Free Palm Sunday by William R. Vitanyi Jr.

moment, they often sought a place that was isolated, but familiar. Whipple had run, out of fear, to a place where he felt safe and untraceable. Where would that place be?
    He examined the various folders. The usual ones were here; system folders, documents, music, and several miscellaneous entries. There was a folder with a ton of saved emails. When Slocum opened this he was impressed at how organized it was, calling to mind the neatness of Whipple’s house. Everything was categorized, with out of date and personal entries separated from more important business correspondence. He spent over an hour scouring the possibilities, and made several phone calls that resulted in dead ends. As he scrolled down the list of entries his eyes stopped on a line that read ‘reservation confirmed’. It was from a motel, and the message was over two years old. It included a number, and on a hunch Slocum dialed it.
    “Lake Motel, how may I help you?” It was an older woman.
    “Hi, my name is John Whipple. My brother and his son were headed up that way for a little vacation, and I’m supposed to meet them. I think he said they were staying at your place, but I lost the piece of paper with the information on it. Can you help me?”
    There was a pause before the woman replied. “I really shouldn’t say. We don’t generally give out information about our guests.” The hesitation in her voice spoke volumes. If they weren’t there, she would have said so.
    Slocum wanted confirmation. “You don’t have to give me their room number or anything. I just don’t want to drive all that way for nothing. It would be a tremendous help.” He tried to sound as helpless and harmless as possible. It had the desired effect.
    “Well, I guess it wouldn’t hurt. A man and a boy did check in late last night. They asked about buying fishing gear this morning.” She laughed. “Land sakes, the only thing they’ll catch this time of year is a bad cold.”
    “Sounds like them.”
    “Is there a message I can give them?”
    “No thanks, but could I bother you for directions?” 

    ***

    Mason’s stunning revelation that the agency would now attempt to alter the societal profile was a bombshell. Norbert took center stage in explaining the technical details behind how it would happen.
    “In case some of you aren’t aware, the mechanism we employ during a profile is a one way street. Over time, we’ve installed hundreds of optical transceivers throughout the physical infrastructure of the Internet. These very small, very complex devices reflect an exact image of the optical signal back to us, while the original proceeds merrily along to its intended destination. Data arrives here, where we analyze it and create a profile. Nothing flows back out to the world. At least, not if everything works correctly.”
    “What about our own email, faxes and so forth? That goes out, doesn’t it?” asked Kayoko.
    “Yes, it does,” said Norbert. “But it’s on a completely different infrastructure, and uses different technology.”
    “I see.”
    “Of course, we do use the Net for communicating with the palm units, which is also separate from our email, and again, employs a different technology. We actually invented a non-routed protocol that only the palmtops are programmed to recognize, so we have a completely secure data stream that…”
    “Let’s keep on topic.” Mason saw that the others were starting to drift.
    Norbert continued. “In short, yet another system has been developed for phase two. This will be strictly outgoing.”
    “Why,” asked Tom Snelling, “does the profiling stream have to be one way only? Why not utilize it for regular communications as well?”
     “Societal profiling requires astronomical amounts of data,” said Norbert. “We don’t have the time to worry about two-way communications, electronic handshaking to verify a successful connection, waiting for busy queues or overloaded servers. We just suck in tons of raw