EPThttp://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=397300
Sometime in 2012
I started with the project files. Pins and needles stuff, spreadsheets, diagrams, tolerances flowing from one end of a network to the other, returning as nacelles, turbine blades, fuel mixtures. Down memory lane, banks of corporate data dancing at my fingertips, ring fingers sensitive on the heat-based touchpad like those of a safecracker.
Spiderweb.
Silk, spider, and her cocooned prey. Bundles of information suspended in an empty network, IP-logged ghosts. Footprints leading to a proxy in Wenzhou, three jumps from leaving the Great Firewall. I found myself pinging off a low-security university server in St. Petersburg, what the old-timers still called Leningrad. Trail running as cold as the Siberian winter that hit my face as I transferred flights through Sheremetyevo.
Time to call in outside assistance. I found him forking up bits of pelmeni with smetana in a streetside cafe, one foot hooked at an odd angle, ready to run. He saw me, raised one hand to grasp mine, put the other in his pants at the same time. From Nevsky Prospekt, I heard the digitized bleat of the trolley rattling off Slavic subway stations. From somewhere below the table, I heard him snap off the safety on his antique Makarov. His face looked like it had been shaped in a wind tunnel: ears very small, plastered flat against his narrow skull, and large front teeth, revealed in something that wasn't quite a smile, canted sharply backward.
"A repeat customer," he said, straightening up. "Is not good for my business. You know the rate, Genghiz."
"I need a scan, Adolf. For rats."
He ordered us a bottle of vodka with one hand, took the resulting cocktail napkin, and jotted numbers. Two columns of numbers that started off matching, but ended different. He pushed it over. Through the glass of eighty-proof, it became clear. An imp dancing through the system, fudging with the casting tolerances, fractions of a millimeter off, hairline fractures.
He followed with a single number, then a street named for some long-gone Bavarian dynasty, the kind that spread royalty across five centuries and eight countries. Landing in Munich, I walked brisk into the lobby of the German tech conglomerate, presented my third identity of the week. The smiling brunette behind the desk led me into a frosted-glass conference room, and I pretended to sleep through the presentation, just another bored Chinese executive taking in the wonders of PLM techniques and the miraculous benefit of integrating all your R&D under one data-sharing network, courtesy of German engineering.
Somewhere on the Frankfurt-Beijing nonstop, tracing the old Silk Road, I saw Persephone staring back at me from the cramped confines of an economy-class magazine holder on the seat-back in front of mine. Lady Harvest, the Rice Queen. She promised an end to world hunger--at least, if the UN was right about population peaking in 2050. I fell asleep midway through the article.
The rest of the job was a blur. Fingerprints on the German digital lifecycle project matched one nervous thirty-six year-old design engineer. He gave us what we needed, then called his parents and pregnant wife and admitted he was gay. We even left him in place--it was the new, new China, after all. He hung himself one month before his son was born, and I reported back, a gorgeous co-worker accompanying me so I wouldn't have to feel like a third wheel at dinner with Beijing's newest power couple. I ordered us four glasses of champagne, and we sang a toast to our dreams.
Read part 16 here:
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=400483
