An crosses the jet bridge into the sterile area of the Las Vegas spaceport and is immediately struck by the difference in the color of the ambient light. It’s brighter, and a broader spectrum than she normally sees with the energy restrictions on her homeworld. There will be many differences during this trip, though. An reminds herself that difference is not always something that should be changed. As an offworld tourist, An is nervous about what she has heard about Earth: a planet she has never before visited or seen up close. As an added irony, she notes there are no windows in this part of the spaceport. Being so much closer to the sun, she is curious about how it looks. Instead, floor to ceiling displays and indirect overhead LEDs chaperone the passengers through the walkways. Most of them show advertisements for services or planetside entertainments. A local bungee adventure service proclaims, “Experience full Earth Gravity! Come take the plunge!” Others cycle through info graphics outlining local rules and regulations restricting what can be transported between worlds. The last display proclaims the local time and temperature, with a warning that the outside temperature has just crested 70 degrees Celsius.*

The hallway funnels all of the travelers into a security checkpoint. An’s anxiety triggers again. Dozens of uniformed guards, all of them armed, swarm around the room. Some stand by the perimeter watching travelers, while others occupy plasteel desks with clear bullet shields. The history of Earth’s wars are well known to her, but seeing this in person is breathtaking. “How do they live like this,” An wonders? “Constant surveillance, and total control.” An is grateful, suddenly, for the freedom offered to her back home. As she reaches the desk, the Earth Transworld Security officer requests that she disable her identity surrogate. Initially, she is surprised that he even knows, but she rationalizes that signal sweepers must be part of the surveillance. He tells her that surrogate technology is disallowed in the spaceport and in most Earth municipalities. "No privacy is guaranteed on Earth," he says. “Especially in America."

She nods to the officer, and removes the veil from her travel suit. This is one of many contingencies her research has prepared her for. It would be simple to disable the surrogate and show her birth face, but it would be recorded and transmitted across the globe in a microsecond. Every camera and system would then hold her likeness and index her location, her habits, her purchases. She would be categorized and filed. Alone, it doesn’t sound so bad, but the politics of this region are different than her home. The assumptions derived from that data could be dangerous to her. Instead, she taps the sequence that enables auxiliary mode for her surrogate. The system flickers, as though it is shutting down, and her surrogate replaces its square blank face with the face of a twenty-something woman of indeterminate ethnic background. The auxiliary mod relies on different technology and should bypass the sweepers. She is tense for a moment while she waits, then the official points to the scanner. An nods and takes off her glove. Inside the meat of her palm is a forged identity chip that registers her as Wei Mina, a 23 year old medical sciences student with a provisional planetary pass for education and research. She waves her hand over the scanner, and it beeps in acknowledgement. The official looks at his screen, and at her face, and waves her towards a large gateway with several lines of people.

Through the gateway, another officer stands before a large battery of scanners. An recognizes the tech stealers from pictures she has seen in books. She fumbles around on her personal access device for a moment and presents the officer with her offworld citizenship waiver, exempting her from the scan. The ETS officer narrows his eyes at her, and her identity surrogate stares at him blankly. Technology developed outside of the Earth commonwealth is protected, just as Earth’s technology is. After hours of memorizing regulations, An knows she can’t be forced into the tech stealers. She has her advocate’s information ready for quick access, just in case. But, in the end, the officer waves her to a line that circumvents the scanners and funnels her towards a line of doors where people enter, one at a time. As her turn arrives, she enters a small room, and the door closes behind her. Locked inside, a camera focuses on her, and a kiosk begins to ask her questions about her citizenship, her luggage, and her reasons for coming onworld. An answers them blandly, knowing that the facial recognition software and iris scans will flag biological evidence of deceit for manual examination.*

“I am here for a business conference,” the voice on her identity surrogate supplies. “The Transworld Coalition for Medical Technologists.” This is a lie, but it would flag her automatically to say she was going to DefCon. The Medical Technologists summit does exist, and is being hosted in her hotel, however. She’s even registered for it. An has a nervous moment, wondering whether the money she paid for the identity surrogate software is worth it. The kiosk asks her the same questions again and again, forcing her to repeat some of her answers and clarify them, reminding her with pedantic attention that deceit is punishable by the laws of Earth and America where the penalty includes incarceration, involuntary data extraction, and exile. In the end, there is no alarm from the kiosk. The surrogate has paid for itself. A second door opens, allowing her to exit into the Spaceport proper. As she steps out of the small room, the fist that has been clenching her heart loosens a tiny bit. But, An’s frustration about the bureaucracy and the general injustice that people are treated this way remains. “This is their choice. Their rules they have agreed upon as a people. You cannot change this. Societies and people only change from within. It is not your fight,” she repeats to herself as a mantra. “Just follow and then go home.” Outside the booth, a conveyor belt presents her with her luggage. The travel lock tamper seal has been triggered rendering all of her electronics suspect. An sighs, removing her drop kit and putting it in her body-strapped carryall.*

