Memetic Drift - J.N. Chaney Page 0,9
a little naïve of you. Don’t you think?”
“I do now. I sure as hell do now. What do you want with me? Are you here to kidnap me again?”
“We didn’t kidnap you the first time,” I pointed out. “We removed you from a situation in which you would almost certainly have been killed. Then we kept you in protective custody until you could be safely released.”
I’m aware that I just described us as having kidnapped him even as I was denying it to his face. This is a complicated job.
“That is one hell of a euphemistic way to describe what happened.” He snapped his fingers, and a shelf opened on the wall behind him. A drone flew out, carrying a bottle of expensive vodka and a selection of glasses. “Do you drink?”
“I wouldn’t turn one down.”
“Good. I hate drinking alone. It makes me feel like an alcoholic.”
The drone hovered in front of him. He pulled two glasses out of slots in the side and set them down in front of him. He took the vodka bottle out of the drone’s grasp, poured two generous glasses, then replaced the bottle. A little door opened on the top of the drone, revealing a small trough of ice cubes. The drone actually seemed to have been designed for nothing other than serving vodka. Not too unusual but perhaps a little extravagant.
Once the ice was in our drinks and the drone had returned to its little dock in the wall, Klein handed me my vodka. Technically, I wasn’t supposed to be drinking it in the first place while I was on a job, but there were a lot of exceptions, depending on the circumstances, and I decided this was probably one of them.
“Please tell me you were the ones behind my connectivity problem. I don’t want to have to deal with that bullshit after I’m done with this bullshit.”
“Your connectivity will be restored in due time,” I said, though I was only guessing. Flavio had implied he was behind the problem, but he hadn’t actually said so.
“Alright, then.” Klein took a large sip of vodka and regarded me with as much patience as he could muster up. “What can I do for you?”
“I need a few parts from you.”
“Parts?” He looked confused. “Do you mean components?”
“Yes, I’m afraid I don’t know the technical terms for these pieces, but I can send you some blueprint images.”
“No,” he pointed out. “You can’t. Remember, I can’t connect to anything.”
Sometimes we’re too clever for our own damn good. On the other hand, there was at least a chance the monitor had thought to address this little problem. “Check your network now.”
He stared at me for a moment, then shrugged and said, “Okay.” He closed his eyes and sighed contentedly. “You know, even if you people did fuck with my connection just so you could get in here, it still makes me happy to see that I’m back up. I have a lot to do today. Send me what you’ve got.”
I sent over the file Thomas had given me. Klein looked it over and then frowned a little. “What the hell did you people do to him?”
“We didn’t do anything. He got himself shot.”
Klein shook his head. “If you think I’m giving you these components, you’re out of your mind.”
“And why is that?”
“These are proprietary to Huxley Industries. Even if I wasn’t living under a new identity, I’m under multiple NDAs. Do you have any idea how much trouble I would be in for sharing that kind of material with you?”
Klein’s big weakness was his own arrogance. I grinned.
“About the same amount of trouble you would be in for just having it in the first place. I mean, you lost your job with Huxley after you got arrested, right? Well, I doubt their non-competition contract included anything about keeping any of their old tech around, so—”
“Exactly! Wait… what makes you think I do have any of it?”
“You could have told me you didn’t have any of it. I might even have believed you. Instead you’re telling me you’re not allowed to share. You can’t share something you don’t have. So, you do have it. Right?”
He was so mad at me for catching him out—or maybe mad at himself, I’m not really sure—that he couldn’t even force himself to form words for several seconds. At last he smiled, but it was a shark’s grin. All teeth.
“Alright, you’ve got me. But what are you going to do about it? It’s not