Previous Chapter

Confronting the five major aspects of my personality as embodied by my coworkers had been exhausting. Drugging and kidnapping by an Arizona conspiracy merchant, not so much. Aurora threatened to ground me when I got up the next morning and headed to work but the truth was her heart wasn’t in it and we both knew it. The Constellations may be the oldest, most respected psychometrics in our little Galaxy but what we were dealing with went beyond that and both of us knew it. I wasn’t feeling too put out by my brush with abduction and that meant I needed to get back to it.

First thing through the office door Natalie dragged me to Hennesy’s office, where I got a lecture which I still wince to recall. It was mostly volume and exasperation, Eugene and I had violated procedure in several ways and gotten ourselves into a lot of trouble as a result, but I had figured out that the Masks had staged their drone attacks from water – or at least, I was pretty sure they had. So once my harangue was over Hennesy made me explain how I’d reached that conclusion.

I started from by breaking down all the convenience that mode of attack presented to someone looking to scrub their psychometric presence and built up my case for why the attack in general fit with the other patterns. It was nonviolent, it was disruptive, it focused specifically on Silicon Valley. Hennesy and Natalie listened until I finished, then Natalie pointed out, “You’re putting a lot of emphasis on these attacks being designed to elude psychometric detection. But psychometrics isn’t a well-known phenomenon, although admittedly the knowledge is more commonplace than I would have expected here in San Francisco. What makes you so sure our perpetrators are deliberately acting to avoid your detection? EMPs have been a part of infotech warfare experiments and scifi speculation for decades.”

“True enough. It wasn’t the question of methodology that makes me think they’re involved, it’s the question of motive.”

That got Hennesy’s attention. “That’s unusual for you, Armor. You know motive is for lawyers and juries, it won’t get us warrants or arrests. Why do you think it’s important here?”

“A couple of reasons, really.” I gauged Hennesy for a moment, looking for the best place to begin, the way to lay out the facts that would convince him of my thesis. It’s not an easy thing to do with him, Hennesy’s mind has always struck me as functioning like a sieve. He wants the whole mess thrown at him so he can strain out what’s important. Normally I admire that trait but this time I really needed him to see the thing my way. So might as well start with the biggest thing. “The biggest is because, if I have the motive correct, it means our perpetrators are connected to the Masks.”

“You’ve been talking to Eugene,” Hennesy grumbled. “He’s been saying that since day one.”

“Of course I’ve been talking to him. But I didn’t think he was right until I looked over the data Jackson pulled together. His crusade against what he calls the Silicoverlords is cute, but he was missing the pieces to make sense of the data he was getting. Hat Trick, his psychometric consultant, apparently hadn’t explained what the Masks were to him, so he couldn’t recognize what was happening. I’ve never heard of Hat Trick, so I don’t know if he didn’t tell Jackson about the Masks because he didn’t know much about them or just because he couldn’t recognize what they were doing, but I do and I did.”

Natalie raised a hand, fingers waving for my attention. “Sorry to interrupt, but AJ Jackson isn’t the only one who doesn’t know what the Masks are. Care to elaborate?”

“The Masks are a group of psychometrics who believe all people are splinters of a single omniscient being, kinda like Buddhists or Hindus,” Hennesy said. It was a pretty accurate description of the Masks, if not necessarily Buddhists or Hindus. “They believe psychometry is the way the splinters are meant to bind themselves back together into the original big brain and they spend a lot of time trying to do just that through a lot of weird methods, most of them legal but a large minority of them not so much. They traffic drugs and humans in some cases, perform medically dubious experiments in others. The FBI started contracting with Galaxy for investigators in the seventies because we got involved in some of the nastier experiments the Masks were working on.”

“For our part, Galaxy and the Masks have been at odds much longer. Honestly I don’t think we’d have had any problems with them at all, except they dogmatically insist all psychometrics have a duty be part of their efforts to reunite humanity. And we knew, pretty much since those,” I waved at Hennesy’s computer, “were invented that the Masks would see them as another vector for their struggle to remake the omnimind they think we’re all fragments of. So we’ve been working to root out their influence on Silicon Valley since the mid 1990s.”

Natalie pursed her lips in concentration, worked her way through that information then said, “So do you think the recent attacks are a result of your efforts to shut them out of the industry entirely?”