In the main terminal, signs above the walkways give directions and highlight local regulations. Periodic multi-lingual announcements force the issues audibly and set An’s teeth on edge. One announcement admonishes “Set ident to transmit if veiled.” There are so many, she loses count of them. Pausing at a directory, she looks up the storefront she wants and sets herself a waypoint. As she walks, she is struck by how small all of the stores are, and how few are manned by people instead of kiosks. Even the restaurants are mainly dispensaries with multi-select menus, credit swipers, and slots to dispense food. There is a vending machine that sells computers, another that rents cars and hotel accommodations. One kiosk is labeled, “Social counseling, 4500 credits per minute.” After a bit, An reaches her waypoint, and rolls her travel cases into the pawn shop. Inside, she’s surprised to find an attendant. “Can I help you,” the young man asks? He has perfectly sculpted features, either genetically selected or surrogate enhanced. An can’t tell. To her, his features look plastic, like a mannequin. But, the ads place his features in the center of idealized attractiveness. “I would like to sell my travel cases,” An says.

“Contents and cases, or cases only?”

“All of it. I need to cash in for American currency.”

“Place them on the scanner, please.” The clerk gestures to a conveyor belt, and An complies. After a moment, the clerk points to a display. “Is this inventory accurate for what you want to sell?”

An reviews the list for anything she wants to keep and decides there is little she can trust other than the clothes in her drop kit. She looks at the amount at the bottom and nods. “That looks good,” she agrees.

The clerk offers her the identity scanner plate and she, once again, waves her ungloved palm over it to authorize the transfer to her Earth account.

Now unencumbered, An travels to the basement, where the taxis wait. At the fringe of Outside, dozens of people in fullsuits stand in queue waiting. Most of them are veiled, so An follows suit. The radiation isn’t of particular concern to her, but it is one justification for public privacy the governments can’t forbid. The reminder of continued surveillance feels eerie and unsettling. A sense of claustrophobia that has nothing to do with the proximity of the walls settles on her. “Not my monkey, not my circus” An thinks to herself. At the front of the line, An watches a couple choose Lower Vegas as their destination. The most expensive accommodations and entertainments are in Lower Vegas. The best way for rich and paranoid tourists to avoid the heat and the radiation is in the extensive underground compounds. An experiences a frisson of amusement as the taxi they enter flashes “Red Canyon” on the rear destination marquee as it departs from the port. It looks like the hackers are here.

An selects “manual destination” and approaches the cab. The door won’t open. An remembers that her veil is on, and that her identity is not transmitting. She slides her hand out of her glove again and touches it to the handle. The door unlocks. Inside, she tells the car to take her to Upper Vegas in NewTown and forces map confirmation of the route. While she waits, she searches her cached local maps for personal transit rentals near her hotel, knowing her searches will not be centrally logged. Once she has the route memorized, she sets up waypoints to visit that are within the range of a standard battery charge. The waypoints are data caches, off-net nodes storing free data. Each one has a protocol of access she has carefully prepared herself for beforehand. An thinks about what she is planning to do, knowing that she could be denied access to leave the planet. Some types of caching are legal, and data tourism is well known. But, acquiring data that isn’t tainted or tracked is highly illegal. Scripting or accessing systems outside of public net requires a special license on Earth. The licenses are very expensive to forge, and nearly impossible to get unless you work for a government or a private employer. Even then, most of the licenses are limited to one or two organizational networks. And Earth governments are more likely to put aliens in prison indefinitely than to spend time on a trial.*

She thought back on the last conversation she had with her friend, Seven, before leaving. “You should set up a deadman’s transmission,” Seven told her. “If you don’t check in once an hour, or per day or whatever, it beacons.”*

“Don’t you think that’s a bit much,” An asked? “I could fire something off if someone intercepts me.”

“Not with all the jammers. They intercept all transmissions on Earth.”

“So, what’s stopping them from intercepting my deadman checkin and replaying it?”

“You send them to me, your dear old mother. Send me pictures of your trip, status updates. Whatever.”

“So YOU’RE my deadman switch?” An laughed.

“Don’t laugh. On never came back, and that was only for a vacation. You’re trying to sneak into the largest hacker conference on Earth.”

