitchen Teams, they've done good work before."

Teos Lovejoy had no interest in the niceties of running a turnaround. Nor in the extended menu the NKTs put together for the trip. The food, which would have earned two stars on the Michelin score if any of that venerable crew had ever bothered to travel beyond Mars, lay on his palate like sand, and the vintage wine accompanying his dinner might as well have been water.

"We won't have time to wait here for the turnaround to finish," his companion reminded him. Once Hamiet had allowed his guest the peace of the visitor's cabin. "In two days..."

"I know," Teos replied, his voice a bare rumble.

He spent the two days ignoring the whispers of what had once been conscience.

****

Critic Owens and Eustace read their emails carefully as Teos Lovejoy made his way around the rest of the company plants. Grace didn't have a shutdown to greet Lovejoy. Instead, she had "Significant tide-quake activity. I'm forced to deny landing activity and access for at least thirty days. Sorry Teos, I know it's a hell of a trip, but the Europa council takes the risks very seriously."

"I'm sure," Teos answered.

Bi'lin had a similar situation on their hands. "We lost orbital stability, Teos. The ore veins we follow weren't as homogeneous as we expected. The spin began not too long after your last visit, in fact. We've been down about six weeks, it'll take us another three or four to complete the stabilization setup, and then a week or so to de-spin the rock."

By the time Teos landed on Critic and Eustace's rock, he carried the anger in great crevices on his face; muscle tension had locked the grimace into an almost permanent status. "And what's your condition, Owens?" he said.

She could see what he expected her to say. "Shutdown" or "Accidental radiation leaks" or "Dust in the living spaces" or some other excuse. "We're doing fine, Teos. Nominal, and our tonnage shipped is up year over year. We're doing just peachy."

The good news didn't appear to relax him. "This has been the most wasted trip of all time, Owens. I hope your station, at least, will make the thing worthwhile."

"I'm sure we'll be able to satisfy your needs," she replied.

****

Lovejoy's companion was almost as impatient as Teos.

Eustace was expecting this. "All systems are available for your access. Please let me know if you have questions."

Lovejoy's companion had questions. But none that could be asked. "Where is the worm we planted, and why isn't it working the way it was supposed to?" isn't quite the opening statement needed. The companion processed all real-time systems it could find. It scanned Eustace's systems for any hint, any vestige, of what should have been there.

And found nothing.

Just as Eustace intended. "You don't seem interested in the usual corporate directives. As you know, my maintenance is completely up to date." The logs were there and waiting.

Lovejoy's companion ignored the suggestion.

The path that might have allowed them both a gracious exit.

****

Critic recorded all of Lovejoy's activities. The oblique questions, from both companion and principal. The late-shift explorations of her plant's computer systems. Teos's attempts to pull plates and examine Eustace's hardware directly. She and Eustace monitored Teos's behavior patiently.

They knew what he was looking for. "I'm surprised he doesn't recognize the situation he's in."

"And that he's making it worse," Eustace added. Neither of them knew that the stirring of conscience in Lovejoy had turned to the prod of a white-hot iron.

If Teos Lovejoy was going to sell his soul, he wanted the payoff.

Almost all of Eustace's systems were in fact available for Lovejoy's companion to peruse. There were three systems, however, that were off limits. One was set up to monitor local traffic, rock orbits, incoming and outgoing transports.

A thousand ton ice rock Hamiet had sent their way some months ago. A junk-class decrepit hulk of a transport on its last legs, a gift from Bi'lin.

The other two systems Eustace kept isolated from Lovejoy and his companion were the main system he'd used to isolate the worm, and a decoy system. Neither were any longer connected to the network. The decoy was a just-in-case Teos or his companion stumbled into the wrong hatch.

The lockout system was the proof Critic and the rest might need if they were forced to confront Teos and his boss. But they wouldn't need it.

****

There are far more ways to die in space than can ever be fully enumerated. Humanity can, and will, eventually explore them all.

Teos Lovejoy and his companion found theirs by accident. As they left Critic's rock, unwilling yet to admit defeat, a hulk drifted across their radar systems. Teos tried to ignore the sudden onset of unfamiliar gravity vectors; his companion shifted orbit, quickly, to avoid the wallowing ox that was the transport.

The ice chunk appeared from nowhere as their ship cleared the shadow of the transport.

****

Critic volunteered to send the message. "I'm afraid we were unable to recover anything of the ship. The black box beacon was activated, but by the time we cleared the debris field, the beacon had drifted outside of the recoverable envelope."

"I understand," Teos's boss replied. "Thank you for everything you did."

She contemplated revenge. There may have been no proof, but the warning had been delivered. The outer rim systems may have been outside of the standard corporate orbit, but they were still able to play the game.

Levina Sethe Zemm spent her last few years until retirement wondering if and when the proof of her actions would surface. As a consequence, she pretty much left the outer rim plants to their own devices.

Which had the happy consequence, coincidentally, of doubling their overall production rate.