Chrysalis

34

Logan stared out of his office window. Soon, he’d probably start counting trees… and from there it was only a matter of time until straitjackets and Thorazine.

At precisely eight thirty that morning, Claire Asperton had received another message. It was longer than the others by a factor of ten, and technical in nature. It laid out the payment method: one billion dollars paid in five different cryptocurrencies, to be dispersed into a total of twenty digital wallets. The QR codes for the e-wallets would be sent to Asperton’s public-facing Chrysalis email as confirmation at 8:00 EST Monday morning. Chrysalis would have eight minutes to convert a billion dollars into the cryptocurrencies and transmit the assets.

Logan hadn’t bothered parsing the long list of financial codes and routing numbers in the message, but the final sentence remained with him:

Peyton’s team of crypto-detectives hadn’t had any more luck tracking this message than the earlier ones. And their opponents offered no guarantees. Logan knew from experience this was common enough in such negotiations: it was the chance they’d have to take. But he was struck by the choice of words: the infection of your system has been cleansed.

He abruptly swiveled away from the window.

The night before, he’d decided that spending more time investigating Voyager and the Omega project was a luxury he couldn’t afford. He’d taken the phase two demo himself without ill effect. Besides, whatever was killing people clearly had nothing to do with that demonstration: Janelle Deston was living proof of that.

“Living proof” was a poor choice of words.

He sighed and asked himself the same question he had the night before: If it wasn’t the Voyager devices… what else did that leave?

There was a tone in his ear. “Jeremy,” came the silken voice.

“Yes, Grace.”

“Summary two of your request is now available.”

Logan sighed as his own words to Asperton came back to him, like a curse: Get a whole server farm chugging away on what else those three had in common. The lawyer had followed through, requisitioning every tiny commonality between Spearman, Bridger, Marceline Williams. Some of the data dealt with travel times, locations, or appointments that embodied the faintest correlation. Other information was far more granular — television shows, documentaries, movies, operas, plays, books, and concerts the three board members had individually taken in over the last two years. Clothing brands, food choices, luxury items ordered… the list was exhaustive and Logan didn’t want to know how Chrysalis obtained such information.

“Switch to summary display, please, Grace.”

A moment later, a virtual printout — letters forming words in the air, semi-transparent, scrolling upward as if spooling out of a printer — appeared before his eyes.

“Grace,” Logan said, “slower, please.”

“Certainly. Scroll rate reduced to.75.”

Logan blinked. Reading holographic documents, especially complex ones, was something he had yet to grow comfortable with.

“Grace!” Logan said again.

“Yes, Jeremy?”

“Please route the output to my screen.”

“As you wish.” The rows of phantom information disappeared; his screen winked into life; and the display picked up where it had left off.

Logan put his elbows on the desk and began to examine the data that crawled up the screen. Now and then he told Grace to flag a particular line or two, but mostly he just watched.

Suddenly, he stopped.

“Grace,” he said yet again. “Halt output.”

He stared a moment. “Go forward one screen.”

He continued staring. Wait a minute…. “Upload those last fifty lines to memory, and commit.”

“Very well, Jeremy.”

“And alert Dr. Purchase in BioCertain — right away. Tell him I’ll be waiting where we were first introduced.” He stood up, cleared the screen. “And forward him a listing of those same fifty lines, please. That should save time in explanations.”

“My pleasure, Jeremy.”

“Grace, you’re a peach.” Logan stood to leave.

“No, Jeremy, I am a virtual assistant.”