An looks out the window at the desert, and takes a picture, forwarding it quickly to Seven. “Just got to Earth. It’s insanely hot here. I can’t believe the climate scientists haven’t done something about it.” An very carefully avoids mention of anything related to technology to avoid having her message flagged. An directs the cab first to a grocery, then to the hardware store, and she cashes in the credits from her luggage sale.

At the hotel, An manages to check-in without removing her veil. The Medtech conference is in one of the nicer hotels left above ground, and apparently those who can pay for it can still expect some degree of privacy. In her room, she constructs a basic sweeper and sweeps for surveillance. Satisfied, she sets up the rest of her personal security measures. Then, she waits for sunset.

Once the sun sets, she takes a picture through her hotel room window, this time of the sun setting over the city, and sends another message to Seven. “The sunsets are yellower here. I don’t think I could ever get used to this. There’s so much space.”*

She sets her identity surrogate to something she hopes will be neutral. It’s a composite generated from random footage of tourists over the last three weeks in the city. She exits her room veiled, and changes in a busy public restroom before walking to the scooter rental booth and paying in cash. The first waypoint only requires a drive-by. She has configured her personal access device to automatically find the signal, connect, and satisfy the connection protocols. The dump of all the data, and the upload will take only a few moments.*

She drives her scooter to the old neon sign museum plaza and rides around looking at each of the signs, all within connection range to the device. But, in the plaza, and along each of the streets, she is struck by the hundreds, if not thousands of homeless people. An makes it into a game to find a stretch of wall that is unoccupied by squatters, and she cannot find many. As the sun has set, they have all come out, all of them too poor to afford fullsuits, all of them sick. Their moans and groans are disconcerting. Some have great oozing sores. Others twitch with the involuntary tic of fried nerves. An wants to ask them why they don’t go to doctors, but she sees the answer in the doorway of a shelter. “Know the symptoms and get help! Symptoms to watch for: tremors, excessive clumsiness, blurred vision, sores that do not heal, difficulty with memory or confusion accompanied by chills and stomach pains. If you or anyone you know has experienced these symptoms, you may be suffering from Halen’s Syndrome. There is no cure for Halen’s Syndrome, but there is help! Clinic hours on Monday through Thursday at these locations…”

As she travels to the second waypoint, An accesses her local database for information about the disease, hoping it is not contagious. “Also called: Earth Radiation Syndrome, Halen’s Syndrome or simply ‘the Syndrome.' Sufferers have a variety of symptoms. No uniform combination of symptoms exists, although most report gastrointestinal distress, sores that do not heal, and some form of neurological impairment. In most cases, Syndrome is progressive, causing death due to secondary ailments caused by damaged immunological response. Therapies such as blood, plasma, and marrow transplants have been successful in mitigating the effects, however it returns over time and is worsened by age. There is no cure for the Syndrome. Onset for most occurs by the age of 30, although cases as young as 5 and as old as 60 have been reported. Physicians remain unclear about the underlying cause, but the condition is not considered to be transferred from person to person. The prevailing theory is the Syndrome is the result of genetic mutation due to increased radiation exposure, especially among poorer populations that has resulted in endocrine failure, causing general malfunction of the immune system."

“I wish I could help these people,” An thinks. “If thousands of doctors haven’t, though…” The thought leaves her pensive as she goes.

The second waypoint is a physical drop. She goes to a hotdog seller in front of the husk of Caesar’s Palace and buys a hotdog. As she cruises along, she pauses near a juggler and a costumed Anime character. She tips the juggler, slipping a micro-drive into his bucket. Then she takes a photo with the Anime girl, and gives the hotdog to a homeless woman with her child nearby. Further along, An stops by the rail of a fountain and waits with others for the next show to begin. As she waits, she feels the brush pass and only barely remembers not to react.*

After the show, she continues to the final waypoint near the DefCon hotel. This cache is inside the parking deck connecting two hotels. An parks her scooter, locks it, and enters the southwest elevator. Most of the cars are self-driving ones, with the deck being simple storage for the taxi services that rent the cars, but here and there are private vehicles. On the third floor, where the entrances to the casinos are, An spots the small, hand-sized box attached to a beam over the security camera near the doorway. “Ballsy,” An thinks. She forces her phone to ring with the specific ringtone that will trigger the sonic download, and pretends to take a call while payloads transfer between the cache and her PAD. Then she hangs up, enters the casino, and gambles for a few hours.

