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.For Li—for any real hacker— dropping into the numbers was like coming home.She knew in broad terms what she was looking for, even if she didn’t yet know where she would find it.She needed a hit from a big corporate R&D player.The kind of player with enough financial muscle to produce cutting-edge tech with an impossibly long research-to-market horizon—and enough political muscle to risk violating human bioresearch ethics guidelines.But she couldn’t go in through the front door.She needed a fluff file.Something public domain, relatively unguarded.Something she could access without attracting unwanted attention.Something that would let her slip past the corporate gatekeepers.She caught a promising datastring and hooked on to it, sliding through layered databases like a diver finning through the currents and thermals of a turbulent ocean.The string led her to the public-access page of CanCorp’s Ring-based bioresearch division.CanCorp was one of the four or five multiplanetaries Li thought could have produced Sharifi’s interface—and sure enough a quick and dirty cross-check told her CanCorp was one of Sharifi’s most generous corporate sponsors.She switched back into VR to follow the string; on the off chance that CanCorp security was monitoring its public site, she wanted to look like an ordinary tourist when she got there.To her annoyance, she was detoured five times on her way.First, a saccharine commercial jingle for some overpriced health snack that tasted like mildew.Then an earnest pitch from the Reformed Church of Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, delivered by an implausibly clear-skinned teenager in a cheap blue suit and a plastic name tag.Then, loaded onto a single and annoyingly persistent banner, a docu-ad about the Heaven’s Gate Gene Therapy Institute, a Ring-generated public-service announcement about a listeria epidemic in the Ring’s NorAm Sector, and a disorienting full-immersion apocalyptic simulation from some computer-literate Interfaither splinter group.She slid out of the Interfaither sim with jelly legs, a throbbing head, and a serious beef with whoever had decided that they were a bona fide religion entitled to public-access streamtime.When she finally reached the CanCorp page, it didn’t tell her much.But it did have a link to a “work in progress” section on which the division’s researchers (or, more likely, the division’s public relations staff) posted sanitized biographies and dumbed-down descriptions of current research.She ran a new search and pulled streamspace coordinates for three CanCorp researchers.She hesitated.So far she’d only hit on sparsely monitored public-access sites, sites where her presence would pass unnoticed as long as she didn’t do anything that made someone decide to take a closer look at the hit logs for the current time frame.Now, however, she was crossing into more delicate territory.Territory where there would be a price for sloppiness.But that was why Nguyen had sent her, of course.Nguyen knew her.She’d told Li her career was riding on this mission and then she’d turned her loose, knowing she’d get the job done, knowing she was willing to risk everything on every throw, every time.Five minutes later an obscure CanCorp research assistant sent a message to the network administrator.Six minutes later, Li opened a blind window on the administrator’s account and started surfing the internal mail archives of CanCorp’s entire R&D division.CanCorp security had been thorough, Li noted with a professional’s appreciation.They had good eSec protocols and they hadn’t been shy about slapping the wrists of employees who violated them.But researchers never took security seriously, and CanCorp’s researchers were no exception.Three of the facility’s designers still had archived mail talking about a prototype device similar to Sharifi’s wire.The project had been terminated twenty-eight months ago.The one prototype of the interface had been sent to an off-site storage room from which, according to later inventories, it had simply … vanished.Li cursed in frustration, surfaced briefly to a disorienting image of her quarters on-station, then plunged back in.Let’s go at this from another angle, she told herself.Look for the organic component.She accessed Sharifi’s medical records again and put together an itinerary for her last few months Ringside.Then she cross-checked Sharifi’s whereabouts against all the clinics licensed to install the kind of specialized internal wetware Sharifi needed.Match: one discreet, expensive private clinic in the Zona Camilia.The operation had been paid for from an unnumbered Freetown account [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]