It was this modeling environment that Creek had spent the better part of two years creating, mostly from bits and pieces of unrelated commercial code jammed together with zipper programs and a substantial amount of hand coding by Creek to modify the existing programs to do what he wanted them to do. The resulting modeling environment was a massive "fuck you" to the general concept of the End User License Agreement, which specifically denied users the right to crack open the programs and play with the code. But if these corporations could see what Creek had done with their hacked software, it was doubtful they'd try to put him in the slammer; they'd just try to hire him. For ridiculous amounts of cash.

The government might try to put him in the slammer. Fortunately, he worked for the government. And he had friends in high places.

Anyway, the point was moot. Creek wasn't going to market his software. He was just going to use it himself.

Creek queried the IBM to see how long it would be before his programs would be unpacked, assembled, and modeling the central data file. He was told it would be about a day. That seemed about right to him.

His new computer pinged Creek. His intelligent agent was all zipped up. Creek activated it

"Hello," the agent said. Everything about it, from clothes to skin tone to voice, was curiously neutral. "Do you have a name you wish to use for me?"

"Not yet," Creek said. "You're not finished."

"I'm fully functional," the agent said.

"Yes you are," Creek said. "You're just not finished. Until then I'll refer to you as 'agent'"

"Very well," the agent said. "May I assist you?"

"Yeah," said Creek. "We're going hunting for fabricators. Let's see what my new security clearance does for me."

Fabricators are regulated. They're regulated for the very simple reason that one can make just about anything on them, including parts for weapons. Gun parts, in fact, are one of the prime purposes of metal fabricators; pop in a pattern for any gun part in any gun built from 1600 onward and in the space of a few minutes you'll be presented with a solid metal item of such standardized high quality that it would make Eli Whitney, the first mass producer of weapons, choke with envy. It also means that an entire weapon could be constructed and assembled off the books, which makes various law enforcement bureaus unhappy. Therefore, every fabricator is licensed and registered, and a log made of every part created by that particular fabricator, which must be filed with the UNE Trade Commission daily.

No legal fabricator in Virginia, Maryland, or Washington DC had a log of an Anally Inserted Nidu Enrager being manufactured in the last year or so.

This was of course entirely unsurprising. Creek had his agent run the search knowing full well it wouldn't find anything. You have to eliminate the low-hanging targets first, on the off chance you were dealing with morons. The next level up on the moron scale were the logs that were doctored to remove particular entries; Creek's agent caught several of those but subsequent crawls into the fabricator's memory drives (typically not reformatted, so the expunged log entries were not yet overwritten) revealed only the expected gun parts, except for the one that showed a wedding ring. There was undoubtedly a sad and compelling story there.

So. From here on out Creek felt justified in working on the assumption that he was not dealing with idiots. Creek had his agent go through the Washington DC metro area police records for the last decade to find out whether a fabricator had gone missing. No dice; Virginia likewise came up clean, as did Maryland. Creek tapped his teeth for a minute in thought and then asked the agent to start churning through insurance claims in the last decade to see if anyone had filed for a missing or destroyed fabricator.

There were two. Three years ago in Occoquan, an antiques arcade had burned down to the ground due to an ironically antique sprinkler system. Inside the arcade, along with a couple dozen other small antiques boutiques, was a gunsmith selling Revolutionary-era weapons and recreations. This file included a picture of the ruined fabricator sitting charred in what remained of the gunsmith's boutique. Creek felt pretty safe crossing that one off his list.

The second one, from six years earlier, was more interesting. In that claim, a fabricator in the process of being shipped from the manufacturer was among the inventory in a Baltimore warehouse whose roof had partially collapsed. There was no picture of the destroyed fabricator in that file and the claim had been disputed by the insurance company before being paid. Creek pulled the police report for the roof collapse; the forensics report suggested strongly that the roof collapse was not accidental. Aside from the fabricator, the allegedly destroyed inventory of the warehouse also included several machines and machine parts intended for a genetics lab in Rockville, but which Creek knew from his police years could be repurposed for refining designer drugs.

A title search for the warehouse came up with a holding company, one of whose primary shareholders was Graebull Industries, the ostensibly legit arm of the Malloy crime family, whose empire encompassed Baltimore and DC. The "security guard" at the warehouse that night had a sheet filled with petty thefts; a couple years down the time stream he'd be caught with a truck full of entertainment monitors and would turn on the Malloys in return for federal protection. A year after testifying, parts of him showed up in the concrete of a Class A minor league baseball stadium being built in Aberdeen. Other parts were still unaccounted for.

"This is good," Creek said.

"If you say so, sir," his agent said. The agent was good at finding information as directed, but not much for a sense of ironic humor.

The missing fabricator in question was a General Electric model CT3505 Dual Metal/Ceramic Fabricator, a nice fabricator if you can get it; it was typically used by defense contractors to model prototypes of proposed defense systems. Like all fabricators it came with its own accessory sets, extensible modules, and proprietary material powders. One couldn't just toss an aluminum can or a pile of sand into a fabricator. Fabricators are programmed to reject any material that's not a powder blend made by its own manufacturer. In the tried and true business model of selling the razor cheap and then jacking up the price on the blades, fabricators themselves were sold at near cost while the profit was made from selling the stuff that let the fabricators make things. In the case of the GE CT3505, that would be the CTMP 21(m) and CTMP 21(c) powder canisters, both available only by direct shipment from GE, and both pretty damn expensive.

If you had a GE fabricator, you could only use a GE fabricating powder. But the reverse was also true: If you were buying GE fabricating powder, you could only use it with a GE fabricator. All Creek had to do now is find out who was buying GE fabricating powder in DC without owning a GE fabricator.

GE was many things, including a government defense contractor; its core system was pretty tightly guarded. Creek had little chance of getting into that. But like many companies, GE handed off its ordering and fulfillment services to subcontractors whose network security was of a standard commercial level, which is to say full of holes and back doors. GE's order fulfillment was handled by AccuShop; Creek had his agent search for news stories about AccuShop and security breaches, and found a couple involving a back door accidentally left in the fulfillment code by programmers. Creek cracked open the GE shop and found the back door right where it should be. IT people really needed to patch more often.

"I'm obliged to tell you that what you're doing is illegal," the agent said.