After she turns in the scooter, she walks to the mall underneath her hotel and uses a forged credit chip to rent a coffin for the night. She climbs in, middles the camera feed, and pretends to sleep. She loops the feed, changes back to her fullsuit, and post-dates the timestamp on her exit for the morning. The facility cameras are on the same network, so it’s easy for her to do the same with her exit from the facility.

Back in her room, she examines her room for compromise, then breaks out the data caches. On the first one, An finds several dozen academic papers, and queues a digital currency transfer to their accounts. It’s getting rarer to find academicians willing to circumvent the public publishing requirements, and she knows their crippling debt makes anonymous donations the only motivation for them to continue doing so. There are also some system schematics for building climate controls and elevator code, one paper about exploiting identity transmissions, and several gigs of poetry, prose, and novels. Most of it pirated and available elsewhere, some of it original.*

The second drop is in the micro drive. This one has a cookbook containing recipes from every Earth ethnic group, a guide for constructing weapons and survival tools from common items available at transport stations, a security analysis of six industrial grade locking systems, and hundreds of general purpose scripts, including backdoors, trojans, and ordinary data parsers.

The third drop An originally thinks is corrupted, but the pattern is not random enough, and there is so much data it is plausible she can recover most of it if it is corrupted. The data is not a format she has seen before, and none of her parsers understand it. She works with it for a few hours, but ultimately decides it’s a puzzle she cannot solve alone. Before she goes to bed, she sends Seven another message “Bedtime here. I love you, mom.”*

The next day, she registers for the MedTech conference and attends the reception and the first day of talks. She sends Seven a couple of messages about how dull the doctors are, and how the food is indulgently fatty, and she sends out a small program to seed her identity surrogate’s likeness and her badge registration in the various conference monitoring systems for the next several days of the conference.

That evening, she slips through the cracks, veiled and with a silicone mask instead of her identity surrogate, and sends Seven pictures of the fountain, the jugglers, and the traffic. Then she attends DefCon.

She spends the evening going from board games, 3-D games, and research villages to casual demos, and shopping for vendors who may have less legal hardware modifications, or cutting edge tech that hasn’t been regulated yet. Everything at the tables is legitimately purposed, to her disappointment. A sign at one of the booths states “Earth regulations prohibit the sale of Class 4 technologies to those without proper Permit. This vendor complies with all government regulations.” Nearby, several people without veils look around in suspicion. An sweeps the room quickly to listen to all the bands. Signal strengths spike from three figures surrounding one booth, and she flags those as government officials on her visual translator. The savvier vendors conduct business on a localnet, invisible to meatspace. Their wares are better, but still hardly controversial. An sighs, and retreats to the cipher village for the remainder of the evening. An is careful not to send any messages from the hotel.

A small group of veiled hackers are busily sharing cache data at one table, and she scans them. They appear clean, so she sits nearby until one of them wordlessly reaches out an un-gloved hand to her. She unsheaths her own hand and shakes. This isn’t merely the mirror of an ancient human custom. The touch triggers a physical proximity exchange of keys that enables her to join the share. Once in, she dumps the data from her collections yesterday, and gathers all of the data the others are sharing. One of them turns its head to her and messages her. See-fu: "Where did you get this one?” The ID tag belongs to the corrupted data. “I don’t remember,” An sends back. “Why?”

See-fu: “Know what this is?”

An: “Corrupted data.”

See-fu: “Wrong. Medical code.”

An: “For what?”

See-fu: “Don’t know.”

An: “Who would?”

See-fu: “Medic”

An: “Why?”

See-fu: “Rare. Thanks for share.”

An nods back, then disconnects from the share. “That’s strange,” An thinks. She crypts the file and moves it to a No-Sector on her PAD, then goes to a data booth in the business center. She disconnects the business center node, and connects her disposable unit with a data cryptor onto the line. She quickly accesses the network to download schematics for medical data formatting from a local medNet, providing a permit key from one of the hospital executives at the MedTech conference. She puts the data through a scrubber and a sanitizer, then extracts the parsing data, which she then manually transfers to her PAD. She checks it against the cache data, and a genetic sequence drops out. Something called HEL-438. The descriptive text reads, “This RNA is proprietary intellectual property registered to the Biogenetics Division of Earth Coalition. Possession or use of this information outside of the context of Biogenetics Division of Earth Coalition is punishable to the full extent of Earth law. Subject: HEL-438 is an RNA sequence designed for treatment Syndrome 438 using the Meiliken process.” The words mean little to An, but she deletes the translated data, leaving the original crypted and No-Sectored.