“Ah…” Honestly, I’d never thought of it in that light before. “That’s not an entirely fair characterization, but if you asked a Mask it’s possible they’d see it that way. Fact is, Eugene and I have been crossing paths with the Masks pretty much since I started working here. It’s never been clear what exactly they were up to but I’ve never doubted they’re making plays to take over Silicon Valley and bring the world closer in their own rather twisted way. I think it’s likely that AJ was going to uncover some piece of that plan and they had to push up their time table by using a series of terrorist attacks to drive Silicon Valley towards them.”

Hennesy leaned back with a snort. “Are you implying that everything that’s happened in the last few days is a convoluted series of false flag attacks?”

“Not exactly. A false flag is where you pretend to be your enemy and attack an ally, so you’re justified in the eyes of others when you declare war on your enemies, or when your allies join forces with you. If I had to guess, the Masks want one of two things. Either they’re trying to push the firms they’ve attacked towards some kind of security solution they’ve prepped ahead of time or they’re trying to weaken competitors in an area they’re planning to break in to later on.” I shrugged, this was one part of the theory I didn’t have a clear picture of. “I lean towards it being the former, the power grid attack was big, probably bigger than intended, but couldn’t possibly have been deliberately targeted even if it had performed as intended.”

“This is all pretty farfetched,” Hennesy said, far from convinced. But I could see him turning over the parts of the puzzle in his mind and seeing that they did fit, to an extent. There was just a lot of it missing.

“Have the Masks ever used terror attacks before?” Natalie asked.

“No,” I conceded. “But everything that’s happened so far falls into the category of large scale, technically nonviolent mischief that a psychometric could do and still be comfortable with. If chaos and panic were all the perpetrators wanted there are easier ways to get it.”

“Although none that made it quite so clear that their problem was with Silicon Valley in particular,” Hennesy said. “And in the cases I’ve supervised where the Masks were involved they tended to omit a lot of direct communication, which fits with the lack of public statements or demands after the recent attacks. No one’s really claimed credit for them outside of a few Iranian and Afghani groups we’re not taking very seriously.”

Hennesy thought about it for a moment more, then shook his head and said, “No, it’s too far-fetched for the brass to take seriously.”

“I thought you were in charge of this investigation,” I said.

“Well you thought wrong. This basically goes right up to the Secretary of Defense at this point, Washington has been taking this investigation very seriously since the power grid went down. It’s none of your business where the buck stops, though, is it?” Hennesy gave me an amused look. “You’ve never cared when higher ups came into an investigation before.”

It wasn’t something I’d ever noticed before, which I guess goes to show that he was right and it didn’t really matter to me. Then again, I’d never wanted to follow a line of investigation contrary to what the FBI wanted before. “I guess I haven’t. But these are special circumstances.”

“True enough. If you want to sift Jackson’s data on your own time, be my guest, but between you and me it’s a bad idea. You can’t let the job get to you that way. Now get out of here and let me get back to work. Agent Chase already has your next assignment.” He pointed one meaty finger directly at my chest, a vivid picture of him pinning me in place running through his mind. “And this time be sure to stick to protocol if you have anything you want to do on your own time. Understand?”

“Sure thing, boss.” Hennesy grunted and waved us out.

Once we were safely in the hallway with the door closed I asked, “So what do you want to do first, dig through the Jackson files or our actual job?”

Natalie gave me a longsuffering look. “Your file never suggested you were a maverick.”

“Yeah,” I said with a smirk. “Well, maybe they should talk with AJ Jackson about my working name. I can be subtle when I want to be. I take it you want to tackle Hennesy’s assignment. So what is it?”

“We pulled a lot of data from the Worker Drones offices and we’re going to try and match any of their designs to the drones flying over the waterfront three days ago.”

“Ah,” I said dryly, “the further adventures of weakArmor, image recognition expert. At least you’re paying my hourly rate on this.”

Natalie plastered on an innocent face. “Have you read your contract recently?”

“No…” I said, suddenly wary. “That’s what Galaxy is for.”

“Well, there’s an emergency clause in it that cuts your rate in half and take out paid overtime.”

“If you’re trying to convince me playing a maverick is a bad idea you’re doing a bad job…”