The Wired Man

20

Entry Re: Rebecca Hollandsworth

"Ma'am, we lost him."

Rebecca always had to tell these idiots how to do their jobs. For once, she wished they would think for themselves. "Use his goddamn location chip."

"He's gone dark."

She sank her fingernails into her palm and turned away from the pale agent. Did she

have to do everything herself? She queued up a link to headquarters.

"Ms. Secretary?" said her assistant as she appeared across the link.

"Get me Supervisor Serdinal."

Her assistant nodded and switched her to hold. The giant SPA shield covered Rebecca's vision, and horrid jazz music blared in her ears. She was going to fix this one way or another.

Gary appeared on her visual feed. He was wearing a haphazard suit minus the coat, and his bright red tie was loosened to the point where it was clinging to the knot that held it in place. His forehead glistened with sweat. "What did I do to merit a personal call from the secretary herself?"

"What's the status of the other sixteen known infected?"

"Right down to business then," Gary said. "All sixteen are contained, but we were unable to stop the spread. Most of the people that got it were forced below the employment line, so once they acquired the virus, they began deleting."

"How many?"

"Over fifty so far that we have found."

Rebecca grabbed fist full of her primped hair. "Prime for rollback."

"Would if I could."

"I don't care how many people will get wiped. Prime for rollback."

"You don't understand," said Gary. "I can't."

"Do it. That's an order."

"The backups are gone, so please enlighten me as to how you do a restore without backups!"

Rebecca's scalp began to tingle. She opened her mouth to say something, but Gary shifted off to the side and yelled something to a man on his left.

"How did they corrupt the backups? I thought we were the only ones with access," Rebecca said.

Gary turned back to her. "They aren't corrupt. They are gone. Get it? Gone."

Rebecca let her shoulders roll back and her posture stiffen. This slippery bastard was always siphoning money on stock manipulations. Robert never cared because Gary was good at his job, but there was evidence in the conversation logs that he had been dealing with Robert recently. Even if he didn't know what was going on, he knew more than he was letting on.

"If you know anything, you better tell me now."

"You think I nuked the backups?"

Rebecca glared. "Where is he?"

"Who?"

"You know goddamn well who."

"I don't know."

"Well the logs I found yesterday say otherwise."

Gary's face shifted to a snarl. "I don't know."

"Bullshit."

"I don't know, okay? If I did, do you think I would be sitting here wasting my time talking to you?"

"After this is all over we are going to have a talk, Gary." Rebecca tapped her implant and broke the link.

She needed him for now, but after this was all over she was going to make sure that baldheaded prick never saw the light of day again.