The next day, An looks at the schedule and, after consuming several technical talks, decides to tap into the television feed for a conspiracy presentation: “What EarthCorp isn’t telling you, the Transworld threat.” Normally, conspiracy talks frustrate her, and she avoids them; those that are true are nothing she can do anything about, and those that aren’t true aren’t quite insane enough to prevent gullible people from perpetuating them. But, feeling brain fried on the other talks, she decides this sounds like it will be comedic more than frustrating.

“It’s in the water,” the presenter begins. Wearing an old-style Guy Fawkes mask as a veil, the presenter could be male or female, fat or thin. The identity surrogate being used is fairly high quality. “The last five years have shown an increase in cancers and mutations, fatal diseases, and crop failures.” A graph on the projector cites several studies from academic journals. “This corresponds with climate changes.” A new line is added to the graph showing moderate correlation. “But, it is caused by additives to the water table.” A new line is added to the graph showing an exact correlation. Photographs from a report marked ‘Classified' display on the screen. “We stole these from EarthCorp status reports. They’ve been putting additives in the water to better control populations. If you are sick, they can control you. If you don’t work, you don’t get Doctors to treat it. This lets them eliminate entire classes of citizens — anyone they decide is against them.” An rolls her eyes. “We know you won’t believe us. So, check it for yourselves. Here’s how we did it.” The presentation goes on with instructions about how to construct an at-home lab, and how to test water samples for the mutagen. An files it away, but largely ignores the technical detail.*

That evening, at the bar, she overhears some people talking about it again. When she looks, she notices that one of the conversation participants is one of the flagged government officials. He’s pressing a naked sheep about it. “If there were a cure to the mutagen that EarthCorp were somehow lording over everyone, don’t you think it would be public with all the other documents he put up?”*

“I don’t know,” Naked Sheep says. The sheep is a fat, middle-aged man with zero electronic signature. It’s possible he’s wearing silicone, but he’s fat, and it would be an absolute work of art to have a whole head mask with full articulation like that. “I heard a rumor there was a gene cure, that’s all.”

“And where did you hear that rumor,” Government asks?*

“Just some people were talking about it at the villages last night,” Naked Sheep says.

“What villages?”

“The villages. You know, with the games and stuff. There were a bunch of dudes sitting around in veils talking about sharing some kind of medical data. I heard one of them say it was a genecure sequence.”

An becomes very still as she hears this.

“I still say it’s bullshit,” Government says. “But you show me who talked about it, and I’ll believe it when I see it.”

An wants to warn the sheep, but knows there’s no good way to do so without getting caught. So, she finishes her drink, pays her tab, and goes to the hardware store to buy what she needs for the home lab.

Back at her hotel, she pours the second half of her morning’s bottled water into the test rig. The test works almost exactly like the talk details said it would. An feels cold trickle over her spine. If this is real, she is exposed to the mutagen. She replays the talk on her PAD. “Exposure rates suggest significant chance of Syndrome development after single exposure, but that approaches 100% with subsequent exposure. Furthermore, they have been tainting Transworld ship water supplies, and it is likely that water supplies on other worlds now also have the mutagens. EarthCorp’s plan, according to this document, are to generate dependence on medical technology as a result of the syndrome. There is no published cure.”

An fights with the urge to scream. She wants to tell Seven about what she’s learned, but she doesn’t want to generate a red flag. Even retransmitting the talk could draw unwanted attention. Her family is drinking this. She has drunk this. Nearly everyone on this planet has. And they’re all suffering. And she has the genecure, but no way to distribute it. Even then, who would believe? An suddenly wonders whether there are any other copies of the cure. By now, Government is going to be searching for the sharers from the village. She was there, too. What about the data cache? If they find that, they may be able to find the original source who leaked it, too.

She sits down at her desk and takes off her DefCon badge, and begins to tinker.

Later, An will travel once more to the cache, this time using her surrogate to pose as a security maintenance tech. When she does, she operates behind the camera to detach the cache. She pockets it, and disappears into the crowd. The next day, she makes her shuttle back to the space station, and from there, she successfully returns home. It takes Seven only three days to identify the right crew to print the genecure and distribute it. Earth nets censor the information, but outrage ripples through the outer worlds. Charities that offer free offworld transport to Syndrome sufferers are branded as global terrorists. In the outer worlds, there’s rumor that someone has created a formula to neutralize the mutagen in water and distributed it. But, so far, it’s only a rumor.*

Some time later, a new protocol circulates for a new cache in Las Vegas. I won’t tell you where it is; that would be giving it away. But somewhere, there’s an old DefCon badge with… a couple of modifications on it. And there’s information on it someone doesn’t want you to know.