Information: Dark Matter Volume 1

Chapter 4

 "Wake up dearie." Her alarm was talking at her. "Wake up dearie. Wake up dearie" She shut it off and then sighed. No point in going back to sleep. It would detect her brain waves and then go back to its incessant nattering cheeriness. Whatever had driven her to select such a wholesome tone? Something more growly and threatening might have been better. At least there was coffee coming from the kitchen. Or would be, if this were her place. Damn. She hadn't stopped to program the machine last night. Shit. Another day. Not a morning person. She scrabbled at the bedside table for her glasses. Ugh. There was a message icon blinking in them. Shit again. She lay there, glasses on and felt the day come together around her.

Eventually she thought a 'click' at the icon present in her visual field and opened the message headed "Time to work!" This was one of the advantages of being an Auggie—output control over her interface. All she had to do was think of the correct command and it happened. No messy working with actual tactile interfaces. It was just a side effect of having a million fibers stuck in your brain feeding neural charges into an ultra-high-speed processor. But still, a nice one when you wanted just to lie in bed for a while longer.

And the message: Blackleaks Collective with something for her. Well, they didn't like her to sit around. They hadn't helped her get all those fibers in her head just so she could make a living. They needed her. More unpleasantness. A throb crossed her head, presaging the headache to come. And with other work still to do. Her thoughts ran over the last couple of days. How weird. Aliens and people searching for them. Was it real? In this dream space at the edge of sleep, she felt it could drift away into meaninglessness.

Except she'd burned her office. She might have to walk away from her life. Shit. She was wide awake now. What was she going to do? Already on edge, she rolled out of bed.

As she made coffee she thought about the files she'd stolen from Spaceboy. She'd taken a look at them. What a boring collection of corporate materials. The bulk of it was reports: analysis of this and analysis of that. She couldn't imagine spending her time going through it all. But then she had to laugh at herself, wasn't that what she did? Even more boring, she just organized things. Except it gave her a thrill to see all the parts falling into places that made sense. There was a tidiness about reality that emerged when all the information had its own location that just made her feel good. No one she talked to could understand that. It was peaceful work. Orderly work. And it just felt good. So maybe Spaceboy could enjoy his work too.

Then there were his medical files. She'd ignored them yesterday. For some reason she'd been surprised to find them, though she shouldn't have been. It made perfect sense to carry his complete medical records. It's not like a doctor here was going to be able to request a set from his home medical service. Then she'd felt a little guilty opening them. The encryption was standard, so not that difficult. Having access to all the standard encryption systems was part of her job, even if less than fully ethical. She'd gone through the medical records of any number of business executives as part of her research work, so this was no different. But it felt different, she couldn't quite sense why. Except she could sense that she would feel different looking into his eyes next time she saw him—not quite like seeing him naked, but certainly with a sense that she had violated his privacy. What she was planning wasn't fair. She'd never want him seeing her files!

She clicked them open once the coffee was ready. No sense putting it off, no matter how uncomfortable she felt. It had to be done. She really needed to see his psych reports. Auggies had to have them. If this file set was complete, there had to be a psych work-up. It was necessary to prepare for and then assess augmentation. She'd certainly had that done, and it had not been pleasant. It took her determination, plus full payment, plus the recommendation of her therapist, to get them to overlook the question marks in her file. The fuckers wanted super-stable people. What about people who just wanted to do good work? It still made her angry. In this case she wanted to see what flags there might be in his file. They'd let her know what kind of lunatic she might be dealing with. For this kind of search that was important knowledge. It would give her a better sense of how hard to look and how to write up the results. Or let her know if he was prone to seeing bug-eyed aliens.