Rising Tomorrow (Roc de Chere Book 1) by Mariana Morgan (essential reading txt) 📕

from one function to another. You can’t remove one part without another couple dozen functions disintegrating. Which is why the only explanation I could find to explain why 2718SEX3’s code was so fragmented was physical damage. But seeing the overlapping squigglecode… It changes everything.

‘I saw that residual code back at the 4th. It was alien. I thought it was a random artefact caused by the damage the adult VRP suffered, but when I saw it in the other two programs I analysed, it got me thinking. It wasn’t that hard to visualise a few thousand lines of code as squigglecode once I saw the watermark.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Palmeiro grumbled, and it was Ingram’s turn to snort. ‘I meant, isn’t it convenient that someone just put the same squigglecode on a flyer? If someone had it pre-designed and unregistered to make your watermarks unrecognisable, why on earth would it find its way onto a flyer? Isn’t that suspiciously convenient?’

‘The flyer,’ Ingram interjected, ‘was designed nearly four years ago when Cassandra was preparing for the VR festival to celebrate its two-hundred-year anniversary in November 2721. It wasn’t planted there recently.’

Both comments were valid, Gonzalez thought, and all eyes turned to Eloise.

‘Human eyes can’t read squigglecodes. They are infinitely more complicated than their primitive predecessors—barcodes or QR codes. Most likely what happened is that the person working on the modifications to one of my VRPs didn’t realise their computer had adopted the unregistered watermark and used it automatically when the flyer was generated. Even if someone scanned it, they wouldn’t find anything, just a random unregistered watermark. Not very common, but I’m sure Cassandra has a bunch of those on files to use when needed. It’s possible that no one at Cassandra even knows that the watermark used to neutralise my own watermarks ended up on this flyer.’

‘Hold on,’ Rivas said, speaking up for the first time in a long while, ‘at what point did we assume that Cassandra is involved in turning your adult VRP into a slave brothel and in the murder of Leeches?’

‘If the fact that the Harper woman was paying Wagner to kill me wasn’t enough of a dead giveaway, I’d think the two overlapped watermarks showing the squigglecode residues I found in my adult VRP are?’ Eloise replied simply, and another long pause followed as everyone digested the obvious but suspiciously simple facts.

‘Surely we aren’t saying that Cassandra as a company is behind the murders and sex exploitation?’ Sergeant Kizenberg said into the silence.

Sergeant Atkins looked at Kizenberg in surprise, his hazel eyes rounding. He was still in his late twenties, nearly forty years younger than Kizenberg, and it showed. Tall for a Leech, his youthful innocence was still written all over his face. His short brown hair was cut with military precision to the prescribed length, and there wasn’t even a thread out of place in his clothes. He sat somewhat stiffly, and it wouldn’t even occur to him to open his mouth without being asked a direct question. They were both Leeches, and yet it was plainly obvious that Kizenberg had stepped past her conditioning a long time ago and had no qualms about participating in a conversation with the Elite. The younger man was deeply in awe of—and maybe just a tiny bit terrified by—her competent, self-assured bearing.

‘Well, that depends on how we define Cassandra, doesn’t it?’ Rivas said after a moment of thought. ‘The company might not have the modified VRPs on sale in their catalogue, but if someone within Cassandra had the resources to pull this off, they aren’t going to be bottom-level employees. It will be the CEOs, or at least senior managers, or maybe even the shareholders. Aren’t they, the people with the power and the ability to make decisions, the ones who actually run Cassandra and other corporate organisations? Aren’t those people really what Cassandra stands for as a company?’

Eloise followed the conversation with idle curiosity, her gaze moving from person to person as they spoke. She had always left this sort of pondering to her lawyers, but now she had discovered that it was kind of fascinating.

‘I don’t see how a single person could have pulled this off,’ Ingram interjected, ‘which further supports Raymond’s point of view. What Cassandra has is state-of-the-art facilities, possibly the second-best, right after the Chandler N-Suit Research Base, and some of the best VR specialists the Alliance has to offer. While Ms Moretti ultimately provided nearly thirty per cent of their VRPs, there is still that seventy per cent to account for. They no doubt have some other freelance designers and developers, but a chunk of those VRPs must have been produced in-house by their own team of VR nerds. I can imagine that it’s considered the ultimate honour by any aspiring VR designer or programmer to be on their payroll.’

No one objected, and Gonzalez found himself nodding, slowly at first and then faster as he too understood where Eloise had been heading when she said some answers were better searched for outside the code.

Almost as if reading his thoughts, Ingram turned to the holo-display and swiped back to her opening slide, showing Cassandra’s main R&D compound. When she turned back to Gonzalez, their eyes locked, the decision made. The answers they were looking for were inside.

‘All right, everyone. Fuel up, get your asses into a VRP for some exercise to clear your head and then get back to sifting through Wagner’s files,’ Gonzalez ordered. He needed some space alone to plan. This time his instincts were telling him to plan carefully, and he desperately needed peace and quiet for that. ‘If you come across anything of value, note it down and—’

A high-pitched shriek of pain blasted from every speaker in Roc de Chere.

For a split second no one moved, and then Gonzalez acted instinctively, punching instructions into his wrist-comp to determine the status of the security system. Everything flashed green. What then?

‘Tilly?’ Eloise whispered, glancing up in an oddly respectful way