The Doubt Factory by Paolo Bacigalupi

Author:Paolo Bacigalupi [Bacigalupi, Paolo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780316220743
Google: CVHVAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00I8289EQ
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2014-10-14T07:00:00+00:00

22

MOSES WAS STRUCK BY HOW vulnerable Alix looked. Standing before him in her borrowed clothes, just at the edge of the warehouse, she looked isolated and adrift, and he was surprised at how much pity he felt for her—for the situation that he’d put her in, for the fact that her world was going to be forever different… for everything, really.

Beyond the factory doors, Adam was waiting in the Dodge Dart, the engine already running. Moses held up the USB stick. It was tiny. Little more than the metal USB plug itself along with the barest bump of extra plastic. Kook and Tank had constructed it so that a person would hardly notice that something had been plugged into the computer. When it was inserted, it would hardly stick out at all.

“All you need to do is put this in his work computer,” Moses said. “Just get this into his laptop, and you’re done.”

“Nothing else?” She looked doubtful.

“That’s all. It’s a lot, actually. The software on the stick will do the rest. Kook modified it. As long as it gets plugged in while he’s already logged in, it should be able to do the rest. All you need to do his get him away from his computer for two seconds. Spill some soda on him, get him to change his shirt. That’s it. Simple. It just takes a couple seconds for the software to run.”

“And it won’t… you won’t point all this at him?”

Moses looked at her sadly. “If we find what we think we’re going to find, people are going to be so busy suing Fortune 100 companies that no one’s going to be worrying about you or your family. People will go after the money; all the money is in the companies. Banks Strategy Partners is tiny in comparison to the whales they’ll be hunting.”

He placed the USB stick in her hand.

She looked crushed and overwhelmed. But then, everyone did, when they first got the download. He remembered how he’d felt when he and Cynthia had started piecing it together years ago. Then Kook and Tank and Adam. Each one of them with his or her own story of loss, and all of them connected. All of them with their memories of sitting in courtrooms, too late to do anything except sue. No eye for an eye. No pound of flesh. Nothing except a check from some class action, with the lawyers walking away rich and everyone else putting a dollar amount on the bodies that they’d put in the ground.

Each time Moses had laid out the reality of their situation, they’d been shell-shocked at first, but they’d understood. But then, they’d all been predisposed to believe. They’d all felt the pain that Banks Strategy Partners dealt out to the world. It made them more than willing to step up.

Alix, though?

All she’d ever felt were the benefits of her father’s work. While other people were watching their moms die of cancer or their dads on dialysis machines, Alix was flying down to Saint Barts.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.