Session 5: Both Daves

What happened#

The therapy session was at noon, and Trash ran it. Not as Trash: as Recycling, who is a counselor, and who talked Dave through a guided meditation about a cat for long enough that the suggestion went in behind it without a ripple. Dave came out of it calm, helpful, and ours.

What Dave did next, because we asked him to, was call his decker upstairs.

We never got that man's name. He was the second Dave in the room inside a minute and Dave 2 is what he stayed, and his badge was on the table the whole time with his real name printed on it. Dave told him there was a critical security update that needed installing, so he brought it up on his own cyberdeck to read the instructions.

He never got to the instructions. He went down in the chair, eyes open, still breathing, and there were twenty minutes left before somebody had to be downstairs wearing his badge.

Recycling did some more meditation after that, and some more nudging, and by the end of it Dave had gone the same way as his own decker. So we sat them up at the conference table and folded them forward, heads down on their own arms, hands placed, the way anybody looks halfway through a long guided meditation. Two men in a fourth-floor conference room with the blinds down, and if the door had opened it would have looked like a session running late. We came out of it holding two IT badges, a pocket secretary and a wireless-capable portable phone, one badge each on Trash and later on Vinnie, and the useful thing turned out to be a piece of actual paper found under the whiskey, because with what Dave had already done for us the room is booked as occupied until the end of the day. Nobody was going to open that door.

Then the lunch, twelve thirty. Trash passed Dave 2's badge to Vinnie in a bathroom and put Mask on him, which finally gave Tony a face. Tony had only ever been a voice on a phone call, and the face he went downstairs wearing was not Vinnie's. The badge got him through the door; Renato was expecting a journalist and got one. It went beautifully. Renato talked about his work to somebody who wanted to hear it, and there is a dinner promised for after the report gets published to the Court. He went back to his desk happy, carrying the rough draft of the article to look over.

The rough draft of the article was the second cartridge.

One o'clock, ground floor, and Lux across a table from Zepeda, who had gone and built a prototype in two days and was wearing it. Lux told him what he actually wanted: Shiawase handling the whole chain, end to end, selling the thing to government workers the length of the UCAS. Zepeda did the arithmetic out loud and it is not a flattering one. A commlink with an explosive in it that does not read as one has to go out at a loss for that to work at all: 10,000¥ a device, forty per cent up front. Lux has taken that to the Director, who can decide for himself whether he wants it.

No alarms. That is the part worth saying twice, because of what the feeds showed.

Trash had had Dave wire the live feeds through to the pocket secretary before any of this, which is the kind of thing you remember having done. Both Daves were where we left them, undisturbed. And Renato was slumped at his desk, with coworkers jacked into the Matrix on either side of him who had not noticed a thing.

He had not put it in the terminal. He had opened it where he sat, the way his colleague upstairs had, the way a man does with something a friend handed him.

So we went and did it ourselves. Badges into the elevator, third floor, past the eyes of the magical security and across the floor to desk 108. The cartridge went into the terminal's flank, and nothing visible happened at all. We confirmed the drive was wiped on the pocket secretary, and the general alarm went off in the same breath.

The watchers came thicker after that. A few of them stopped on us, looked, and moved on.

We took the elevator back down and went for a side passage rather than the lobby, which is where we met the hellhounds. Two of them, on a handler, and all three already tense. The handler looked at us the way a man looks at an answer he does not like, and one of the watchers went to him, eagerly, while we were standing there.

That is where we stopped.

Timeline#

• Noon: the therapy session. Recycling runs Dave through a meditation and a suggestion. Both land.
• Dave 2. Called upstairs, handed the cartridge, opens it on his deck to read the instructions, goes down. Minor glitch, and the consequence is a man.
• Dave. More meditation, more nudging, and he follows his own decker down.
• The room. Two badges, a pocket secretary, a portable phone, and a conference room booked occupied until six on a piece of real paper.
• Twelve thirty: the lunch. Badge swap in a bathroom, Mask on Vinnie, Renato charmed, a dinner promised, and a second cartridge handed over as a draft article.
• One o'clock: the negotiation. Zepeda wears his own prototype. Lux asks for end-to-end UCAS distribution; Zepeda prices it at a loss, 10,000¥ a device, 40% up front. Passed to the Director.
• The feeds. Flashback: Dave wired them to the pocket secretary. Renato is down at his desk, his neighbors jacked in and oblivious. The second cartridge went into a person too.
• Desk 108. Third floor on the badges, past the magical security, cartridge in, drive confirmed wiped, general alarm.
• The side passage. Hellhounds and a handler, a watcher reporting, and the week ends standing there.

Quotes#