NETFEED/NEWS: Smell—The Final Frontier

(visual: WeeWin's olfactory testing lab)

VO: The Euro-Asian toy company WeeWin has announced what it calls "the first genuine scent delivery system" for net users without neurocannular capabilities. WeeWin says the NozKnoz (pronounced "noseknows") system uses a scent palette of basic olfactory stimuli to create millions of different odors,

(visual: Dougal Craigie, WeeWin VPPR)

CRAIGIE: "Many people don't use neurocannulas—not just because they can't afford them, but also for medical and religious reasons. So we are not just excited, but deeply proud to announce that you no longer need to have your brain wired to enjoy the many smells of the net. This is not one of those cheap chocolate-and-cheese pastiche systems—NozKnoz nasal delivery plugs give results that cannot be distinguished from neurocannular stimulation."

Dulcie snuck another look at her silent employer, certain at some irrational level of her being that even in his deathlike sleep he must be able to sense her guilt, but if he did, his still form gave no indication. She turned back to the small screen on her pad, which she had chosen because it seemed more discreet than the wide wallscreen.

Dread's hidden storage had remained adamantly inaccessible. She had thrown every sort of decryption and security-breaking gear at it, had found it protected by nothing more advanced than a password, no quantum cryptography or anything special, but her gear had run an almost uncountable amount of number and letter combinations past it without success.

For God's sake! It's just a goddamn password! Why can't I break this?

Of course, when it came to passwords, it always helped if you knew something about the person whose account you were trying to crack.

Reluctantly, she gave up on penetrating her employer's mysteries, closed off her access to Dread's system and then ran some cleanup gear. She doubted that either Dread or his security program were sophisticated enough to spot her incursion, but there was no sense taking chances.

Irritated with herself, her earlier bold mood dissolving into worry and second thoughts, she opened up the Jongleur files—her legitimate work, if you could use such a term to describe felonious data theft—and got back down to business. As the signifiers filled her tiny screen she swore, then transferred operations up to the wallscreen—it was hard enough trying to make sense of things in two dimensions, let alone on a screen measured in centimeters. She left it at that, though: for some reason she felt reluctant to submerge herself in a 3D environment, even though she could do some things more efficiently in wraparound.

I'm scared to be helpless in a VR setup while I'm in the same room with Dread, she realized. It's not street hoodlums, not burglars I'm frightened of . . . but him. That's great, Anwin—two weeks into the thing is a bit late to realize it.

She looked at the dark ridgeline of his profile, moving up and down gently now as the bed massaged him, and a sudden image from her childhood reading leaped into her brain. She almost dropped her coffee.

Jesus, I'm Renfield. That guy who ate the flies and spiders. And it's my job to watch over Count Dracula.

She felt a little better after a quick shower, although she had decided on a caffeine moratorium for the rest of the day.

Dracula? Let's not get too morbid, Anwin, she told herself as she sat back down to stare at the Jongleur files. Still, she thought, if her boss popped up out of his humming coffin just now, even full of kind words and barely-veiled sexual interest as he sometimes was, she didn't think she was going to be very receptive.

She did her best to narrow her attention, sifting through the Jongleur information that had not made the first cut, yet which somehow might still hide useful data about the Grail network. An hour passed and she began to feel more like herself, even taking a few minutes to try to reopen Jongleur's weird Ushabti file, but her failure to provide the proper code or password the first time had left it as mute and secretive as an oyster.

They're just the goddamn same, the two of them. No wonder Jongleur hired him. . . . She froze, stunned by her own stupidity in not having thought of it sooner. My God, of course. His employer! If anybody's going to have any information on our boy Dread it's going to be Jongleur!

Within moments she had moved the display of Jongleur files back to the pad and had started to search. A request for "Dread" turned up nothing useful, which didn't entirely surprise her, and neither did "Sydney" or "Cartagena" "Isla de Santuario" or anything else that came to mind. How could you search for information on someone when you had almost no information with which to begin a search?

Jaws clamped so hard in concentration that she would have a headache later, Dulcie pulled up the immense bank of J Corporation accounting records and sent dozens of different bits of specialized gear looking for anomalies while performing the same search on Jongleur's personal files. The guy has to be paid, she thought. No matter what they call it, there has to be a connection. She also pulled up Dread's own system, all of which she had already explored except for the hidden storage—"the locked room," as she had begun to think of it, a phrase out of memory that rang a faint bell she was too busy to heed. It was boring, mundane stuff, but she wasn't looking for a revelation there, not in data she'd already examined. She was looking for a match, however obscure, a place where an open end on the Jongleur side lined up with something similar on Dread's side.

It took almost two hours, but she found it at last. A short string of numbers on a single disbursement out of the J Corporation's staggeringly large operating budget, routed through several smaller companies with no obvious connection to the corporation, one in North Africa, the others in the Caribbean, matched another string of numbers in an account which, although it belonged to an apparently fictitious company, was nevertheless listed on Dread's own system. Based on the dates, she suspected she was looking at some of the expenses for setting up the Colombian assault. It seemed to be an emergency replacement for some funds that had been misrouted, which was the only reason she had found the connection.

It's the little mistakes that kill you every time, she thought gleefully.

With this single small thread in her fingers she began to pick her way backward, following the chain of authority, sometimes by easy steps, sometimes only by leaps of practiced intuition, until at last she found herself moving slowly back up the connection she had discovered between the J Corporation and Jongleur's own personal system. Her palms were sweating, her heart fluttering.

The strands led to a group of files in Jongleur's system labeled "disposal"—which she at first thought was a little joke on the old man's part, but when she began to examine them she found that they were indeed contracts, reports, and other information about the hugely complex waste removal systems of the artificial island, thousands and thousands of nested files, all perfectly, boringly normal. She sat back, stunned and disappointed. How could she have been so wrong? Had she missed a stitch back there somewhere, then followed the wrong thread all the way back across the tapestry? It would take her at least another few hours to go back over it and find her mistake.

She was just about to close the whole mess in disgust when she suddenly wondered why Jongleur should take such an interest in the waste removal infrastructure for the corporate property, to the extent of having it on his own personal system. It was his own principal residence, of course, but it still seemed odd. She checked and found that the same set of files existed in the corporate system, but that didn't prove anything—Jongleur could simply have wanted his own copy, perhaps because there was some more mundane accounting discrepancy he was examining. Still, the Jongleur that Dread had spoken of didn't seem like a man too interested in the day-to-day business of maintaining corporate headquarters.