The Extractionist by Kimberly Unger

Author:Kimberly Unger [Unger, Kimberly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978616963774
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

For McKay, hitting the outside of the NWaS building was like suddenly taking a big gulp of air after holding her breath for far too long. She stood a few seconds, letting the Overlay connect to the City systems, bring in news feeds and weather data, feed her data on every little thing within link’s reach, including the urine content trickling down the city gutter next to her. That last bit of data could have been left off. She could have done without the smell too. McKay dropped a note asking one of the courier services to pick the contract up at her place in the morning for delivery to NWaS. There was little doubt in her mind that Tanh or someone like him would try to monitor her communications, so she slipped that one out with a little less encryption to convince them she had bought in.

McKay jammed the contract wafer into the lockbox as soon as she got back to the House, setting the scrubber to work on it. She instructed it to strip the text and burn anything else on the wafer, then dropped heavily into the comfy chair.

“Jesus, Spike, this is getting too damn complicated.” She rested her head in her hands and rubbed her eyes, setting off sparks in her vision when the pressure reacted with the ’mites. The sprite was nowhere to be seen or heard. In fact, McKay hadn’t seen him since the day before at Katie’s. Spike was rarely absent for that long at a stretch. It’s a program, not a puppy. Spike can take care of himself. Itself, she corrected.

She stared moodily at the lockbox. The lights in the faceplate fluttered merrily as it ground through the data spun into the chip’s crystallized plastic surface. Nothing yet. It was a stupid old trick, burying a virus in a contract. After being baited with her own patent, cheap, petty tricks seemed right in line with Christopher’s mindset. Tanh was another story, especially since he’d invoked Rose’s name back at the ambush. She kept popping up, but never with the major players. It felt like she was maneuvering around the sidelines, pushing buttons to get reactions. Christopher was aware that Brighton was after him, but surprisingly unconcerned. Bosch had moved to rescue McKay; was it possible that she was still playing both sides? McKay had expected something different, some kind of revelation on meeting Christopher face-to-face, but she’d come away with the feeling that the senior programmer was not the driving force here. This investigation was more of an annoyance than any real trouble.

Feeling kind of full of yourself, eh? You’re not big enough to be a problem for a guy like Christopher.

McKay and Saiid had designed the scrubber, cut off from any system, both Swim and hardline. She had to plug the wafer in manually, and the operating instructions were ’mite-encoded into the hardware, inflexible, unchangeable. Its function was simple enough: read the files, execute anything executable therein, and trigger any encoded viral activity.

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.