Tally Road Original Story- Chapter 16

"So where are we going to get a secure connection?" said Rairate.

"I think I could probably coax some of the public terminals to do that," said Dene, "but no promises."

Ten levels above the slums, the food still wasn't very good. They'd found a little cafe, and were eating there partly from hunger and partly from the need to sit in a quiet, safe place for a while. It wasn't a very good cafe, but it was nearly empty.

"This table has some sort of a terminal built into it. Can you use that?"

"Not a chance." said Dene. "It almost doesn't do anything except show advertisements. It'll be filing away anything you type into it. I've seen the reports from that type of data mining sometimes- employment seekers often have breakfast in places like this, and it becomes part of the location evals I do at... uh, used to do at my job."

Rairate sighed gently. They would just have to find another terminal somewhere. One thing about the Runge homeworlds was that you could always find another anything. At least they could all be grateful that they'd escaped the lower levels of Verss with their lives.

"This planet sucks." observed Boodins, sulkily, rubbing his foot. Dene bristled, but before she could say anything, he retorted, "Well, it does!"

"Actually, I sort of like it." said Siertes, unexpectedly.

Dene blinked, distracted. "How come?"

"It doesn't matter what you are, here. You know there are planets where I wouldn't even be allowed through customs? Not just me, I mean- I'm a Mued, many people are afraid to be around me- I mean any Tompar."

"Like what worlds?" asked Dene, taken aback.

"Any Aintar settlement. Well, they have some excuse..."

Rairate nodded at Siertes. "One strike's worth of Tompar venom will make another Tompar very sick, but it will kill two Vorsi, twenty Runge, twenty-five Resten, thirty Estrai, forty Nerre, or two thousand Aintar. Their avian metabolisms are sensitive to the toxins."

"Yeah, sure," said Siertes, "but Ause won't allow Tompar either and you don't have that excuse."

Rairate's ears went back slightly in chagrin. "We don't allow much of anybody on our world. Our culture is not to be distorted or slighted."

"And this pup's world allows Tompar, but if you go there all your movements have to be tracked and reported to the police at all times..."

"That's not true!" protested Boodins.

"You're not a Tompar." said Siertes. "Ask one. Trust me. I'm not saying your people aren't nice, they're awfully decent and civilized, but we are supervised if we live on Restred."

Boodins considered this unhappily for a minute, and then Siertes completed her thought. "And that's why I like the Runge worlds! They don't care what you are, only who you are. Sometimes not even that. It's wide open. Not even home is like that. There's something special about it."

"It's very uncontrolled," objected Rairate politely. "We could have been killed."

"Back home is controlled. I'll go back there when I'm done here, and I don't know what will happen then. Maybe I'll be killed. It depends on who's in charge when I get back, if they want me killed they'll have me killed, there's nothing to be done about it, that's just the way things are."

"Who is 'they'?" asked Dene, distressed.

"Whoever's in charge. 'There are only two ends to a whip'. I'm not in charge, I know that. Everything is controlled. Anyway, I like the Runge worlds. Here, I can pretend that maybe I'll never go back."

The four sat, considering this, and Boodins was so distracted he forgot his sulk. Finally, he said "If they could kill you, why would you go back?"

Siertes shrugged. "What else would you do if they call you back? That's what you do. Anyway, maybe they won't kill me. Probably not. Does it really matter all that much?"

"It would to me!" said Boodins.

"You're no Tompar." replied Siertes.

Rairate's feline face remained inscrutable during this exchange- he knew the life of a Mued was uncertain at best, and he had other concerns.

"Where can we find a public terminal that can give us a secure connection, Dene?"

She considered this. "We might need to open a bank account."

"You're kidding. Are you kidding, 'aons?"

"Well, we have enough money to do it, but the question is under whose name. I don't know if mine would be safe, the money could be impounded. Could we use yours?"

"But why?" asked Rairate.

"Cash is anonymous. It's going to be a lot harder to come up with a secure connection if we have to do it in an anonymous way."

"But we're trying to stay anonymous!" protested Rairate.

"No, we're trying to stay secret. It's different. Understand?"

Rairate gave her a look.

"I don't understand either." said Boodins.

"I do, but it probably won't help." said Siertes.

Rai turned. "Then, what does she mean? Why do we need to expose ourselves in order to make a simple secure connection to Voustrets?"

The Tompar shrugged. "It's status, of course. You can't seriously expect to do such a thing as anonymous-person status. You've got to assert higher status, high enough that you can expect privacy in your communications. If we can't fake that, we can buy it."

Rairate considered this. It was distasteful- tantamount to suggesting it wasn't who a person was that mattered, but what they had. There was no respect for the honor of the lowly here, and that was not proper at all. On the other paw, they had a chance to better themselves. On the first paw again, if they didn't better themselves, they were worse off than Rai liked to think about. At any rate, he didn't have to appear one of them, thanks to Voustrets. This situation could be handled.

"Come, vraonse, we will seek out a bank."

They had to go up several levels before Dene was satisfied with the banks. "Those loan shark operations wouldn't do us a bit of good. Not only wouldn't they establish reputation, some of them would monitor you."

"How do they do that?" asked Rairate.

"Oh, you'd sign off on a form that would give them license to. Some don't even expire. It's horrible, really."

This didn't satisfy Rairate, as he was more interested in the specific details, but he let it drop. "And this bank is better than that?"

"Of course, this is Annten Bank. You're going to deposit the money into an investment account, place two latent short sells against corporations that aren't short bait so they'll remain inactive, and then transfer not more than half the money plus the value of the latent shorts into a debit account..."

She realised the others were staring at her, and Dene bristled with embarrassment. "Uh... I just know this sort of thing."

"But how? Vraonse?" said Rairate. "You seem to know every detail of it, as if you..."

"It's just a hobby!"

"I did not mean to offend. My apologies."

Dene sighed. "People think things about you when you know too much about this stuff. They'd be calling me a hacker."

"It sounds like you are." said Rai. "You've had reason to open impressive looking bank accounts before? Why would you place... late short sells? Is that what you said?"

"Latent... you know, setting up an action triggered by either the valuation or possibly keywords if you want to live really dangerously. But it would be valuation, because you're intentionally picking something that isn't going to go short, and setting it up so the shorts won't ever come into play. The point is to have the transactions posted and register as an active investor through the distributed system..."

Boodins was trying to keep up. "Uh, keywords? Keywords are dangerous?"

"Some people like to tie up some money in shorts triggered by keywords. You know, like if there are more than 5 instances of 'quite', 'very', 'confident', 'certainly' or 'undoubtedly' in the annual report, short them because someone is trying to write fluff and make them sound more interesting than they are..."

Rai's ear flicked. "I don't think we need to know all those details. You think we should do this, before finding a secure connection and talking to Voustrets again?"

Dene nodded emphatically. "I can get you several grades more secure without even trying hard, if you do. From Annten I can get you an investor grade facsimile patch- we wouldn't actually use the facsimile as we have nothing to transmit, but when you initiate the connection you get video and voice over the same protocol, he'd be used to that sort of thing..."

Siertes glanced sidelong at Dene. "Clever crazy wolfess. Keep that up and I'll start taking lessons."

"Enough, 'aons." said Rairate. "We'll do as Denenke suggests."