Free The Forever Watch by David Ramirez Page A

entries in other databases. A person’s being deleted means deleting his educational history, his employment records, his health records, every single purchase he ever made, every e-mail he received or sent—and such a cascading deletion in turn creates more inconsistencies in the vast, unified system of the Nth Web. That is what we can search for. From there, we can talk to the people that actually knew them, find the memories that are not so simple to erase.
    â€œAh, I get it. You can do stuff like check about which departments had to fill in empty positions all of a sudden.”
    I nod. “That’s the idea. Let me see if I can cobble something together that can find them the long way around.”
    I start to lay out the specifications of what we’ll need for Barrens. Lyn would think it a waste of time, but I know he can get this and find details I’d miss.
    It would have to be semiautonomous, this program, and capable of some degree of evaluation. It would be even better if it could self-modify its parameters as it improved its own search criteria. And it would have to be distributed—a small load on multiple Analytical Nodes is less noticeable than a heavy draw on a single node.
    The electronic hardware of the ship is incredibly powerful, each node a quantum supercomputer; the network of all the ship’s nodes that formed the backbone of the Nth Web made it a vast digital universe.
    For this task, a population of simpler self-optimizing agent programs would be much more efficient than a single large program.
    â€œYou can guess what the other benefit is, right?”
    â€œOkay,” he says, tilting his head over the drawings on the napkins between us. It’s just simplified schematics of what the network of nodes resembles, and a cloud of dots representing the swarm of programs I mean to code. He gnaws a bit on the corner of his lip. “And if it is a bunch of programs spread across the nodes instead of a single program in one place running queries all over the place, it’s harder to trace.”
    â€œThat’s right.” I lean over and press my lips to the side of his jaw. “Don’t chew your lips. They peel and get bloody.”
    â€œI’ll try. Well. Your idea sounds good to me.”
    It has been a long time since I have had to create something—my position is mostly administrative, aside from the rare optimization improvements we try to develop. I find my enthusiasm growing, despite the morbid subject of Barrens’s quest.
    I slurp down my last noodle and skim through the entries on the tablet. Even with only fragments of file information, a tremendous volume of data is here. “Callahan must have been working on this for a long time.”
    Barrens serves platters of salad next. Apple slices, cherry tomatoes, spinach, with a dressing of honey, oil, and vinegar. Steaming scoops of couscous on the sides.
    â€œCal told me about this only a couple years ago. He wanted to pass it on because he was being Retired soon.” There is a loose leaf in the folder, with messy handwriting scrawled diagonally, creeping up left to right. “He thought it’s a single killer. Someone from ISec, or someone protected by ISec.”
    The files at the front of the folder are chilling. Half of someone’s family name labeling a picture of a crime scene that looks just like Barrens’s memory, just blood and gore spilled out across a room. The last page of a medical examiner’s report about the amount of psi energy it would take to cause this level of catastrophic damage. Other reports about remains that went missing from the morgue. But other files look less like pieces of police records and more like oral histories and short stories. They have other labels: “Tunnel Snipes,” “Conspiracy Theories,” “Alien Origins,” “Hidden Histories.”
    â€œWhat’s this other stuff?”
    â€œHmm? Oh. The other