Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,59
you’d lost when the Persephone went down. I’m sorry.”
She shrugged and turned her head slightly away. In her previous form, it would have made her long black locks fall across her face and obscure it from my view. Not so, now, and I could see the pain writ large there. “I feel best when I’m in a coil that most closely resembles my birth body,” she said by way of explanation. “It was worth it, enduring the Class Four, to get back to something closer to the true me.”
I wondered why she hadn’t resubmitted her name to the Class Four list. I was glad she hadn’t—if Shay Chan were currently in a Class Four, there’s no way she could have been helping me, and I’d almost certainly be dead by now. I wanted to ask… but some decisions were so personal, you just didn’t dig into them. Not if you had any hint of social grace, anyway.
“So, Carter, I’m quite willing to do whatever we must to get answers.” Her voice was cold, almost grim.
“Then let’s get to work.”
Tracking down the right target was simple. Chan dug into the public accounts of Genetechnic, and within a few minutes had the names of the chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief operations officer, and a whole slew of other corporate honchos. The addresses took longer, which was unsurprising. Privacy was a concept that had been on the decline ever since the first vestiges of the proto-Net took shape in the late twentieth century, but the wealthy and powerful still took steps to make it more difficult for the average person to gain access to them.
Difficult did not equal impossible. There were too many records, too many traces, too many details floating about cyberspace. Within an hour, Chan had addresses—physical and Net—and a dozen other details to go with the list of names and offices. “So,” I said, scanning the list projected into my field of vision, “who do we target? CEO? CFO? Head of Security?”
“We need to rank by two factors,” Chan replied. “First, of those names we have, who is most likely to be in the know. Second, who can we grab with the lowest risk.”
We went back and forth for a while. The Head of Security would almost certainly be the lowest paid, which meant she might have the fewest security measures in place. On the other hand, you didn’t get to be head of security at a large corporation without some level of military or police training, so she’d likely be a skilled combatant in her own right. And maybe the bad—for us, anyway—kind of paranoid to boot. She might or might not know anything. The CEO… well, he was probably in the know, but corporate CEOs tended to have the same kind of personal protections in place as heads of state. Trying to snatch the CEO was a lot more likely to get us sent back into the recoiling queue than it was to get us any information. In the end, we settled on a man named Fredrick Ingles, with the dubious title of Director of Innovations. Neither Chan nor I had done a lot of time in the megacorps and none of it recently, so our corp-speak was a little on the weak side, but the Director of Innovations sounded like someone who would have to know what was going on in the research and development area, but not so high up to have the words “chief ” or “officer” in their title. The Ingles address, cross-referenced against real-estate records, was solid upper-middle-class, which meant electronic, but almost certainly no human, security measures. And, best of all, tax records (I didn’t ask how Chan got her hands on those—they were supposed to be privileged) showed that Ingles had no current marriage contract, and no claimed dependents, which meant no collateral damage. He was the perfect target.
“Are we sure about this?” I asked Chan as we started gearing up for the night ahead. “So far, everything we’ve done is either a good case for self-defense, or small-time crime. But we’re about to break into a person’s house who may be entirely innocent in all this and do our level best to wring answers out of him. If things go bad, we could be spending the next several lifetimes on asteroid mining penal colonies.”
Chan didn’t even hesitate. “I’m sure. Someone needs to shine a light on whatever’s going on here. I seriously doubt we’re the first people Genetechnic