Reality Bytes Part 4 -- Clarity

She flopped down on her bed and closed her eyes, expecting to be asleep in moments. A few seconds later, her eyes snapped open. She was too uncomfortable. She slipped out of her still damp dress and underclothing and let them drop to the floor. Her skin felt cold to her own touch. She threw back the covers of her bed and snuggled underneath, sighing in satisfaction as the bed automatically warmed just enough to take the edge off the chill. But once more, sleep eluded her. “Damn,” she swore, and sat up.

Her mind was running in circles, going through it over and over again. If it had been Adam’s intention all along to rob her research, why had he bothered with the pretense of a relationship? He’d never even asked about where she worked. It certainly didn’t seem like he had needed to use subterfuge at all. He could have gotten past the lab’s security whether he had known her or not.

And why had he come back to apologize? Was it some kind of mind fuck, an attempt to throw her off the trail? Suddenly, an idea surfaced. “Gregory,” she said into the darkness.

The terminal on her wall activated. “Yes?”

“Bring up those text messages I told you to archive. Put the first of them up on the screen.”

The wall blinked and text, black on white, appeared:

Dearest Alicia,
Are you angry with me? I’m sorry if I’ve done something to upset you. I’ve been thinking of you constantly. Contact me, please. It’s been so long. I want to see you again.

She read the words but wouldn’t let herself feel anything but bitterness. “Open the second message, please.”

Ally,
There is a matter of grave importance that you must attend to at once. You need to make backup copies of all your research work on the phage. Stow the copies in a safe place, but don’t leave any record of where and try not to tell anyone unless you have to. I will explain when I can.

Alicia lay back, stunned. “Christ, he tried to warn me.” If it was true, if her home records hadn’t been altered along with those at the lab. But why would he bother? If all Adam had been after was her research, why go to the trouble of creating this message? For that matter, why had he contacted her at the bar? There was one possibility the seemed compelling, that went along with everything that had happened. What if he’d had no other choice? What if he had been forced against his will?

A part of her wanted to believe so badly. She had to know. She addressed Gregory. “I need you to compose a message, to Tiffany.”

Alicia paced back and forth in front of the museum, gnashing her teeth in irritation. She’d hoped that for once her old friend would take the hint that something was important.

“Hey, sorry I’m late.” Alicia jumped. She hadn’t recognized Tiffany approaching. She was wearing wide, dark sunglasses and an uncharacteristically short and revealing miniskirt. Her blonde hair was twisted into a long braid. “Sorry for the getup,” she continued. “But the message you left was pretty scary stuff. I thought it might be a good idea to disguise my appearance.”

It was a good idea, one which Alicia should have thought of herself. In the fourth decade of the twenty-first century, cameras were almost everywhere, and most of them were linked up in some way with the net. There was always encryption on such feeds, of course, but Alicia had little faith in that kind of protection. Her every movement might right now be monitored. That’s why she had chosen this place to meet. “Let’s get inside and talk,” she said.

They entered through the massive glass front of the building. The first room was nearly a hundred yards long. High up on the wall, in physical letters rather than bright holotext was the word “Transportation”. The room was dominated by a full-size hanging model of a clumsy-looking aircraft. The words, “Boeing 737” were hung from the ceiling with wires. Along one wall was an old diesel train. Ground cars took up most of the rest of the floor space. It was a museum of the twentieth century, and the proprieters, in the spirit of immersing visitors in the history of the time period, had completely eschewed twenty-first century technology. Even the narrations were done with ancient, bulky screens and late twentieth century computer and video equipment. It was one of the few buildings in the civilized world that remained unconnected to the net.

Alicia and Tiffany sat down on an antique bench in a quiet corner of the museum. Tiffany opened with a question. “Just what the hell do you think you’re going to accomplish?”

She already knew, in brief, what had happened with the lab and the messages at Alicia’s home. The message Alicia had sent her also explained what she intended to do about it. She would contact Adam again, but this time she would be ready and equipped to get the truth from him. “I need to know, Tiffany. I thought I was falling in love with him. I need to know why he would do this. I just can’t bring myself to believe he was leading me on the whole time.”

“Let…him…go,” Tiffany said firmly. “He’s already halfway destroyed your career. Do you want to lose everything?”

“Fine,” Alicia recanted, “let’s say you’re right, that he is just an asshole and a con-artist. Maybe he won’t show at all, but if he does, maybe we’ll get the chance to make him pay for what he’s done.”

“You’re asking a lot,” Tiffany said, but it was obvious that Alicia had hit upon something she agreed upon. “Any good hacker knows how to cover his tracks. If we’re going to do this, we need to do it right. I have most of the equipment, but I do not have the expertise to do what you want. I know someone who does, but it won’t be easy to convince him to help.”

“I know you can do it,” Alicia said, brushing Tiffany’s cheek with the back of her hand. She felt embarrassed as soon as she’d done it and looked away quickly. That kind of contact was something they avoided these days. Their last fling together had been years ago.

“Don’t worry about it,” Tiffany said, patting Alicia’s hand. “We still have some fond memories, don’t we?”

Alicia blushed but nodded. “We were such kids back then.”

Tiffany stood and her tone returned to business. “Well, I’ll need a few days, at least, to get everything ready. I’ll ping you by Friday.”

Alicia got to her feet as well. “Listen, Tiffany, this really means a lot to me. You know I wouldn’t ask you if it weren’t deeply important to me.”

Tiffany grimaced. “Spare me the speech, doll. If it were anyone else, the answer would’ve been an unequivocal ‘no’. Now be careful, alright?”

Tiffany’s message came three days later, exactly as promised. It was short and simple. “Everything’s ready. Meet me at my place tonight at six so we can talk. Later.”

The trip to Tiffany’s house was a blur of lights and traffic. The morning after she had found out about her work being stolen, her team had begun a furious, round-the-clock effort to reconstruct nearly two years of research and development. She hadn’t gotten so little sleep since finals week in college and the way her head and body was aching made her feel much older than she was used to feeling.

Tiffany lived on a hillside near Salmon Bay, and she had a breathtaking view of the water. She and her husband Brad had done very well for themselves, he a high-profile corporate lawyer and she a WAN administrator for an international software development company. Their house, though magnificent, was surely only a fraction of what they could afford, but Alicia could see why they had chosen it every time she imagined a child or two playing in the lovely little garden next to the house. It was a dream that a few days ago she would have said was only weeks away from being hers.

Tiffany answered just moments after Alicia knocked. She must have been waiting right near the door. Tiffany led her to the dining room, which was empty but had been set for a meal for two. “Brad’s down in LA, doing some investigative stuff,” she explained, “but I thought I’d make something special for us. Seafood, the real stuff,” she said, gesturing to a table laden with shrimp, lobster, and shellfish. “Don’t worry, it’s all farm grown,” she added.

Pollution and over-fishing had made brought the world’s oceans to the very brink of disaster two decades ago. She’d been just a little girl back then, but she could remember taking to heart the biologists’ grim warnings of the food chain collapsing and wiping out all life on Earth. Genetic engineering had solved much of the world’s food problems by producing hardier, pest- and disease-resistant grain, but the promise of vat-grown, cloned meat proved to be far more difficult and costly than at first anticipated. It wasn’t until the nanotech revolution that human beings could turn to wholly artificial means of creating meats by building them from base proteins. With such a cheap alternative to the increasingly difficult task of catching live food, international bans had quickly been passed and the fishing industry had languished. Now, with bioengineered bacteria helping to consume the poisons humans had dumped there, the oceans were on the road to slow recovery.