Free The Forever Watch by David Ramirez

case’s entire logs and files, trees and clusters, vanished after he matched it up with one specific Mincemeat tale, about a Keeper named Sullivan coming to his baby’s locked room and finding … you know. It . Pieces. That story was different because it had a lot of concrete details, a date, a time, names.
    â€œThe commands were from nowhere. The only evidence that baby ever existed was just the memory in his head. How could a baby disappearing be covered up as a Retirement ? A death by accident or disease would take faking autopsy reports, medical records, documents signed by so many Doctors. So it was deleted instead.
    â€œCal decided that since he wasn’t in an ISec holding cell yet, it meant that it was something that happened all the time, not just in response to his querying the system.”
    That is not quite so. Information Security propaganda would have everyone believe that they are always watching, but while past societies had the problem of not having enough surveillance, the opposite is so on the Noah. There is simply too much data on everyone, and filtering it to find what is important is not a straightforward task.
    The Ministry of Information is the smallest Ministry, so they have to automate as much as possible. For the wrong reasons, Callahan was right to think that it was the result of programs being triggered, and not the work of a living gray-coat agent. Long Term Investigations is still a police department, under the Ministry of Peace, and even though it is maintained due to Information Security’s regulations, it is a lower priority to them, just as it is a lower priority to the police. A real ISec officer might look at a collation of reports from their monitoring programs once every few months.
    Callahan’s next step was done with enough skill to keep from catching the attention of ISec. If they had noticed him, he would have been interrogated and Adjusted, though ISec doesn’t keep long-term prisoners the way urban legend says.
    He put a hack in place, monitoring LTI’s isolated-case database. Every time one of these deletion commands went into the system, his little monitoring app would register it and start to copy it even as it was deleted, then reconstruct the incomplete data with probabilistic guesswork.
    Great chunks are still missing, but already a terrible pattern can be discerned. People are being erased from the system. As if they had never been born. Others have had their files modified, evidence of falsified Retirements.
    Whoever was doing this was, at the least, trained by Information Security. I am a gifted neuralhack, but I do not have that kind of skill. It is impressive that Callahan was able to get even this much, suggesting he too was better at this than I am.
    â€œI won’t be able to help you the way you’re asking.” I never felt the need to try to impress Barrens. I am glad this has not changed, despite the change in, well, whatever it is we have got. It is easy to admit to him that while I’m the best neuralhack in City Planning, Information Security is at a different level from me.
    His head droops. “So, I’m on my own on this?”
    â€œI didn’t say that, Leon. I think there are less obvious ways I can help.”
    I am not without certain skills. My intuition has, over the years, become attuned to ferreting out trends and patterns. While ISec can erase the records of these people, it’s against policy to erase an individual just like that from the memories of all the coworkers and ex-classmates and neighbors they knew. Each of these vanished victims had a home. They bought food and furniture and clothes. They each left the subtle imprint of what they browsed and bought and said on the Nth Web.
    The subject might have been deleted from the records, but deleting everything around a subject? In the Noah’s databases, every entry corresponds to so much data, which in turn is associated with other